[Foundation-l] mo.wikipedia

[Neil Harris]

Anthere wrote:
> Hello
>
> Can someone make for the board a *short* and efficient summary of the 
> whole mo.wikipedia.org situation ?
> Please, someone near-neutral, in an npov manner ?
>
> Thanks
>
> Ant
>
>
>   
As an outsider to this argument, I know little other than what I have 
read on the mailing list and in articles, so I apologise in advance for 
any inaccuracies, but I think it goes something like this:

To a close approximation, Moldovan == Romanian, but written in Cyrillic, 
and is used in Moldova and Transnistria, which border Romania, and are 
closely historically and culturally related.  There are considerably 
fewer mo: speakers (3.4 M in Rep. Moldova, 0.5M in Transnistria) than 
ro: speakers (24 M).

See [[Moldovan language]] for details.

However: Romanians have had an unhappy history with all things Russian 
(see [[History of Romania]]) and the historically-recent carving up of 
the [[Principality of Moldavia]], and many feel _very_ strongly, for 
political, historical, and cultural reasons that they don't want to have 
_anything_ to do with  the use of Cyrillic to write Romanian, to the 
point that they took the Cyrillic character off the Wikipedia globe in 
the logo for the ro: Wikipedia.

This is a _major_ nationalist issue for many Romanians. So, politics and 
script system appear to be very tightly coupled.

There only seem to be three practical ways forward:

1 Maintain the status quo, and don't create an mo: Wikipedia

2 Create a separate mo: Wikipedia in Cyrillic, effectively duplicating 
the ro: Wikipedia in a different script.

3 Two front ends, one database. Add dual-script interface support to the 
ro: Wikipedia, but: unlike with the zh: Wikipedia, a dual-script 
interface within a single domain will _not_ appeal to those who are 
against having even a single Cyrillic letter on the logo, so there will 
have to be two domains, ro: and mo:, the former with a Latin-only 
interface and article display, and the latter with either Cyrillic-only 
or dual-script support, both using the same back-end database, which 
must, I believe, remain entirely Latin-based for technical, historical, 
and diplomatic reasons.

My personal preference is option 3, since option 1 disenfranchises 
almost 4 million people, and option 2 effectively forks the ro: 
Wikipedia, and will in any case most likely simply be filled up with 
machine-transliterated articles from ro:

However, to implement option 3, there will need to be not only a lot of 
consensus-building, but also the implementation of a reliable, 
round-trippable,  Latin <-> Cyrillic transliteration system for 
Romanian, which does not yet exist. There are several options which are 
_nearly_ workable, but work would be needed to make this happen, and 
would require expertise from both the mo: and ro: communities.

Whichever option you choose, you will make some people _very_ unhappy.

-- Neil