[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] Moldavian

[Neil Harris]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> There are those that want words like "irregardless" not to be included 
> in dictionaries because from their puristic point of view it is an 
> abomination. The Romanian wikipedians can not have their cake and eat 
> it. Either they allow for the existence of a resource that is the 
> http://mo.wikipedia.org or they allow for content in Cyrillic in the 
> http://ro.wikipedia.org. When people argue that because of historical 
> reasons Romanian is written in Cyrillic, the only correct reaction is: 
> "Yes, right. So what?". The point being the existence of something 
> cannot be denied because of this argument that they do not agree on 
> political grounds and wish for it to not be there.
>
> The language commission would welcome a program that would convert from 
> Latin to Cyrillic for the content of both the mo and ro wikipedia. In 
> our opinion it would help and not hinder bringing the communities and it 
> would probably isolate political bigots and their POV..
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
>   

I suggested this several iterations earlier in the ro:/mo: debate. As I 
said in my previous E-mail, no-one was interested in it.

For this to work, _all_ of the following have to happen:

* the ro: community has to agree to work with mo: proponents
* the mo: proponents have to agree to work with the ro: community
* both sides have to agree on the ro:/mo: integration as a desired solution
* both have to collaborate to create a _fully round-trippable_ 
transliteration mapping that both can be happy will not mangle text in 
either script (this is hard, not least because several transliteration 
standards already exist that do not seem to fulfil this criterion, and 
it will be difficult to explain to people with a primarily cultural 
agenda the technical reasons why their favourite transliteration cannot 
be used) In the worst case, this might require a significantly complex 
technical solution to resolve the possible ambiguities. In any case, it 
will certainly need both sides to collaborate in extensive testing of 
the system.
* the Foundation needs to be convinced that this solution is acceptable
* someone needs to integrate the transliteration method into the current 
dual-script system
* special skins and virtual-hosting configuration will need to be set up 
for the new ro:/mo: wiki
* both sides than need to get on with one another after the merge

Based on past observation of this debate, I think the chances of all of 
the above happening are pretty close to zero.

Has anything happened to change this?

-- Neil