[Foundation-l] Moldovan Wikipedia

[Johannes Rohr]

Hi everyone,

the Moldovan Wikipedia at http://mo.wikipedia.org has now been locked for 
almost a year (last modification of the main page is dated 16 November 
2006). When you hit alt+shift+e, you are presented a message saying, this 
Wikipedia is locked "for now". The main page has no explanation 
whatsoever why this wiki is locked, it doesn't even say /that/ it is.

In 2006, community members proposed the closure of this wiki for a number 
of reasons, the discussion is available at 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Moldovan_Wikipedia

To sum up the reasons presented by the proposers:

- Moldovan is identical with Romanian, it is just a different name for 
the same language;
- The Moldovan Wikipedia is in the Cyrillic script, which is not used 
in Moldova, except for the breakaway republic of Transnistria, where it 
is used in schools, but only because it is forcibly imposed by the 
Russian-speaking government. (see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3631436.stm)
- The Moldovan Wikipedia contains almost no original content, most 
articles are transliterations from the Romanian edition, 
- While it was active, it had virtually no native contributors, the main 
author wrote in dictionary-aided broken Romanian. 

Now, what we have since the database was locked a year ago is an 
uneditable project with several thousand pages. This is quite obviously 
not a good thing, not least because it makes interwiki conflicts 
unfixable. 

I feel that this situation is not sustainable and should be resolved in 
one way or another. 

Personally I am in favour of starting a formal proposal for the deletion 
of this wiki, similar to the one regarding the Siberian Wikipedia (see 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletion_of_Siberian_Wikipedia ). 

If there are any other opionions or suggestions, I am looking forward to 
reading them.

Thanks,

Johannes