[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] mo.wikipedia.org when will you stop making joke of us ?

[Mark Williamson]

There is no study of how many people cannot read Latin-alphabet
Romanian. However, I suspect that if there are such people, most of
them (except maybe elderly?) are fluent in Russian.

However, I don't think that's the appropriate way to look at the
issue. There is an assumption that Moldavians in Transnistria don't
want to write in the Cyrillic alphabet. This is often accompanied by
an assumption that Moldavians in Transnistria don't support
Transnistrian independence; that they are "enslaved" or that they are
oppressed by the Slavs (mostly Ukrainians and Russians).

Although there is no polling about the preference of script, several
opinion polls by independent Western polling organizations have shown
that most ethnic Moldavians in Transnistria support Transnistrian
independence. Although there are certainly people in Transnistria who
would rather write in Latin, it is naïve to assume that everybody
feels that way, because Latin script preference is seen as a political
choice in support of integration with the Republic of Moldova or even
Romania, which are not widely-held views in Transnistria (most
Moldavians who feel this way have left already, it's not a prison
state after all).

Thousands of children have Cyrillic Moldavian as their medium of
schooling, so although they may also be capable in Latin, their
"native script" is Cyrillic.

We don't approach the issue of, say, Catalan or Basque as "how many
people can't speak Spanish or French" because that's not the point.
Neither, then, do I think we should approach this from the point of
"how many people can't read Latin", but rather "how many people would
prefer Cyrillic". I don't have a number for that, but I'm sure it's
not insignificant.

Mark

2008/11/13 Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org>:
> Mark Williamson hett schreven:
>> It would be quite simple. Theoretically, it could be a tab at
>> ro.wiki.......... but politically that seems unlikely to garner
>> approval from ro.wikipedians.
>>
>> Mark
>>
> How many percent of the Moldovan or Transnistrian population or how many
> people in absolute numbers are able to read Cyrillic, but are completely
> unable to read Latin script?
>
> If that number is "non-marginal", we should provide Cyrillic.
>
> If it is not allowed to write articles in Cyrillic (so only conversion
> from Latin to Cyrillic and not the other way round) and if the
> conversion button is deactivated by default, but if it is possible to
> activate the "show Cyrillic script" button by a gadget and if there is a
> little box on the Main Page describing (in Cyrillic) how to activate the
> gadget, I guess that should be a solution with which the Latin Romanians
> can live and which should enable all Cyrillic-only users to at least
> read the Wikipedia.
>
> Marcus Buck
>
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