[Foundation-l] 31 august, 20 years of our national holiday "Our romanian language" in Moldova, mo.wikipedia still in cyrillic !

[Andrew Turvey]

A few points to add and some suggestions: 

- You can have a single language written in more than one script; although they are separate issues, for our purposes, given that we are predominantly written, we tend to combine both issues and look at language/script combinations.

- There seem to be two language/script combinations in use today: Romanian/Moldavian, written in the Latin Script, used by 20-25m people, which according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes has the ISO-639-1 code "ro" and Moldavian written in the Cyrillic script which is used by around 175,000 people in Transdniestr.

- The iso code for Romanian/Moldavian is ro. "mo", which was the ISO code for Moldavian in the Cyrillic script is now deprecated. There is no ISO code for Cyrillic script Moldavian.

- Where ISO 639-1 codes exist we use them to name the Wikipedia. However, we do have other encyclopedias for languages which don't have ISO codes. Examples are http://ang.wikipedia.org - the Anglo Saxon encyclopedia which uses some non-latin characters (e.g. Ƿ for "th")

- There was a similar dispute recently about the belarusian encyclopedia. I note there are now two projects - be-x-old and be - which are both Cyrillic but looking at the language article the first rejects certain grammar reforms that took place in 1933. 

- There is a place to request closing down projects: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects. No proposal has yet been made on that page to close mo.wp

- Why should wikipedia close down a language/script which has an active, if small, usage? Surely a better solution is to rename the project and let them continue as they are?

My suggestions:

- mo.wp should be moved to something other than "mo" - perhaps mocy?

- In articles like http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias, it should be listed as Moldovan (Cyrillic) rather than just Moldovan

- mo.wp should become a disambiguation page, allowing users to choose either mocy or ro.

- Finally, I don't see any reason why the community can't address with this issue by discussion and consensus. There's no need for the foundation to get involved, at least at this stage.

Andrew