[Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia

[Marcus Buck]

  An'n 04.10.2010 02:13, hett Zachary Harden schreven:
> The project was active, but judging by the comments made before and after the closure, it was closed due to a political spat (like a lot of projects coming from the Eastern Bloc).
Which ones exactly where closed? I don't think this claim is valid.

In the case of Moldovan it wasn't a "political spat" but the plain fact, 
that Moldovan is just another name for Romanian. Here's what I wrote on 
the wikitech-l thread about the same topic:

There are 19.7 million speakers of Romanian in Romania. There are 2.6
million speakers of Romanian in Moldova (they call their language either
Romanian or Moldovan, but it's the same language as in Romania). Both
Romania and Moldova write the language with Latin script. Then there
are 177,000 speakers of Romanian living in Transnistria. Transnistria is
officially part of Moldova, but it is a de facto independant state.
Transnistria's population is about one third Romanian, one third Russian
and one third Ukrainian. When Moldova became independant in 1991 the
Russian group in Transnistria feared that their privileged status would
change and that Romanian would become the most privileged language in
the new state. A civil war broke out and supported by Russian troops
Transnistria became a de facto independant state. This state holds
Russophile policies and the Romanian language (called Moldovan) is
written in Cyrillic. The Cyrillic script was introduced by the Soviets
as a measure of cultural Sovietization.

So for the Romanians and Moldovans the Cyrillic script is a symbol of
Soviet cultural imperialism and more importly a dividing line that
excludes 177,000 speakers of their language from participation in
Romanian-language cultural affairs (at least in its written forms).

mo.wp is Cyrillic but uses the code 'mo' that stands for Moldovan and
would thus in theory cover all 2.78 million speakers in both Moldova and
Transnistria. For Moldovans mo.wp feels like Wikimedia tries to promote
Cyrillic in Moldova. The code 'mo' by the way is deprecated because ISO
recognized it as being identical with Romanian.


Marcus Buck
User:Slomox