[Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia

[Marcus Buck]

  An'n 05.10.2010 21:03, hett M. Williamson schreven:
> Marcus, thank you for the test. I don't think anybody doubts or
> doubted that this is possible - of course a few more rules need to be
> added, for example ea is almost always converted to cyrillic Ya, with
> special exceptions, and several other minor mistakes, but that isn't
> anything to do with the actual technical feasibility.
>
> The only problem I have with this is: why should it be read-only? I
> have mentioned it before and I will say again, it is not fair. It
> violates the Wiki principle of "anyone can edit". Having a Wiki that
> is read-only and that Cyrillic editors cannot edit in Cyrillic is, in
> my opinion, never ok.
>
> -m.
Because users of Romanian in Latin script don't want it. And they are 
more than 99% of all Romanian speakers. Users writing Romanian in 
Cyrillic are a very small minority. And they don't use Cyrillic because 
they think it's the better method but because their regime wants them 
to. When Moldova became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991 one of 
the first things they did was switching from Cyrillic back to Latin. I'm 
quite sure if the Transnistrian speakers of Romanian had the chance to 
decide freely they'd see some benefit in using the same script as 99% of 
all other Romanian speakers.

Imagine there was some ideologically isolated de facto regime somewhere 
in the world where English must be written in Cyrillic by presidential 
decree. Would you agree that English Wikipedia should have a script 
converter and should allow articles written in Cyrillic? 99% of all 
English speakers would be barred from editing the Cyrillic script 
articles on en.wp.

(By the way, my test was not to prove that it's technically possible to 
convert. It was meant to prove that it's _easy_ to implement. Since four 
years the developers are telling that they cannot rename the project 
because it's too much work and other things are more important. So if 
renaming is much work, well, I can testify that implementing a full wiki 
with converted content is not much work. Much more work was spent in 
writing mailing list posts insulting Cetateanu Moldovanu calling him a 
"nationalist" than would have been necessary to create a solution to the 
problem.)

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox