[Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia

[M. Williamson]

Marcus, have you conducted a poll of those people? Please don't make
pronouncements of that sort without any research. We are not here to
decide what people should or should not do, we are here to reflect
things as they are on the ground, what is used by people currently,
what is their "native variety" and what they consider their mother
language.

You still have not given a good reason why there should be no ability
for Cyrillic users to create content, using their own alphabet.
Because other speakers of the language don't want it is not good
enough, we are talking here about fencing an entire group out of the
Wiki process simply because of their preferred script.

So, as I see it, there are three choices that abide by the Wiki
process and respect everybody's rights:

1) Re-open mo.wp, possibly at a different domain
2) Enable an automatic converter, but which also allows posting of
content in Cyrillic, possibly to be stored in the database in Latin
3) Enable an automatic converter, which allows posting of content in
Cyrillic, to be stored in the database in Cyrillic

#3 is clearly undesirable for many reasons, and #1 doesn't seem like
such a good idea.

However, your proposal, in which people are locked out of content
creation in Cyrillic, strikes me as discriminatory and I would always
choose a non-ideal solution like #1 over your proposal where people
are unable to create or modify content just for political reasons.

-m.

2010/10/5 Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org>:
>  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
>
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