Forwarded from on-wiki. It was posted there on Friday 2 March at about 18:30 UTC.
“Dear LangCom members,
I am writing to you with intention to clarify some things regarding the Montenegrin
Wikipedia project. I am aware that there is a lack of support for this project to be
allowed, and the main argument is that it is a “variety” of Serbian language, claimed even
by some members here. I’d like to remind you that not a single serious institution claims
this to be true, they all list it as a member of Serbo-Croatian macro language, not a part
of Serbian (an important distinction).
Next, some question the use of two added letters all while claiming that they can simply
be replaced with sj, zj. As per Montenegrin orthography, this is not true, I can explain
everything in detail on the discussion page for anyone interested in this, please, be free
to ping me there. And on the same page plenty of examples have been given to show how
these letters are in fact used. Also, alongside a few other users, I have shown some clear
differences between Ijekavian Serbian and Montenegrin (let me remind you that ~90% of
articles in Serbian Wikipedia are written in Ekavian standard, not Ijekavian). The most
important feature of Montenegrin is jekavian iotation, not present in any other SC
language, and this means that it is impossible to follow Montenegrin standard if we were
to write Serbian (or Bosnian, Croatian) Wikipedia.
And let’s not forget the reason that most members here wish to ignore, but sadly, due to
historical and political reasons, cannot. Serious NPOV violations are present on Serbian
Wikipedia on literally every article regarding Montenegro (and lots of other political,
historical topics related to other countries and people but it is not relevant to
Montenegrin Wikipedia right now). I have listed quite a few examples of that in discussion
page and even some of reverting changes that were made to regain NPOV, ping me for all of
that as well if you cannot find it on that cluttered page. Politics do in fact play a big
part in all of this, and explain why Montenegrin community is, besides all the reasons
listed above, also uninterested to contribute to such projects, and there is a clear
intention to write neutral articles retaining NPOV among our community, not to create
propaganda-style articles that can sadly be found on all of these other projects.
Some propose using Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia. The very existence of it is harshly
criticized amongst most of Serbian, Croatian community, as they find it unnecessary and
are often feeling angry at SC community merely copying their articles, as claimed by some
users. I won’t argue about necessity of SC Wikipedia, but I felt that this is a good
introduction for my main reason why Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia is not a good solution for
Montenegrin either.
Very large number of articles have parts directly copied from Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian
Wikipedias, resulting in a huge mess on articles, with a single sentence being written
half in Croatian, half in Serbian, which is utterly confusing for the reader, switching
between dialects, word forms, grammar rules etc. In the discussion page I’ve shown how
different a Montenegrin Wikipedia article would be from an article in Serbo-Croatian to Mr
Amir Aharoni, please, be free to check that as well, and I can do that for any article you
want me to, so you have a side by side comparison, just like the one I made there. A very
large number of Croatian words is unheard of and unknown in Montenegrin, to the point
where you simply cannot understand whatever you are reading about (scientific topics to
the point of unintelligiblity!). And Croatian is vastly dominant in Serbo-Croatian
Wikipedia (alongside those Ekavian Serbian parts in the middle of a single sentence). You
can agree that this is not a good ground for developing a serious project written in
Montenegrin language.
Finally, I am aware that these other projects are grandfathered, but it doesn’t change the
fact that they do exist, and Montenegrin community sees this as very unfair (to say the
least) and really feels that based an all of the things listed above, and this fact that
it’s the only SC variety without it’s own Wikipedia, it does deserve creation of it’s own
project.
Sincerely, Luka (Wiki username: Lujki).”
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