[Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Milos Rancic <millosh at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> > I think this really needs to be reformed somehow. If that software,
> > which would transliterate between Cyrillic and Latin, appears, what's
> > the reason not to have ONE SINGLE Wikipedia for all of those
> > languages?
> 
> If you want to work on such project, try to think a little bit deeper
> what is possible now, what would be possible in two years etc. And,
> start to work on it. The problem with you and Pokrajac is that you are
> full of your ideals in emails and talk pages without any consistent
> work.

An on-the-fly script converter is already working on the Chinese Wikipedia. It does not, I am
told, require more than one version of an article and does not fork articles. What it does is
display whatever script a person wants w/o needing separate articles written in the different
scripts.

So it appears that there is no valid reason to have separate wikis for each country that was
formerly part of Yugoslavia. One Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia will do, IMO.

We are here to build encyclopedias that everybody in the world can read and use. That does NOT
mean that we need to have encyclopedias in every single dialect spoken in the world. In fact,
doing that will only hamper our goals since it needlessly breaks-up communities that could combine
their effort into creating one encyclopedia that respects all the various mutually-understandable
dialects of a single language. 

That Serbian, Croation, and Bosnian are separate languages appears to be a politically-convenient
fiction that wants to enforce differences that don't really exist. That can only tend to enforce
component-nation-specific POVs and thus violate NPOV (as would having separate Wikipedais for
Simplified and Traditional Chinese). 

It is very sad that the lack of a good policy on language creation and shutdown has resulted in
this situation. 

Shut down Serbo-Croatian? No. Shut down Serbian, Croation, and Bosnian and then merge them into
Serbo-Croatian? Yes. 

If need be we can reduce to just two wikis until/if a Latin/Cyrillic script converter and be
created.

-- mav


		
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