I feel that's a very inaccurate representation of the Romanian point of view on this proposed transliteration. What must be understood is that Cyrillic is controversial for Romanian simply because of historical context. This can't be discounted, and I think people should a bit more sensitive to this issue. It doesn't compare with Devanagari for English or, say, Arabic script for Swedish. But the point is that even those Wikipedias would never be accepted.
Ronline, you're speaking from a very idealistic place. In your world, gays, gypsies, and Jews are all accepted as equals by Romanians. But the reality is, many Romanians do not share these ideals with you. *You* may not have a burning hatred for anything Russian, but it's clear many Romanians do.
Case in point -- if there were an English WP in Devanagari, no Americans would go to the lengths Romanians have gone to to campaign for its closure. The attitude would be, "It's a bit ridiculous, but why should we care?"
So much time has been spent on the Moldovan Wikipedia that it's apparent many Romanians do care about the issue, and it's also very clear that they have a burning hatred for anything Russian, considering the fact that I have been called "Russian" (in Romanian) as an insult by Romanians, which doesn't make a lot of sense -- I'm certainly not Russian, but I'm not sure why it should be used as an insult. Are Russians evil demons or something??
In any case - Mark seems to believe that Romanians have a "burning hatred" for anything Russian, including Cyrillic. This is definitely not the case. Rather, the writing of Romanian in Cyrillic is something that is not performed by any Romanians, bar a series of people who declare themselves ethnic Moldovans in an unrecognised state. For that reason, implementing a conversion script touches on people's sensitivities. The Latin script is a link that Romania has to the rest of the Western world. Using a Cyrillic script that would be treated on par with Latin implies a sort of Cyrillic hegemony for most of Romanians and Moldovans, and serves as a painful reminder for the times when people in the Moldovan SSR were forced to learn the language using Cyrillic characters.
"Forced to learn the language using Cyrillic characters" is a phrase I have seen used almost exclusively by Romanians. Moldovans just speak of a script change, of reversion to Latin script. These people had much more important things to worry about at the time than what script they wrote in. Even during perestroica, there were no protests to revert to Latin -- the MSSR gov't simply did that without any sort of popular outcry.
- The Kurdish Wikipedia uses both Arabic and Latin script, but there is no
conversion. This, IMO, is quite a messy approach. Either have two separate Wikipedias (there's nothing wrong with that), or imply automatic conversion.
The main problem is Kurdish dialects. They are largely mutually unintelligible, and are also divided along the lines of script. Sorani and Gorani usually use Arabic, Kurmanji and Zazaki usually use Latin.
- The Tatar Wikipedia uses the Latin script, which is non-official, yet
there is no content at all in Cyrillic. There is no clear policy on this (ideally, conversion should be implemented).
Actually, while I was troubled by this for a while, I found out that Latin is the official script for Tatar in Tatarstan. This is in conflict with the fact that Cyrillic is, by a recent national law, the official script for all languages of the Russian Federation, however, the Tatar law still exists and Tatars themselves seem to be embracing Latin.
- Automatic conversion is messy. For example, the Serbian Wikipedia
continues to be Cyrillic-default, and one must switch to Latin everytime ( i.e. when a link is clicked from a Latin page, it still takes you to the Cyrillic version). AFAIK, pages also can't be edited in Latin. I presume this is the case for the Chinese WP as well.
When you edit, the existing content is not converted, no. However, you can add new content in Latin. Same at zh.wp, except that it chooses one script or the other based on your IP range and cookies.
Mark