Mark Williamson wrote:
On 18/03/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
Its very existence is a POV fork - it's a language which nobody offically recognises as being distinct from Romanian (I say lift, you say elevator), for a country which nobody offically recognises as existing. If the Foundation says yes, a country which doesn't exist is allowed to have projects in a language which doesn't exist, they are promoting the POV that the country and it's language exist and should be recognised. /That/ is not a goal of the Foundation.
That's a rather inaccurate assessment. The official language of the Republic of Moldova, which is recognised by every nation on earth, is "Moldovan".
Ok, so how is it different to Romanian? According to [1] Moldovan "is essentially the same as Romanian". Let's call a spade a spade, mmkay?
Also, whether or not Transnistria is internationally recognised as an independent country, it's certainly undeniable that there is some usage of the Cyrillic script over there.
Sure, but as Bogdan Giusca wrote:
NO MOLDOVANS requested or wanted this Wikipedia.
We have *no* Transnistrian Moldovan contributors who want to write a wikipedia in Cyrillic alphabet.
Its only supporters are Node_ue (the kid in Arizona who barely speaks the language) and a few Russians who support it for ideological/political reasons and who can't contribute anyway, as they don't know the language.
There are no newspapers, no journals, no magazines, no books currently published in Romanian Cyrillic in Transnistria. The children use decades old schoolbooks from the time of the Soviet Union.
Virtually everyone there would like to switch the education system to the Latin alphabet, but dissent is not something easy to do in a totalitarian regime: there are some Romanian/Moldovan Transnistrians in prison since 1991 for political dissent.
So, they are obviously not doing it by choice, and none of them were contributing anyway.
And if having mowp is a statement by WMF to the legitimacy of Transnistria, isn't *not* having it equally POV in the opposite direction? Note that I don't personally think it's POV.
No. NPOV says that we have to include all *majority* viewpoints, not *all* viewpoints. Including all viewpoints is /balanced/, but inclusion of a POV which is not in the majority (recogninsing the unrecognised language of an unrecognised nation) is itself POV. If the UN recognises Trasnistria overnight, and they declare that their offical language is Moldovan written in Cyrillic script, and Transnistrians start to ask for a Wikipedia in Moldovan-Cyrillic, they can have it. But not before.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Moldova#Language