By the way, similarly to how Romanians like to equate Arizona with me, and thus anybody from Arizona must be me, perhaps we should do the same with Moldova? After all, Moldova's population is smaller by quite a bit, and internet access is less widespread in Moldova.
So all those Moldovans who voted (all whopping 7 of them!!) are obviously just one person. Right, Bogdan?
Mark
On 19/03/06, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
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?
And if you look at the detailed history of [1], it's one of many pages where a small number of Romanian trolls made so much racket that they scared everybody else off. None of the major pages about Moldova are very good -- they are all written mostly by Romanians. Attempts of Moldovans or others to make them more neutral and accurate are constantly reverted, and the people who try to make things good are insulted and harassed until they leave.
None of these people really care about Moldova other than as a topic of nationalist sentiment, though -- none of them has ever really contributed to the articles about places in Moldova, people in Moldova, and things like that -- mostly just pages like [[Moldova]], [[Moldovan culture]], [[Moldovan language]], etc.
If we had such poor function in articles related to Bosnia, IE, that they were dominated by Serbian ultranationalist trolls, they would very likely say "Bosnian is essentially the same as Serbian" -- there *are* relatively few differences, many of them are artificial, etc.
That aside, the topic at hand isn't really whether or not we should have a "Moldovan Wikipedia" so much as it is whether or not we should host content in Cyrillic.
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.
Since, of course, the word of Bogdan Giushca is the word of God!
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.
So, is it POV that we have a Wikipedia in Corsican despite the fact that there is no nation of Corsica recognised by the UN and that Corsican is not the official language of any country?? No. What matters is that PEOPLE USE IT. for their primary language
Mark
-- "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
-- "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin