Mark Williamson wrote:
On 26/03/06, Alin Dosoftei desiphral@gmail.com wrote:
Mark, this a perfect example of why Roma get sick and tired of non-Roma trying to organize their lives by thinking they finally find some exotic puppets to play with. They come with cut and dried ideas and they try to impose them irrespective of the ground reality by not listening to the people.
If you think I discriminate against you, you are wildly mistaken. In my life I don't have a lot of personal experiences with Roma people, so I don't have any of the biases you may encounter with non-Roma people in your own environment. To me, Roma people are just like any other people. Not "exotic puppets to play with".
No-one is suggesting bias or bad faith, only well-intentioned ignorance. That's what the image of the [[Ugly American]] has been all about ever since that book was written in 1958. Most Americans who have regularly involved themselves in Wikipedia have learned that lesson. They have learned that people from other countries prefer to solve their own problems without recourse to the presumption that American solutions are necessarily the best. Regretably, some few Americans here, like you, have never grasped this.
What worries me is the prospect that you will call yourself the "Romani Wikipedia" while at the same time being inaccessable to a large portion of Roma, including but not limited to readers of Ursari.
Why should that worry YOU? I saw no evident Roma involvement in the decision that there should be one English Wikipedia to unite the British and American languages. Why shouldn't the Roma sort out their own problems? There are more ways to have people come together than having them unite to repel a meddler who has decided that he has better solutions to their problems than they do themselves. If the Ursari speakers feel that they have a problem with the rest of the Roma community it's up to them to seek help; it's not up to a stranger to imagine a problem and impose his own gratuitous solution.
Ec