[Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

Sun Jan 8 07:57:05 UTC 2006

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>I won't vote because I am not part of that community, but the recent 
>>changes does show that the project is active.  Assuming that the vote 
>>succeeds there would still be enough active and involved people to pass 
>>the criteria for starting a new wiki.  Under those circumstances 
>>wouldn't it be much easier to argue that a dissolution vote is invalid 
>>if it would leave enough people behind to start a new wiki in that same 
>>language.
>>    
>>
>
>Having an active community is NOT the most important reason to have a separate wiki. FAR more important, given our goal to having encyclopedias that everybody on the planet can read, is to make sure we consider how closely the proposed wiki's language is to other languages we already have wikis for.
>
>It is my understanding that Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible dialects of Serbo-Croatian and that the bigest difference is the use of scripts between and/or among them (which MediaWiki can deal with on the same wiki without forking articles). 
>
>In fact, our article on this confirms my suspicion:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_in_standard_Serbian%2C_Croatian_and_Bosnian
>
>So a far, far better question is this: Why do we have separate Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Wikipedias instead of just one  Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia?
>
>Splitting things up purely for purely political reasons is a grave, let me repeat, GRAVE, violation of NPOV and does not serve our goal to provide an encyclopedia that the peoples of the Former Yugoslavia can use and understand. 
>
>We need to create a clear policy on the creation and shutdown of Wikipedias and apply that retroactively to fix this and other similarly horrid mistakes. 
>
If the situation had been my call at the beginning I would have had no 
problem saying that we should have only a single Wikipedia to cover all 
these, but it wasn't my call, and we need to cope with the reality in 
front of us.  It is a fact that we have four projects, and none of them 
suffer from a lack of interest and activity.  Nobody would benefit by 
trying to undo the past.

There is ample support for the notion that setting up the separate wikis 
was a grave violation of NPOV, but adopting retroactive policies for 
anything is never good without an overwhelmingly strong reason.  There 
is no such overwhelming reason.  So unluss one of those communities 
collapses form a total lack of interest, or there is a merger agreement 
by any two or more of these communities we will probably have to live 
with the fact of four communities for the forseeable future.  My crystal 
ball cannot see farther than that.

Ec