[Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

Sun Jan 8 16:17:58 UTC 2006

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> 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,

There's no support for that whatsoever, actually.

These wikis were all in existence in the 2001-2002 era, apparently part of the
first batch of bulk-created wikis made from a list of ISO 639 standard language
codes:
* http://sh.wikipedia.com/ (Serbo-Croatian)
* http://sr.wikipedia.com/ (Serbian)
* http://hr.wikipedia.com/ (Croatian)

I have no doubt that whoever ran those bulk setups didn't read the whole list
and wasn't aware that that particular combination of languages was present.
Ascribing motives or claiming "a grave violation of NPOV" is simply absurd.

Later, bs.wikipedia.org was added by request, on the basis that
1) our policy was to create wikis for any language with an ISO 639 language
code, on the assumption that an international standards body had a better handle
on what's out there than us
2) it wasn't very fair or neutral to have Serbian and Croatian but *not* a
Bosnian wiki.

At some point the Serbo-Croatian one was shut down and articles copied to the
others, on the basis that:
1) ISO 639 had rescinded the 'sh' code several years ago (in fact prior to the
creation of that wiki, so an out of date list must have been used), so that wiki
in fact was inconsistent with our language creation policy and probably would
not have been created if anyone were looking at it explicitly
2) a number of people were strongly requesting that

Later, at some point, someone reopened the Serbo-Croatian one, I'm not sure why.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20060108/8fca614d/attachment.pgp 