[Wikipedia-l] Apropos:moldovia

Now... I live in Kiev, I am NOT ethnically russian, slavian or whatever, and I could not care less for anyone's national feelings. Actually I suppose the NPOV policy should simply BAN anyone even just mentioning them as a decision criteria. If politics are allowed to be a decision criteria, then you can expect a LOT of such quarrels coming up. We all have political opinions, and I cannot think of any country in in this planet that has never had pretty good reasons for them to feel offended by (at the very least) some of their neighbouring peoples, religions, cultures, scripts, miniskirts, trolleybuses, etc. Do you want to open this pandora's box? Go on. Only pls rename this list into Wikipedia-h (H is for hooligans), because that's what it's going to be. So... living here I meet a number of moldavian (not transdnistrian) residents on the net. Bear in mind, I say *residents* because I simply do not give a damn about their blood, religion, DNA, etc. And I believe that nobody should. This people speak BOTH russian and moldavian. Since my use of rumenian languages is limited (I speak IT-4, which is enough to read most RO, but definitely not enough to write even just at RO-1), I usually use my RU-3 with them. And it works perfectly. Now, RU-3 happens to be written in cyrillic and so are most of their answers, too (just a small number of them using a latin transliteration). Which in turn means that they either use a russian interface or type by some sort of charmap. I read enough *weird* reports about Ukraine at the time of the "orange revolution" to know how western journalists that come here should be valued. It really depends on which side of the conflict buys them sex partners, wine etc. In the most honest cases they sincerely believe to what their translators tell them, but simply do not have any way for them to check anything of what they are told. Such western reports have supported all possible conflicting sides in regional hot spots in the recent past, mostly because of this. So I'm really asking myself whether the press should be used as a source, when contemporary politics are even remotely a part of the issue. Reality is usually much wider and more complex than the canonic 8.000 symbols a redactor is giving to his journalists for them to describe an event. I don't mean to offend BBC's reputation, actually they are one of my favourite and most reliable news sources. I simply wonder whether the news *as such* can be used to make a decision at all, no matter what the source. After some 6 years in eastern Europe I came to understand that most of what we think of it is simply absurd. It is actually impossible to judge a foreign culture unless you dont' spend *many* years in it. This is because of the trade they have with Ukraine and Russia, that are ONLY using cyrillic script(s). The situation will only get to a further integration into using cyrillic once Rumenia steps in the EU and more strict border checking between Rumenia and Moldavia will be in place. Many moldavian products already bear mixed latin/cyrillic labels for them to be easily exported here (wine, mainly). The most world wide known moldavian band (Zdub si zdob, I believe BTW, they are GREAT) made a fortune by singing (also) russian songs and maintains an internet site in both russian and moldavian. So it's simply absurd to claim that one of the two scripts (no matter which one) could be unknown to the locals, who definitely have much more urgent life problems than writing a wiki, but undoubtedly do trade and listen to the radio. Choosing a script or another is mainly a thing at official level, a thing dealing with politics only. In reality, people will simply use them both, no matter what the local war games end up in deciding, because BOTH are needed in practical and economical life, and even the most radical guys need money to make a living. Same applies to the (many) rumenian minorities in Ukraine. closer to the undisputable source of the rumenian culture, that is Rumenia. But on the other hand there are many minorities in Ukraine that never really had a formal instruction in the latin script (and probably never will), but still speak some rumenian dialect. And the only script they can manage is ukrainian and russian cyrillic. My fivepence worth, because I got to understand that most people in here simply does not know what the issue is about. And as long as we deal with facts and information on cold NPOV basis I am happy to help. IMHO the sooner we manage to detach geopolitics from languages, and get to speak about content accessibility in instead, the better we will work. Bèrto ----- Исходное сообщение ----- От: "ScottL" &lt;scott(a)mu.org&gt; Кому: &lt;wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org&gt; Отправлено: 4 июля 2006 г. 15:07 Тема: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Where are the decision makers? From the BBC article posted way way back on this thread it appears that the schools for ethnically Moldavian children in Transdniester actually use the Latin script if they can, and some times they do it when they are officially being persecuted. At least that is what the article said. As far as I can tell the (non-moldavian speaking) people in power are trying (unsuccessfully) to impose this script. Now it probably is likely older people in the region still use it and its probably in public use but I am not sure you can say that its in many schools. At least not to a point where students are learning it to the exclusion of the Latin based script. SKL Mark Williamson wrote: comment to use vote<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects#Closu… f_Moldovan_Wikipedia>on _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l