[Wikipedia-l] Policy draft: Wikimedia projects are not the place for national constitution

Mon Nov 13 14:15:11 UTC 2006

On 13/11/06, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/13/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW, what Ethnologue says for Zlatiborian and Zlatiborians? ;)

I'd totally forgotten about how oblivious you were. Responding to all
my points as if I were serious. Everyone else, even most of the
Serbians, were able to tell I was kidding. I was actually expressing
somewhat of a Pan-Yugoslav position through use of extreme sarcasm,
basically, that "now everybody tries to break off from the unitary
South Slavic nation". The intention wasn't specifically that but to
highlight how ridiculous it is that we have languages in 3 versions of
what can't even be called different _dialects_ of the same language
(maybe if you had one in Cakavian instead of "Croatian").

When you didn't get it at first, I decided to intensify the terms to
the point that it could _only_ be taken as humour ("shed the shackles
of ... oppression and slavery", "glorious illustrious wonderful
Zlatiborian language ... repressed by evil Serbians"). Your response
was not laughter but rather concern, and an assertion that "people
like me" should be "sentenced to death" (!), but that I could be
forgiven because of my age.

In the end, you were the one who came out looking like a fool, and the
"great worthy cause of the illustrious Zlatiborian culture oppressed
by the evil Serbian overlords" has become somewhat of an in-joke and I
have seen it used on several tech webpages.

People may have been incensed at first, but after a couple of my
e-mails pretty much everybody besides you reacted with good humour,
although the issue got kind of old after a while.

> You are completely missing the point. The intention of the document is
> to explain that Wikipedia should not be involved in constituing of new
> nations. And this is not the only condition for making Wikipedia.
> Including that there may be a general rule which says that very close
> languages shouldn't have separate Wikipedias (BCS, Lusatian, and so
> on).

But it is _completely irrelevant_. As I said, we do not have
Wikipedias for nations, but for languages. It is simply impossible to
use Wikipedia to build a new nation. To form a language where nothing
existed before, perhaps, but to build a new nation, no. It's not
possible, because _we do not create Wikipedias for nations!_.

> The main reason is discussion about Siberian Wikipedia. As you are

Siberian seems to be a bit more credible than Zlatiborian. Also,
Siberian got more supporters from disinterested 3rd parties. While the
existence of Siberian as a language is debatable, it is clear from
viewing any text in it that the words they are using are very
different from Russian.

Besides, although nation creation is mentioned often in the discussion
it is truly not relevant. What _is_ relevant are the merits of the
language itself. How many people speak it? How many people are willing
to edit its Wiki? etc.

> famous as someone who is supporting hoaxes, you have to me a good

I see you used the plural there. The only "hoax" I have supported is
Zlatiborian, and everybody but you knew I wasn't serious.

> lesson to be very sceptic about new languages. In the case of

Well, as a general rule this should be true. But not to the extent
that your rules have laid out.

> Siberian, it is very unclear how much people talk that artificial
> language. Besides that, there are also laughing in Novosibirsk about
> Siberian as a hoax, such on Zlatibor was a year ago about Zlatiborian

Well, I have yet to see anybody _in Siberia_ actually standing out
against the language. One Siberian person supported it, it seems, in
the initial voting. But other than that it seems the "real Siberians"
have remained silent.

Mark

-- 
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