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

Mon Nov 13 23:44:51 UTC 2006

On 13/11/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 12:00:31 AM, Mark wrote:
>
> > Standard language of PMR is written in Cyrillic.
>
> > Yes, it is a "separatist region", but that does not cancel the fact
> > that it is taught in schools there.
>
> Yes, it has been discussed this before: it's not standard Moldovan,
> as used by the government of Moldova. So why is it at the mo subdomain?
> Shouldn't it be at mo-cyr.wikipedia.org ?

Well, I would agree with the government of PMR on this point: although
Moldova calls it official normative language "Moldovan", it is
essentially Romanian. As they say in Dubossary, "Limbe moldaven'aske
se skrie yn alfabetu kirilik". The Latin-script schools in
Transnistria are considered "Romanian-medium education".

And as was mentioned earlier in this thread, countries do not have a
monopoly over languages. What the government of Moldova says about the
Moldovan language is irrelevant when it comes to the norms used on
Wikipedia. A large portion of "Moldovan speakers" live in Ukraine,
Belarus, Russia, and Kazakstan, and most of these people were familiar
with Cyrillic to write their language. Similarly, while Russian state
law says that Cyrillic is the official script of the Federation, the
Tatar Wikipedia uses Latin script. Why?

And why doesn't the Serbian Wikipedia use Latin, used on nearly all
Serbian websites? Because it differentiates them from the Bosnian
Wikipedia and, to a lesser extent, the Croatian Wikipedia (this
because Croatian norms are already a bit different).

Script choice is a very interesting sociolinguistic topic. In Moldova,
sure, most people will choose Latin. But why can't they write in
ro.wp? Their normative language is identical to Romanian, save a few
turns of phrase, a handful of technical words and a couple of
syntactical inexactities (and of course the i vs a controversy, but
then even Romania is not uniform in that regard).

The reason that mo.wp should be written in Cyrillic is because a mo.wp
written in Latin makes no sense and has no use. Anybody Moldovan who
writes their native language in Latin, knows when reading a list of
languages to select "Romanian", even if they will declare to the death
that their language is Moldovan. So far, there have only been two
camps of native Moldavians on mo.wp: Latin users who are militantly
assertive that their language is identical with Romanian and that the
two WPs should be merged, and Cyrillic users who think that a Moldovan
WP makes little sense if written in Cyrillic.

> I think that's the main point of disagreement and both Moldovans and
> Romanians disagree with the current state.

Nooo... the main point of disagreement seems to be a bit more radical,
like "NU EXISTA LIMBA MOLDOVENEASCA EXISTA DOAR LIMBA ROMANA" with
lots of exclamation marks afterwards. Or "NU A PROPAGANDA SOVIETIC".
Or something like that.

> Anyway, Mark, what do you want to do with this encyclopedia? I don't

Well, I was just sitting along pushing it forward and waiting for a
better contributor. It seems now that it is self-maintaining, and so I
leave it alone.

> that in the last six months it got *any* new original content, despite
> the thousands of trolling edits by numerous sock-puppets of Romanian,
> Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, American and possibly Georgian origin.

That's because you haven't been looking clearly. I saw new original
articles on the Kyiv metro, the Ukrainian language, and population
theory. One of them was in the last month or so. But of course you
don't notice these things... you're only what, the admin there? Psh.

Mark

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