Andre Engels wrote:
Still, the situation is now that there are separate
wikis AND a merged
one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a
strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the
other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my
opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem
to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias
than in the Serbocroatian one.
I absolutely agree with Andre that the current situation is undesirable
in the extreme. Having three separate wikis *and* a merged one is
really not very helpful in the long run.
I visited this region some months ago, and one thing I am happy to
report is that all the wikipedians I met there, both Serbian and
Croatian, were exactly the same in every essential respect as
Wikipedians I have met everywhere.
They are reasonable, they are thoughtful, and they are thinking really
hard about this situation. At the present time, it seemed to me that
the majority viewed seemed to be best summed up as "It is bad to have
all 3, but it is probably necessary for now."
Milos has been working on software tools to allow for full support in
*one* Wikipedia of all 4 major ways of writing this language.
I don't know how much different the
languages/dialects are. I do know
that from both sides people are moving towards separate languages. If
we consider languages to be variations with at least a given amount of
difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we
consider languages to be dialects with a special formal status,
they're different languages.
Opinions about this matter seem to vary a significant extent.
Nationalists (and I do not use the term pejoratively here, only as a
label of convenience) tend to desire/believe more in separate languages.
But at some point, there is this simple matter of objective fact: when I
went with a group of Croations to Serbia, and we had a big friendly
happy meetup at Milos' house, everyone just laughed and joked and talked
to each other, and they didn't have to use English to do it. :-)
--Jimbo