[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] mo.wikipedia.org when will you stop making joke of us ?

Fri Nov 14 09:56:46 UTC 2008

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 8:42 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/11/13 Dan Collins <en.wp.st47 at gmail.com>:
>> How can people manage to be this grumpy about something this petty.
>> Suggesting that a country is full of criminals simply because they use
>> a different writing system is disgusting trolling, and has no place on
>> this mailing list.
>>
>> --
>> DCollins/ST47
>
> It isn't as petty as it may appear and it is understandable that
> people would be somewhat vexed.
>
> Transnistria is not widely considered to be a country for a number of
> reasons. The written language is a Russian invention which I
> understand was part of a program to rework Moldavia's cultural
> identity. It is understandable that residents of Moldova would object
> to it being called Moldovan.
>
> Now you might think that since it is only used in Transnistria (there
> may be a little use in Moldova among certain age groups but I've seen
> no evidence of this) we could call it Transnistrian however this would
> clash with the geopolitical objectives of a number of countries such
> as say the United States of America.
>
> To a large extent we can ignore the issue since at the present time we
> are yet to encounter a native Cyrillic Moldovan writer. But this is
> not a long term solution and moveing the thing to cy-mo is likely to
> cause further issues.
>
> While eastern european nationalism may seem somewhat petty to those of
> us who live in countries where out national identity has not been
> significantly threatened of late that does not mean that we should
> underestimate it's significance to those who display it.

I am sure that others may find other examples, but here are my two:

* Serbs and Croats object on usage "Bosnian" as the name of language
which is used by Bosniaks. The reason is that Serbs and Croats from
Bosnia are also Bosnians (while not Bosniaks).
* Greeks object on usage "Macedonia(n)" for Slavic nation located at
the part of Ancient Macedon (and their language). The reason is that
they feel that they are descendants of Ancient Macedonians.

I think that no one has monopoly on words. So, if there are some
disambiguations, they should be described and articles about different
languages (or other entities) with the same name should be named by
using parentheses, like "Moldovan (Transitria)".

However, it is true that Moldovan case is more complex because we
don't have good enough informations even from Moldova, not to talk
about Transnitria.