[Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia

Tue Oct 5 21:11:31 UTC 2010

NPOV is good as far as it goes, but the issues of wiki naming and
language are necessarily one where positions need to be taken on some
very touchy real-world issues.

The naming of mo.wikipedia and its use of Cyrillic were particularly
unfortunate, as the Moldovan standard alphabet is Roman, the
Transnistrian is Cyrillic, the Moldovan TLD / name code is "MD" not
"MO", and we have no Transnistrian wiki that I am aware of.

Essentially - we landed in a configuration that simultaneously is as
wrong as possible, on every account, offending nearly all people on
both sides of the defacto border.  This is highly inappropriate, even
from a "We're NPOV and not here to make political statements"
standpoint.

The particular campaign of emails is ... at best unfortunate.  But we
really should do something about this eventually.

Whether that's deleting mo.wikipedia, renaming it to tr.wikipedia (or
deleting and creating a new one there), or what, I don't know.  But
we're Very Wrong right now.  We can neutrally get to Somewhat Right.

I understand (at a high level) the technical issues and staff priority
issues, etc.  But there's a difference between "low on the priority
order" and "We shouldn't fix this".

-george

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Your approach is the wrong one. Our aim is to bring information to all
> people of this world. When people leave for political reasons, they are
> welcome to leave. Their point of view is clearly not the Neutral Point Of
> View that is also expected of them in their contributions.
> Thanks,
>       GerardM
>
> On 6 October 2010 03:50, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
>
>>  An'n 05.10.2010 22:24, hett M. Williamson schreven:
>> > 2010/10/5 Gerard Meijssen<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>> >> Hoi,
>> >> Technically it is easier to transliterate from Cyrillic. So when
>> >> transliteration works in a round robin fashion, it does not really
>> matter in
>> >> what script people edit. It will only be stored in one script. The
>> choice
>> >> for a script can be based on a user setting or on the method access to
>> the
>> >> information was sought.
>> >> Thanks,
>> > Gerard, I am aware of all this, however in the proposals of Marcus
>> > there is constant mention of a "read-only" Cyrillic portal rather than
>> > a "round robin" transliteration program which enables editors to
>> > create content in Cyrillic which is saved to the database in Latin.
>> >
>> > -m.
>> I'm trying to promote a solution that _works_. If you want a solution
>> where Cyrillic users can participate on par with Latin users you need
>> the support of the Latin users. I'm sure you won't get that support. You
>> can critizise ro.wp for being unwilling to give that support but that
>> won't change anything about it. If you try to impose something on them
>> that can break the ro.wp community. If just 2% of all active ro.wp
>> Wikipedians leave the project in disagreement about the issue that's
>> twice as worse as if the 1% Romanian speakers of Transnistria are unable
>> to participate.
>>
>> Marcus Buck
>> User:Slomox
>>
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-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com