[Wikipedia-l] Why MO.wikipedia. - Moldovan, are written in cyrillic ?

Tue Dec 6 21:42:55 UTC 2005

 Ronline wrote:

> I'll give you a hypothetical case. In Switzerland, 
> Italian is an official language.
> Now let's say that until 1990, Swiss Italian was written 
> in a different alphabet.
> After 1990, there was a significant movement to revert 
> back to the Latin alphabet,
> and nowadays everyone uses Latin alphabet in Switzerland 
> when writing Italian, except for a few
> who still prefer the old alphabet. Would it.wiki accept 
> this new alphabet as part of a biscriptal Wikipedia? 
> Considering that, say, out of a total of 70 million
> Italian speakers, only about 200,000 people still write 
> in this strange alphabet,and of those, 180,000 can write 
> well in the Latin alphabet? The case is similar to what 
> the Moldovan-Cyrillic case is today.

As a total outsider who has never been to Moldova, one more aspect has
come to my mind while reading the above lines:

Does the fact that a small minority of people might prefer to use
the Cyrillic script for private purposes justify the enormous 
effort of building an entire encyclopedia for them - while they
know the Latin script? 

My point is: if a society generelly uses one script (which seems 
to be so according to everything I have heard from our fellow 
Wikipedians who know the country as well as the language) it doesn't
really matter if an individual likes another script better. They will
have to adapt to the common standard if they want to read the paper, 
a current book, the phone book, the signs in public places, labels
on products etc., make they annual tax declaration, do business, get
a job, ride a train ... So are any severe reasons for Wikipedia to make
an exception here?

Having said that, there is still one open question: the issue of 
Transnistria which does not make things easier and may not be forgotten,
of course.

But luckily, there are quite a number of Wikipedians here who know
much, much more about the whole situation than I do - and they all 
seem determined to bring about an intelligent solution. So I am convinced
the issue will be settled for good pretty soon.

Arbeo

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