[Wikipedia-l] Re: Status of Wikimedia

Tue Nov 8 20:48:21 UTC 2005

On 08/11/05, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) <rowikipedia at yahoo.com> wrote:
> As I said before, there's a difference with proposals
> such as Zlatiborian, "Bostonian", etc. In fact, I am
> also against languages being renamed for political
> reasons, like Moldovan, Montenegrin, etc. I'm also not
> particularly favourable to projects like Bavarian,
> etc. *However*, as long as we force speakers of
> legitimate regional languages like Samogitian, Vlax
> Romany, Megleno-Romanian, Sorbian, etc, that haven't
> yet got a Wikipedia, to go through an over-rigorous
> proposal phase, we're going too far.

Now, obviously you knew I'd respond to this paragraph.

First of all, in all seriousness, Zlatiborian is different from
standard Serbian, but definitely not so much that it should really
have its own Wikipedia. I do think that in all seriousness it probably
deserves one more than Bosnian and possibly more than Croatian due to
its uniqueness in some key areas, but I think it's unlikely that a
Zlatiborian WP would ever exist, and it seems largely unnessecary.

Now, I have thought for a long time about the Moldovan Wikipedia. I
think that it would be a positive thing to eventually have a Wikipedia
in real Moldovan, as real Moldovans speak it in the suburbs of
Chisinau, because such a Wikipedia would be uniquely Moldovan and not
understandable to Russians or Romanians either. It would use Moldovan
popular orthography used informally by young people, not Romanian
alphabet or Cyrillic alphabet.

But so far this language has been almost never used in literature. It
is still confined to conversation, e-mail, SMS. So I think that it's
not really feasible or nessecary now. But perhaps in the future, there
will be a Wikipedia that can be uniquely Moldovan without being the
black sheep of the Wikipedia family for political reasons.

Also, Montenegrin has real differences to Serbian. It's not like
Moldovan -- it's actually different to Serbian, instead of calling the
same language by a different name.

Bavarian is actually a legitimate minority language of Bavaria, in
Germany and Austria.

> I think most of us here are smart enough to
> distinguish before languages which are never mentioned
> on the internet and have no written standard - and are
> therefore "invented" by the person who proposes them -
> and legitimate minority languages that need all the
> help we can get (if for every paragraph typed arguing
> about the Zlatiborian hoax someone wrote one
> template-based article at the Voro Wikipedia, we would
> have had about 40 articles extra and helped save a
> wonderful part of Europe's lingustic heritage...)

You can actually write a bot to do that.

Cheers
Mark

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin