[Wikipedia-l] Voting for the closing down of Moldovan Wikipedia

Tue Mar 7 03:10:38 UTC 2006

> The Moldovan Wikipedia community has decided to close down the
> Wikipedia.

Bogdan's definition of "community" is very liberal here. 90% of these
people showed up to vote, and made 0 edits other than that to the
Moldovan WP. I would hardly consider them members of the "community".

> A bit of background on this: Moldovan was the name given to the
> standard Romanian language written with Cyrillic alphabet in the
> Soviet Union.
>
> After the fall of the Soviet Union, the independent Republic of
> Moldova kept this name for the language, although it asserted to
> be the same language with Romanian and began to be written once
> again with Latin script.

What you _forgot_ to mention is that in Transnistria, Cyrillic is
still official for the language. Thousands of schoolchildren each year
go to school with textbooks in Cyrillic Moldovan.

> This Wikipedia remained empty with a redirect to Romanian Wikipedia on
> the main page, until User:Node_ue was made admin and began writing
> articles in Cyrillic alphabet.

Actually, it happened exactly the other way around. I wrote hundreds
of articles BEFORE I was made admin.

> About 95% of these articles were simply transliterations of articles
> from Romanian Wikipedia, a part of the transliterations being done
> manually by User:Russ, who can't speak Moldovan/Romanian and the
> resulting articles were rather wrong.

How do you know whether or not Russ can speak Moldovan? How do you
know the results are wrong? You can't write Cyrillic with good
spelling, you're Romanian.

> A few articles were a
ctually written by User:Node_ue, but they were
> mostly stubs and rather badly written (with several grammatical
> mistakes per sentence).

Other users also contributed original articles. You can't really judge
the quality of the articles unless you know which ones they were,
which you don't.

> The translation of the interface used a large number of obscure
> "pure Moldovan and not found in Romanian" words, which however,
> were not known to actual Moldovans. (examples include
> "bircieste" = "search" and "halaturi" = "tools")

Both words appear in Romanian dictionaries. (hint: "^i" is written
"^a" in Romania)

> During the period of 12 January - 12 February, a local voting has been
> organized to determine whether the community sees the need for the
> existence of a Moldovan Wikipedia.

You use the passive, and again you use the word "community" in an
extremely liberal sense. There is much more to the story, which you
choose to exclude because it reflects badly upon your cause.

> The vote was opened to confirmed (>25 edits) Moldovan and Romanian
> editors. While many of the side discussions were held in English
> and Russian (in addition to Moldovan/Romanian), the vote was
> restrained to determine the will of actual and potential editors.
> Some votes were rejected on this basis.

Rejected on this basis? On whose authority? And given what evidence?

> * 95% of the content was simply copied here and transliterated (no
> translation is necessary) from the Romanian wikipedia. In the oppinion
> of the moldovan organizers of the referendum, this gives Romanians a
> right to express their vote.

This is an outright lie -- there was only one organiser of the
referendum. I would not be surprised if he is just Bonaparte using a
proxy, too.

> * Romanian and Moldovan are the same language for all day-to-day
> purposes (cf. [[:en:Moldovan language]]), which makes them potential
> editors.

Yes, well then, if they are potential editors, why can't they have
registered and made edits already? If they're the same language, why
can't they have contributions? In my opinion, just because they could
potentially edit someday, doesn't mean they should be able to vote
_today_.

> Two votes were rejected because they were from people who did not
> speak Romanian/Moldovan and didn't had enough contributions to
> either wikipedia.

How do you know what they spoke?

> There are several strong reasons that compelled us to request the
> deletion of the Moldovan language Wikipedia. Among them technical,
> originality, and ethical arguments that we briefly expose here.

...

> History
> -------
> It was created by Node_ue, who was the first admin.

That's an outright lie. It was "created" by a developer long before I
even knew it existed.

> Its deletion has already been discussed. Consensus not reached, for
> the intentions of Node_ue, and the reaction of Moldovan editors was
> not clear at the time. At that time, it was already clear that a
> Latin-script Moldovan wikipedia has no reason to exist (so that even
> Node_ue agreed to point the latin version to the Romanian wikipedia).
> It appeared that his only concern is to maintain the cyrillic version
> of the moldovan wikipedia, which uses the Sovied-imposed script.

No, it was clear. The first vote on the future of that Wikipedia,
votes were in favour of keeping it. And THAT time, not any Romanian
guys were allowed to vote.

> Following several abusive administration incidents, the adminship has
> been removed from Node_ue.

"Several abusive administration incidents" is another lie. There is
more to it than Dpotop's description. My "abuses" were much more minor
than yours -- you allowed numerous people to vandalise pages with not
even a warning, and you used your powers to enforce your own POV. I
simply blocked a user who was moving pages recklessly.

> In conclusion, we, the Moldovan and Romanian wikipedia editors,
> believe that the current moldovan wikipedia has no reason to exist
> for:
>
> - it has no editor fluent in Moldovan

Another lie.

> - it brings no information

Oh? How so? There are hundreds of informative pages, in both Cyrillic and Latin.

> - it is considered offensive by many Moldovans and Romanians.

Well, the Kurdish Wikipedia offends many Turks, but it still exists.

> With these results, a clear consensus has been reached in the group
> of those who speak Romanian/Moldovan language.

Hah.

Mark