[Wikipedia-l] To Gerard re: Moldovan wiki

Sun Mar 19 09:51:48 UTC 2006

> Yes, but remember that Cyrillic is a script in decline. The 150,000 or so
> Moldovans in Transnistria are made to use Cyrillic, and they would prefer to
> use Latin, as can be seen by the crisis provoked by the decision to remove
> state funding from Latin-script schools. OK, none of these are reasons
> against the existence of a Moldovan Wikipedia in Cyrillic per se, but I
> think your point of this being able to be used for any tangible positive
> purpose is overstated. This can be seen by the fact that there are no
> contributors who are interested in adding information to the project at the
> moment (i.e. native speakers). Even *this* wouldn't be a problem.

As I've noted many times before, Latin alphabet is still taught in
private schools in Transnistria. Nobody is being forced to use
Cyrillic.

> The biggest problem that people don't agree with, however, is that the
> Moldovan Wikipedia is biscriptal, and in practice is Cyrillic-only
> (article-wise), when Cyrillic is neither the majority script, nor an
> official script, while also ideologically representing a symbol of past
> repression (we can't always look at things in a political vacuum).

No -- what it seems to me is that most people either don't like the
fact that Cyrillic is used *at all*, or that the name "Moldovan" is
used. Nobody seems to have any of those nuanced feelings you detail.

Mark