[Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia?

Sun Mar 19 12:19:02 UTC 2006

2006/3/19, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>:
>
> If we had such poor function in articles related to Bosnia, IE, that
> they were dominated by Serbian ultranationalist trolls, they would
> very likely say "Bosnian is essentially the same as Serbian" -- there
> *are* relatively few differences, many of them are artificial, etc.

I think this links in to what I believe is the source of a lot of the
confusion related to Moldova(n) - the fact that the relationship between
Moldova and Romania is unique in the world, and there is no comparable case.
The Bosnia-Serbia case is different - Bosniaks are undoubtedly a separate
nation from Serbs, whereas Moldovans are still engaging in the process of
nation-building (or maybe moving away from it... the problem is that even in
the current confusion over nationality, the country is being pulled both
ways, one way towards a Romanian national identity, the other way towards a
separate Moldovan identity). So, this is why a lot of Romanians feel they
have authority to write about Moldovan subjects, because they consider
Moldovans to be the same nation as them.

Mark, of course, believes, from what I know, that there really is no
Romanian nationality, that the present "Romanian" ethnicity is really
Wallachian, and that Moldovans are hence different to Wallachians/Romanians,
and hence any form of Romanian intervention into Moldovan affairs is
(Wallachian) irredentism (consider, however, that current Wallachia is just
one of three regions of modern Romania, and is neither the most prosperous
nor the most significantly over-represented region in Romanian culture and
politics).

I think a similar situation to Moldova is that of Kosovo. That is, Kosovo is
to Albania as Moldova is to Romania, in many ways. Many people in Kosovo
would consider themselves Kosovars about 15 years after independence (or
maybe even now). Also, Just imagine for a second that during Yugoslav times,
the Kosovars had been taught that their language was called "Kosovar" and
made to write it using Cyrillic letters. That's sort of the situation we
have in Moldova now.

Ronline