I can see four good reasons for NOT creating a Montenegrin Wikipedia: 1. Standardised Montenegrin is practically identical to Standard Serbian, except for a few words spelled differently. In addition, there is a Wikipedia in Serbo-Croatian as well. There is no way that Montenegrins would actually NEED such a project to have access to encyclopedic information.
2. Political POV issues should never be a reason for splitting off projects. We are already stuck with two Wikipedias in Belarussian and four in Serbo-Croatian, a fifth one just to satisfy a different POV is not going to be of any use to anybody. Besides, there won't be any POV issues when it comes to articles about planets, maggots or the political system of Burkina Faso, so the whole POV problem should not affect not more than, say 0.1% of the entire content of a decent encyclopedia. 3. It is actually quite a waste that people, instead of having one large encyclopedia, should be working on four or five small(er), incomplete ones. This may be nice for editors, but not for the public coming to Wikipedia for information. 4. To provide a Montenegrin Wikipedia with content, it is very likely that articles will be massively imported (by hand or by bot) from its sister projects, especially the Serbian one, which will probably lead to copyright problems. If this won't be done, the project is likely to remain small and largely limited to articles written from a Montenegrin POV. In neither case such a project will be of much use to anybody. Cheers, Jan 2017-12-28 4:00 GMT+01:00 Steven White <koala19...@hotmail.com>: > From a purely linguistic perspective, it's hard to argue with any of this. > And I don't have a skin in the game here; objectively, it doesn't matter to > me if Montenegrin becomes eligible or not. Still, I would say the following: > > > Concerning MF-Warburg's comment: I fully understand that the others are > grandfathered and wouldn't be created now. But the fact that they exist now > means that the question about Montenegrin cannot be considered in a vacuum, > either. > > > Concerning Jan's comment: I hear you. But to extend your analogy, the > Irish are looking for an Irish English wiki because every time an Irishman > tries to bring a different POV to articles about Ireland on the British > wiki, s/he is being shot down. (Pretend it's 1975, or 1922, and the example > is more trenchant.) Also, this whole issue of language secessionism > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_secessionism> doesn't really > exist in English, so to make that comparison is only partially valid. > > > I do think we need to hear from Milos on this subject. > > > Let me add: On the Meta discussion page, I'm about to allow the discussion > to reopen, with a focus on really two questions only: > > > > - The principal question is whether or not Montenegrins actually have > "free, unbiased access to the sum of all human knowledge" on the current > projects. What they keep suggesting is that they don't: Serbian POV > dominates, and Montenegrin POV is given short shrift. I am going to ask the > Montenegrin advocates to prove that with concrete examples. But if they do > so, then either (a) NPOV is going to have to be enforced from the outside > (if that's even possible, but thereby violating normal practices of project > autonomy) or (b) we're going to have to allow the Montenegrins to have > their own project. > - The second question: It's really quite remarkable in a way that the > Montenegrins got the Library of Congress to make the first change to ISO > 639-2 in five years. I'll grant that was probably just a political victory. > But I'm going to invite the Montenegrin community to share any new evidence > that they may have that may have changed LoC's mind, and could change ours. > Maybe there isn't any new evidence. But if there is, we should be open to > it. > > > Steven > > > Sent from Outlook <http://aka.ms/weboutlook> > > > > _______________________________________________ > Langcom mailing list > Langcom@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom > >
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