Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Tatar Wikipedia; request for deletion

The Tatar Wikipedia is with 4053 of a respectable size. Getting a request for deletion for a project of this size seems outrageous. So there must be more to it.

The proposer writes that he has been implementing the use of the ISO-8859-9 code page for the Tatar language. According to the proposer, there are 150 articles that are "semi useful" and the rest are bot generated articles.

The reason for the proposal is that Tatar is not written in the Latin script. The Tatars live mainly within the borders of what used to be the USSR and in Russia it is required to write Tatar in Cyrillic.

There are several issues;
  • Wikipedia is to bring information to people. When people do not read the Latin script in Tatar, what is the point?
  • There has been a battle raging with admins blocking each other
  • There is no existing precedent that deals with these issues
  • The language committee has explicitly recused itself from all projects that existed before its start
As this is the type of Wikidrama that people do not know about, the type of Wikidrama that does not get press coverage I would like to learn how we as an organisation, a community are going to deal with this.
Thanks,
GerardM

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