Moldovan Wikipedia

» see mo.wikipedia.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Moldovan and Romanian are the same language. The Moldovan constitution calls the state language Moldovan and then specifies that it functions on the Latin alphabet, the 1989 language law made it official on those terms, and the Cyrillic spelling of it belongs to the Soviet period and survives today mainly in Transnistria. None of that stopped a Moldovan Wikipedia from existing, because Wikipedia did not consult a linguist. It consulted a code list.

ISO 639 had assigned mo and mol to Moldovan, and in June 2004 the Wikimedia software created a wiki for every code it found, so mo.wikipedia.org appeared without anybody proposing it. At first it behaved sensibly and worked as a portal pointing readers at the Romanian Wikipedia. Then in March 2005 it began accepting articles, in Cyrillic, and the editing wars started inside the month.

What accumulated there was not a body of Moldovan writing. The deletion proposal set out the mechanism plainly: the articles were Romanian Wikipedia articles from 2005 and 2006, machine-transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, and it offered a side-by-side comparison to prove it, a Romanian article on music against its Cyrillic twin. The editor doing most of this was Node ue, a prolific contributor who was not a native speaker, and the Romanian community's objection was that nobody who actually reads the language was writing there, because they were all over on ro.wikipedia.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the freeze ~

On 8 March 2006 Anthere, then on the Wikimedia Foundation's board, sent a short request to the wikipedia-l list asking whether the Moldovan Wikipedia and Wiktionary could be blocked once a link to the Romanian version had been put on their main pages. She also asked both sides to stop arguing for twenty-four hours. That was the end of it as a working project, about one year after it had been allowed to hold content at all.

The formal closure vote on Meta ran from June 2006 and finished 106 in favor against 62 opposed. Bogdan's motion to wind it up pointed out that there were no Moldovan contributors on mo.wikipedia for the simple reason that they were all active on the Romanian one, and that nothing had been posted for over a year. English Wikipedia dates the frozen period from December 2006, which is when the discussion was finally closed rather than when the editing stopped.

~ then the code itself went away ~

On 3 November 2008 the ISO 639 registration authority at the Library of Congress deprecated mo and mol, leaving ro and ron as the identifiers for the variant also called Moldovan. The one technical fact that had justified the wiki's creation was now withdrawn, and under Wikimedia's own language proposal policy a project with no valid ISO code could not be opened. It could not be reopened either, which is why the later arguments were all about deletion.

Danutz filed the deletion request on 24 January 2011, citing the Siberian Wikipedia precedent, and ran through the policy line by line: no valid code any more, and no linguistic distance that ro.wikipedia could not hold by itself. He also noted that the parallel Moldovan Wiktionary contained eleven pages, none of them dictionary entries.

~ november 2017, from where i was sitting ~

The thing I notice about the date is where I was when it happened. In November 2017 Wikimedia deleted a wiki that nobody had been able to edit for a decade, and from Turkey I could not reach any Wikipedia at all. The block had come down on 29 April 2017 and stayed up until 15 January 2020, so that whole final chapter of a tiny governance dispute is something I read about afterward, from the other side of a national filter, on a site I was at the time reaching through a VPN or not reaching.

~ the redirect ~

MF-Warburg closed the second deletion proposal at 16:36 on 23 November 2017 with one line: the proposal is accepted, mo.wikipedia.org has been redirected to ro.wikipedia.org, and a Phabricator ticket number. That redirect is still in place. Request mo.wikipedia.org today and you get a 301 to the Romanian main page before any content loads, which means the API will not answer either, so the usual trick of asking a dead wiki how many articles it had does not work here. The content was folded back into the Romanian project it had been copied from in the first place.

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