Re NOLLM, I started the discussion and draft but didn’t really make it, I probably came up with like 1/3, Chaotic Enby 1/3, and others (lots of, it was discussed on the draft's talk page as well as at WT:AIC) 1/3. Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 10:43, 21 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

...Why did we let there be four separate Wikipedias for one language again? Whoop whoop pull up ^{♀️ Bitching Betty 🏳️‍⚧️ Averted crashes ⚧️} 12:43, 21 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Or six for German, or two for Norwegian? There's an old saying (from the Bronx) that a language is a dialect that has certain distinct features. It has its own army, king, and flag, but perhaps nowadays we should say it has its own army, president, and Wikipedia. Some of those dialects of Serbo-Croatian do have their own president and army, and so they think they have a right to their own Wikipedia, too. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:05, 21 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• Editors banned for political bias? That should send a few hundred English Wikipedia editors running for the hills. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:12, 21 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  In absence of WMF talking, rumors do... And it seems that it was indeed politically motivated ban. Those banned seems to be deemed as not supporting established narrative in some ongoing conflicts. Ђидо (talk) 16:00, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't entirely understand why the case of Croatian Wikipedia is brought up repeatedly in the article. Serbian and Croatian Wikipedia are two completely distinct communities. If it's intended as a comparison, it is not particularly relevant because while the motivation in both cases is the same (nationalist historical revisionism), the actual mechanisms were apparently different (Croatian WP was subject to objective manipulation, sockpuppetry, and coordination of the nationalist admins; nothing of that sort is being directly ascribed to Serbian admins).

It is only semi-correct to say that Serbian language and Serbian WP are written in Cyrillic. Serbian today is more frequently written in Latin script (same as that of Croatian), and sr.WP can be switched to display all text in Latin as well, since the conversion between the two scripts is trivial. The political and linguistic tensions between the four nations predate the 1990s. Even if the breakup of Yugoslavia had been peaceful I'd doubt the communities would be willing to create one single BCMS Wikipedia.

The actual publicly available information about these bans is oddly lacking, I don't get the impression WMF is being adequately transparent about this move. And Serbian editors are up in the arms because their admin team has been practically decapitated with no prior public warning.

— Phazd (talk|contribs) 19:03, 21 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I also thought the focus on the history of the Croatian debacle was a bit off, but on the other hand they are both pretty niche, so it stands to reason that giving even an overly broad context is still beneficial to the English-speaking community, for the readers to be able to better understand the extents of abuse Wikipedia can be subjected to.

As it happens, I encountered user Sadko before on en:, and I am entirely unsurprised that others also thought their level of biased editing was beyond the pale. I previously complained about how their WP:ARBMAC topic ban on en: was lifted. While the apparent lack of transparency is odd, that part still sounds like it would be a good thing overall. --Joy (talk) 12:21, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That's entirely possible and wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I rarely ventured onto sr.wiki, when I did I used to see some really bad POV content, and I've also come across some extremely subpar articles on en.wiki that turned out to be translations from sr., some of which I've tried to fix on en. at least. But if we stick to the comparisons to hr.wiki: the banning of Kubura and other manipulators from hr.wiki was, from what it seems to me now (IIRC I wasn't active on any wiki project at the time and only read about it in the media), a fairly clear and transparent process. This case is different - but why? — Phazd (talk|contribs) 15:05, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect because they cannot provide consistent and convincing arguments for the ban.Ђидо (talk) 15:58, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Croatian Wikipedia case was brought up as a false equivalence, to dress up and steer people opinions certain way. Ђидо (talk) 16:01, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Would you mind even pretending to WP:AGF instead of asserting that the volunteers writing the Signpost are evil manipulators of public opinion in cahoots with a shadowy WMF cabal? Seriously, this is embarrassing. Choucas0 🐦‍⬛ 17:37, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I saw these conspiratorial comments and it seemed surprising. Then I went to check the history, and quickly found this 2022 interaction where they were apparently promoting some weird nationalist talking point. We are pretty lenient with WP:ARBMAC enforcement. --Joy (talk) 19:08, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

While a lot of Serbs do use Latin in everyday life, Serbian Wikipedia is primarily written in Cyrillic. While authoring articles in Latin is allowed, there is probably around 10% of them. Vast majority of articles are in Cyrillic. Also, it should be noted that, although Cyrillic is equal script choice for old Serbo-Croatian, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia does not allow authoring articles in Cyrillic (Same with Bosnian Wikipedia, which, theoretically, should support Cyrillic as supported script for Bosnian language). Ђидо (talk) 16:04, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• >>The Signpost has no editorial capacity to interview, explore, read on-wiki discussions, or further investigate. ///// Oh, that's just bullshit. OF COURSE you have the "capacity to interview, explore, read on-wiki discussions, or further investigate." Carrite (talk) 21:35, 21 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• You may not be aware, but the few Signpost editors we have are neither professional journalists, full-time Signpost writers, nor fluent in Serbian/Croatian/Serbo-Croatian. If you are so confident that it's easy to do and they're just refusing to do so, feel free to prove everyone wrong by doing so yourself. --PresN 06:21, 22 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah, but the article cites an opinion of anonymous user saying that the global bans are "a huge success for freedom of knowledge and opinion". Wouldn't be better to cite opinions of other users, discussions on Serbian, Russian Wikipedias so that the readers would see bigger, more balanced picture. Otheriwse there seems to be a certain narrative that article tries to convey. Also, there is Google Translate.

  For instance, one Serbian Wiki admin resigned as the result of this ban. Why would that happen? BilboBeggins (talk) 15:37, 22 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Comment: Actually, two atm. --نوفاك اتشمان (talk) 17:13, 22 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• The CIA factbook is gone? Meh. I have a printed copy of the 2018-2019 edition and had fun browsing it randomly. That it came from an intelligence agency made it extra cool; checking the description of some countries with the authors' conflicts of interest in mind was also fun. I have a feeling it might come back into publication someday after 2029. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:52, 21 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• This intervention by WMF into work of a Wikipedian community is highly concerning. Serbian community is shocked. Members of others communities also do not like this development. But as a matter of fact, what Wikipedians can actually do about? It seems that not much, if anything at all. "however, the banning process itself does not automatically indicate any kind of guilt or wrongdoing" - ok, but why then the measures are applied to editors, which are very severe, even strongest possible? We as community don't have any influence, let alone control, on the process. It is stirking that WMF can just wipe out almost entire leadership of a project without having to answer about anything. This is not transparent. BilboBeggins (talk) 15:31, 22 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• As long as we will have four different BCMS editions of Wikipedia, each with only a dozen administrators, a few hundreds active users, for a total of less than 20 million native speakers, we will keep running into major issues. All these projects are going to stay vulnerable to capture, suffer from low editor activity and inevitable NPOV issues on the topics that matter most to their readers. The only technical hurdle was the Cyrillic/Latin scripts divide, and that has been solved already with the implementation of the convertor on sh and srwiki. I know it goes against principles of project autonomy and local decision-making, but it is a band-aid that needs to be ripped, otherwise the underlying wound will continue to fester with predictable results. We owe that to the WMF people and project-wide volunteers who keep having to clean up the mess, to local editors whose efforts are being wasted by all this duplication, and above all to BCMS readers who deserve the best Wikipedia possible in their language. Choucas0 🐦‍⬛ 14:11, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  @Choucas0 You're ignoring some technical and many non-technical problems here, which I could write a whole essay about... but I suppose many talk pages have already been littered with this sort of stuff anyway so I'll spare us of repeating it all. Since you have no "skin in the game" here, since you're not from any of these countries, or know the language(s), or have contributed to any of the four BCMS Wikipedias, I find this sort of calling for grand solutions regardless of the local communities' and nations' opinions (be they for or against merging) to be deeply arrogant. "You are being saved, do not resist". It's also disturbing how you worry about the poor WMF that has to "keep" cleaning up the "mess" (but how many times have WMF and non-local volunteers have actually intervened in BCMS Wikipedias' workings?), but say nothing about the chaos that the Serbian volunteer community has been thrown into by this action. As for the supposedly dangerously low editorship and readership, how are individual BCMS wikis in any worse position than e.g. Slovene or Macedonian or Breton or Ossetian Wikipedias, which are even smaller? Shouldn't those Macedonians just join the Bulgarian WP, Ossetians can switch to Russian, etc.? — Phazd (talk|contribs) 16:26, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I would be actually interested in reading such an essay, for what it is worth. You might find my position arrogant, but you are also presuming a lot of things about what I may mean or think, and not really what I wrote. For starters, we all have skin in the game, as we are all part of the same movement, not independent entities. Second, I find the distinction you make between local communities' and nations' opinion to be telling: while the first one should be paramount until intractable problems needing project-wide involvement appear (like in this case), the second is completely irrelevant. The entire point of organizing our communities around languages and not nations is because of the unifying force of a common tongue, as opposed to the myriad carefully maintained antagonisms of nationalism. Besides, at no point did I express satisfaction for srwiki being thrown into disarray by this sudden action. I do in fact think medium and small projects should be getting much more support, not less, even when very little editing activity is recorded; I also did not mention low readership, by the way. My point however is not about the ultimate size of the BCMS language base, but obviously the fractionation of the editor communities along national lines. Maybe it would make sense for mkwiki and bgwiki to merge, I do not have an opinion on that at this time. Bringing up Slovene, Breton or Ossetian though is just downright silly. Please try to engage with what I wrote on its own instead of ascribing some sort of imaginary anti-small wikis opinion to me. Choucas0 🐦‍⬛ 22:09, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  @Choucas0 Not quite an essay, but perhaps the most important point: the linguistic, spelling and terminological differences between Serbian and Croatian that would have to be resolved to create a functional common BCMS WP would require more careful and successful work than anything state-backed Croatian and Serbian linguists have done in the entire previous century in their repeated efforts to create a fully unified language. (The situation is now further complicated by the developments in Montenegrin standard.) The differences between the standards do not amount just to different easily convertible alphabets.

  "the second is completely irrelevant" — It is very relevant. Full stop. All these speakers (i.e. readers) do not exist outside of their nations and their cultures, and ignoring the readers' identity (including their needs, knowledge and everything about the contexts they're living in) is to actually ignore the readers themselves. You seem to view this from some western post-national liberal viewpoint. The region in question however is not wholly western, and neither is it post-national nor very liberal. Language is not just an agnostic vehicle of communication here (it's not agnostic anywhere, of course, but the non-neutrality of language is particularly evident in the case of BCMS).

  More explicitly, an example: the grammatical future tense is formed like this in Croatian: past će ('it will fall'). In Serbian it is pašće. Each of these forms has been implicitly or explicitly unacceptable in the other variant since language standardisation took off in the 19th century. No attempts at unification have ever been successful (there have been two coordinated attempts, one in 1920s the other in 1950s/1960s), there's no neutral common option here. There's a number of other differences of this sort, not to mention the differences in vocabulary. How is this to be resolved now? Is WMF going to develop some powerful and reliable intra-BCMS translation tool that would translate each page from one variant to the other? Or is each page going to be manually checked by editors of each variety to affirm it follows each norm? Or is the wiki going to serve texts to readers in forms that are alien to them? (Admittedly as a Croat I find hr.wiki's purist and sometimes grotesque language, inherited from the era of nationalist admins, to be alien as well, but at least I know for sure how to correct it.)

  "instead of ascribing some sort of imaginary anti-small wikis opinion to me" — You wrote: "each with only a dozen administrators, a few hundreds active users, for a total of less than 20 million native speakers, we will keep running into major issues". I don't know how to read this as anything other than being against small wikis, because all the problems you list here apply to small wikis.

  "Besides, at no point did I express satisfaction for srwiki being thrown into disarray by this sudden action." — In the comment section about an event that may cause extensive difficulties for the project, where two other commenters have already expressed worry about the that possibility, you spoke only of some alleged pointless/wasteful effort by "WMF people and project-wide volunteers" in fixing the problems of BCMS wikis. The potential harm to Serbian WP is much more relevant in this comment section, I'd say, and shifting the topic over to WMF's and other volunteers' problems does make it look (at least to me) like you don't think sr.wiki is now facing problems worth mentioning. What also irks me here is the suggestion that WMF and some volunteers have invested much work through time "fixing" something about BCMS wikis – because I do not get the impression they've done a whole lot to fix anything here. That's why I asked: "but how many times have WMF and non-local volunteers have actually intervened in BCMS Wikipedias' workings?", to make sure I'm not missing anything.

  (I wondered if you're from the US. I checked, and as far as I understand you're from France, which makes your viewpoint make even more sense. If you're willing to spend some substantial time on this matter, I would recommend Paul Garde's Le discours balkanique, which was written in part exactly to explain the "Germanic" model of national identity to the French public and why it's relevant and how it has operated in the Balkan region, including the realm of language politics.)

  — Phazd (talk|contribs) 23:37, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  No comment on anything else, but why couldn't something like MOS:ENGVAR work for the specific problem of different varieties. (specifically MOS:TIES and MOS:RETAIN)? InfernoHues (talk) 15:12, 24 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  For topics relevant primarily to just one of the nations it would, but surely not for the countless international topics, or those that involve two or more nations in question (is it "Homeland War" or "War in Croatia"?). Already the spelling of the names of international topics is a possible point of contention: Croats retain the original speling from languages with the Latin alphabet, as <George Bush>, whereas Serbs transcribe it all, as <Džordž Buš> or <Џорџ Буш> (and obviously <George Bush> can't be converted into Cyrillic with the existing converter used on sr.wiki). I don't know if there has ever been a serious thought-out solution to this, and anything I can come up with right now is practically untenable. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 16:06, 24 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Normally, when there aren't ties to a specific English variety, or ties to multiple, the variety that was in use when the page was created is used. I can see how that would cause problems in for BCMS though, as varieties seem more politicized there. That solution also wouldn't work if the wikis were to hypothetically merge, as there wouldn't be an "original" variety used for an article. InfernoHues (talk) 16:19, 24 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  @Phazd You must admit though that the situation in which we have both sh.wiki on one side and sr.wiki, hr.wiki, ecc on the other is unique in the entire WMF-world... All the problems that you are mentioning have apparently already been solved on sh.wiki... I don't remember any other situation in which we have a Wikipedia in a language and then other Wikipedias in the different national varieties of the same language, we usually group them in a single Wikipedia edition (besides English, other examples of pluri-centric Wikipedias are the German, the Spanish and the Portugues Wikipedias). The only other possible example that I can remember is the Moldovan Wikipedia (written in cyrillic), that was closed by WMF long ago.

  I agree with you though that the Western Balkan Wikipedias are probably a bit singled out, there are a lot of other Wikipedias with the same problems. --Friniate ✉ 08:54, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  sh wiki didn't solve these problems, it seems to have largely ignored them. At the same time, most readers from these regions seem to ignore sh wiki, so that's not a real solution. --Joy (talk) 14:13, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  The problems haven't been solved on sh.wiki. It's a mix of solutions from different languages/standards, developed by the editors but not acceptable according to any of the four norms that the readers actually use, and as Joy points out it's failed to reach its supposed audience (see the stats on List of Wikipedias, assuming that the ratio of editors:readers is roughly the same across different projects; I would also expect the ratio of national affiliation of the editors to be unrepresentative of the real-world demographics of the four countries). The situation may be unique, but the solution shouldn't be to hammer the userbase into a single common wiki just to make it follow the usual organisational pattern, as if that's a virtue in itself. Both BCMS and English are polycentric languages, but their sociolinguistic situations are different, and that has to be accepted and worked out before external intervention takes place. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 15:53, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Comment: Indeed. They even collectively declined to add and use the most recent ex-Yu language standard. So much from language diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by them. :/ --نوفاك اتشمان (talk) 19:03, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  @نوفاك اتشمان What exactly do you mean by "the most recent ex-Yu standard"? After the rejection of the Novi Sad Agreement by Croatian linguists in 1971 (effectively the breakup took place already in 1967) there was no more collaboration on language standardisation, and I doubt the standard language manuals written before that point would be enough for today's needs... — Phazd (talk|contribs) 19:46, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Comment: @Phazd: Ah, I'm sorry, as I mean a modern standard variety there above. ^ --نوفاك اتشمان (talk) 21:17, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  It's not that easy, and when it comes to BCMS, foreign people are usually oversimplifying it, disregarding the fact that the languages also substantially differ when it comes to sciences (mathematical, physical and chemical nomenclature), foreign words (Washington vs Vašington), some important grammatical structures. If kids learned something in Serbian, they would fail their school exams in Croatia. People are free to edit any of the four Wikipedias, and some do collaborate cross-wiki, but somehow most choose to edit in their native language, and least people use Wikipedia in the so-called Serbo-Croatian language, because it feels - more than ever - like some hybrid language that nobody is forced to learn any more and nobody really speaks. But then again, there are a bunch of German Wikipedias, two Norwegian, two Belarus, and nobody asks why. Or why didn't the Ukrainian and Russian Wikipedias unite because those are, according to a person in Moscow, one people and one language.~2026-25056-94 (talk) 16:24, 24 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think they should be merged. I'm just saying that language differences aren't the reason they shouldn't be merged. From my understanding BCMS languages are a lot more mutually intelligible than the examples you gave (except Norwegian maybe). InfernoHues (talk) 17:04, 24 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  The Norwegian example is different though, we have two Wikipedias written in two different national varieties, but we don't have also a third Wikipedia written in a common standard between the two varieties.

  Also the German case it's different, they are dialects, not national standards of the same language. An analogy would be having different Wikipedias for the Swiss German and the standard German... --Friniate ✉ 09:03, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  "I know it goes against principles of project autonomy and local decision-making, but it is a band-aid that needs to be ripped, otherwise the underlying wound will continue to fester with predictable results" How do you know that this inervention and abandonement of principles is actually "for greater good"? BilboBeggins (talk) 21:22, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Your question is interesting, because despite most of your message accurately quoting me, your second quote about me supposedly claiming what is happening here is for greater good is nowhere to be found in my comment. So you will forgive me for not engaging with this clumsy strawman, as I purposefully did not actually opine on the blocks on srwiki in my comment. Choucas0 🐦‍⬛ 21:39, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  But then going against principles of project autonomy is not justified. BilboBeggins (talk) 21:55, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  You're right, it would be better if it were another planet with a single Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian Wikipedia. But the planet is what it is, and the Serbian editors were not told anything about the reasons or intentions behind the blockage. In the case of the Arabic, Chinese and Croatian sections, political motives were mentioned, but even that was not mentioned here, which makes one think about confidentiality, but what confidential could concern six people at the same time? Demetrius Talpa (talk) 23:31, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  The only technical hurdle was the Cyrillic/Latin scripts divide, and that has been solved already with the implementation of the convertor on sh and srwiki. The script is one thing, but I don't see that any technical solutions exist there for using different standards. I don't know that there can be a social solution like WP:ENGVAR (treating them as just a matter of style). That just won't fly. --Joy (talk) 12:25, 25 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Seriously, this is worrisome. From https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0:Open_Letter_to_Wikimedia_Foundation

• Climate of Fear and Uncertainty: Because the local community does not know the exact nature of the policy violations (e.g., whether they were related to off-wiki harassment, on-wiki content manipulation, or sockpuppetry), many good-faith editors are now afraid to edit complex, historical, or geopolitical articles. There is a paralyzing fear that making a good-faith mistake or holding a specific editorial stance might result in a sudden Global Ban without warning.
• Erosion of Internal Trust: The lack of a visible local dispute resolution process preceding these bans has led to rampant speculation, paranoia, and internal accusations among remaining users regarding who might have "reported" whom. This toxic atmosphere is directly harming our ability to collaborate in a civil, assumption-of-good-faith (AGF) environment.

_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:02, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If you click the history link, you'll see that most of that was written by user Ђидо, who's been complaining in the above section, too, but they're far from a model editor. --Joy (talk) 07:09, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I prefer to discuss content (arguments), not editor. I don't know that user, I don't edit that wiki, but the concerns articulated here are sound. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:45, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

But the discussion isn't about content, rather it's about user bans. If we're not supposed to discuss users when discussing user bans, I think it's going to be a very short discussion :D --Joy (talk) 11:58, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Any discussion of users should start with public case evaluation or explanation. What are we supposed to discuss when the court gives us no rationale? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:06, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I went to check how fast they were with the Kubura global ban - it happened in late 2020, and the public report was published in the summer of 2021. In general, we tolerated that controversy since about 2013. I think we can probably be patient for some time less than seven months or seven years to get to hear the full story about these global bans in turn. --Joy (talk) 13:33, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Still, the problems with Kubura and hr.wiki were being documented already back in 2013, anyone can still read those complaints and reports (IIRC they're on Meta). So, when they finally happened, the bans in 2020 probably didn't need much additional explanation, surey nobody was surprised by the actions. In this case, on the other hand, the best we have is just the article from Vreme. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 17:58, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Joy, you could also tag me when talking about me, as a common courtesy. Setting aside that I do agree with the letter overall, and did sign it, I was not author of it, I merely did a technical move to extract it to a separate page.

I would like you to address this accusation: "they're far from a model editor"...

Ђидо (talk) 02:18, 2 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]