Here's the story of İQTElif as i understand it. I did this bit of research myself. Please correct me if i'm wrong.
Reşat Sabiq and Ultranet are most probably the same person. (Reşat is also spelled Resat, Reshat, and with some other variations of ş because of encoding troubles.)
He is trying quite hard to make Free Software programs, such as glibc, Mozilla, KDE, Ubuntu etc., accept İQTElif as the standard way of localization for Tatar, but without major success. A Mozilla add-on for localizing Firefox to İQTElif Tatar is available, but there are no statistics on its usage. It looks like he also tried to submit İQTElif as an IETF standard, but it was rejected by Michael Everson, the guru of fonts and Unicode.
The alphabet looks OK, as far as i understand the Tatar language. Ultranet also has a good practical goal of consistency with other Turkic languages, although i think that he gets a bit over the top when drawing parallels between Kazan Tatars and Crimea Tatars - it is not really the same nation, because Russians used to call many different Turkic peoples "Tatars" (the poet Mikhail Lermontov was said to be studying "the Tatar language", while he was actually studying Azeri).
Ultranet claims that "Tatars are using İQTElif", but he failed to provide verifiable sources for it.
Here's a useful Google search string: "iqtelif -resat -reshat -Reþat -reşat -sabiq -ultranet". Also, note that "tatar.iqtelif.i18n at gmail.com" and "info at ultranet.tv" are probably Ultranet's emails.
Other Ultranet's claims are centered around censorship and political opposition to Latinization of the Tatar language. He tries to prove it by saying that different Russian and Soviet political regimes suppressed the Tatar language and made it change its alphabet many times. This is not related to the case of deleting the Wikipedia article about İQTElif. Other modern ways of writing Tatar, such as Zamanalif and Inalif don't have any official recognition from the government of Russia, but they are actually used by at least some people that write Tatar on the Internet, so they deserve to be mentioned on Wikipedia. İQTElif, on the other hand, seems to be used only on websites which have something to do with Ultranet - Yahoo and Google groups and archives of mailing lists about software localization.
Ultranet did provide two links to Turkish Ministry of Culture:
- http://www.kultur.gov.tr/gaspirali/default.asp?lehce_ID=7&strDil=English
- http://www.kultur.gov.tr/tr/dosyagoster.aspx?dil=1&belgeanah=109902&dosyaisim=emirhaneniki.pdf
However, i don't understand Turkish well enough, so i don't see how these websites can be considered verifiable sources for the usage of İQTElif. Any help from speakers of Turkish and Tatar will be appreciated for this matter. --Amir E. Aharoni 10:18, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Links to other discussions on the matter:
- Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2007 July 29#İQTElif
- Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/İQTElif
- ru:Обсуждение:Татарский алфавит#İQTElif - ОРИСС? - in Russian --Amir E. Aharoni 10:22, 30 July 2007 (UTC)