Ah, Nauruan, my guilty conscience.

When I first started writing in Wikipedia back in 2005, one of the first
things I wrote a lot about was the country of Nauru, because it is a small
country that it was relatively easy to cover "completely" in Wikipedia.

This led me to register on the Nauruan Wikipedia (this was back way before
we had SUL, single-user login) and start editing there; just small bits; it
was me and a few other well-intending people who were "Naurophiles" who
wanted to help grow the Nauruan Wikipedia; the Wikipedia had been created
in December 2003, when everything with an ISO 639-1 code got a project, so
before the language committee existed and the language proposal policy came
into existence, and the wiki at the time I started was almost empty.

Anyways, me and a few other people were creating a few articles based on
the very scarce resources we had about the Nauruan language at the time –
primarily, if I remember correctly, a digitized German-Nauruan dictionary
from the late 1800s or early 1900s, and extremely little knowledge – if any
– about the language's grammar. We were well-intentioned, only wanting to
"help" Nauruans by building some basic stuff for later, but the results
were extremely bad, to put it bluntly.

Now, when I check Special:Random on the Nauruan Wikipedia, I see that
almost all geographical articles (which most articles are) follow the same
pattern that I and the other well-meaners used back in 2005: "(subject)
wono (object) ian (country)". I have no idea if this is even correct
Nauruan, and in any case, if almost all articles are "X is a Y in Z", that
is not very informative. I ceased being active in the Nauruan Wikipedia in
2006, but I have checked in from time to time, and have seen no sign of any
native speakers of Nauruan being active – and why would they, if the
quality is at the current level?

So all in all, I am in favour of closing it and moving it "back" to the
Incubator.

lør. 1. apr. 2023 kl. 18:20 skrev MF-Warburg <[email protected]>:

> With one closing proposal (Akan Wikipedia) out of the way, I thought it
> would be a good moment to tackle the rest of them as well. So, I invite
> your comments (one mail will follow for each request):
>
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Nauruan_Wikipedia
> https://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bwiema_peij
>
> The content of this project is extremely limited. Using Special:Random
> dozens of times, I found not a single page that had more than one sentence
> of content (that isn't a long quotation in a different language, e.g. of
> national anthem texts). I would say this could be a justification to say
> "the project is inactive + there is an absence of content", so it could be
> closed. The discussion on the page is the usual mixture of "give it a
> chance" and "it's not useful, close it down". There have also been some
> concerns raised about the quality of the content. So I would lean towards
> approving closure.
>
>
>
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>


-- 
mvh
Jon Harald Søby
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