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 <mfwarburg@googlemail.com>:
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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Jon Harald Søby