Well, my point of view hasn't drastically changed since I defended the creation of a Wikipedia in Lingua Franca Nova, namely that the main criterion for creating or not creating a new project should be the question whether it is viable. From that point of view I'd say: go for it!

However, I can't deny having some second thoughts here. You might want to take a look at the page history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotava.

Thing is, sometime in the second half of the 2000s, Kotava suddenly appeared out of nothing. Nobody in the conlang community had ever heard of it. Yet, they immediately started making claims about some 50 fluent speakers, which for a constructed language is quite a lot and, to be quite honest, rather improbable. Those 50 speakers were also the ticket for Kotava to obtain an ISO 639-3 code, and subsequently, this ISO code became the ticket for Wikipedia articles about Kotava.

You may want to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotava, and especially also at its page history. All substantial contributions to the article were made by one-issue accounts with an obvious interest in promoting the language. The main problem, however, is the total lack of independent, reliable sources about language. This resulted in no less than three deletions, and for the record, the current version of the page is practically identical to the 2013 version, which was changed into a redirect for that very reason. The discussions that followed were rather unpleasant, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kotava_(3rd_nomination), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kotava and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:IJzeren_Jan#Kotava_(2).

In short: there is practically no verifiable information about the language, its creator, its speakers, etc. at all. Therefore, we can't exclude the possibility that it is just the hobby project of four of five people, who also happen to be the only people who can conform whether the content of the Incubator project is valid Kotava or not. From that point of view, a checkuser might not be a bad idea before validating anything.

That said, Kotava indeed has an impressive text corpus. Enough to warrant the creation of a Kotava Wikipedia, I believe.

Cheers,

Jan van Steenbergen

Op do 26 sep. 2019 om 23:48 schreef Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com>:

Hi all,

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Kotava Wikipedia. Kotava is a conlang created in 1978, mainly known in French-speaking countries (according to the English Wikipedia). They have a very active test wiki in Incubator, with more than 3,000 articles, which makes it bigger than the Novial Wikipedia (which we approved in 2008) and about the same size as the Lingua Franca Nova (LFN) Wikipedia (which we approved in 2017). There are several active users, and sustained activity for many months.

Does anyone have reasons for why we should not approve this project?

--
mvh
Jon Harald Søby
_______________________________________________
Langcom mailing list
Langcom@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom