The Toki Pona language was constructed by Sonja Kisa. Sonja Kisa is also
User:Sonjaaa and the primary instigator of the Toki Pona Wikipedia. Toki
Pona is not an officially recognized language anywhere. Now the Toki Pona
Wikipedia is effectively not an encyclopedia, but a language development
wiki for the TP language.
So, where do we stop? A few years ago I scribbled down the beginnings of
an artificial language somewhere. Can I have my own Wikipedia, too? Yeah,
it's not really complete, but I can develop it as I go along, right? There
are 133 Google hits on Sonja Kisa's name. There are 13,100 hits on my
name. Heck, there are only 894 hits on "Toki Pona" and Google thinks I
misspelled "Toki Ona" (whatever that is). I bet I could push an artificial
language I create to 5,000 hits within a couple of months.
I realize that Brion is a fan of languages, and since he sets up those
wikis he pretty much decides what is acceptable. Shouldn't those languages
undergo some basic public approval process first, though, so that we can
determine whether there is really any value in creating them? In my
opinion, Wikipedia should not be a promotional vehicle for other people's
pet projects.
To me, it matters not whether a language is artificial or whether it has
naturally developed over hundreds of years. It does matter, however, how
many speakers there are, and if we can realistically create a complete and
accurate encyclopedia with that number of speakers. I'd say a minimum of
10,000 active speakers is a requirement for creating an encyclopedia.
Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that requirement.
But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of
interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation
as a serious project. When a professional historian reads our article
about the Holocaust, and there's a "Klingon" link right next to Japanese,
that might be seriously off-putting. Especially if there's also Tolkien's
Elvish, and maybe some language from the Buck Rogers universe. I'm sure
the furries also have their own languages.
IMHO this puts us into a similar realm as the micronations, of which there
are also thousands. Creating Wikipedias for all these unused languages is
like formally acknowledging them. Furthermore, this will bleed into all
other Wikimedia projects.
I'd prefer it if these languages were developed on separate wikis, until
they have a meaningful number of active speakers. And I also think the
decision whether to start a particular language should be made by the
community.
Regards,
Erik