Mark Williamson wrote:
- An academic excersise?
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_3_110/ai_73064217/pg_1 <- Gothic was last heard in the Crimea by outsiders between the 1780s and 1790s, according to the page (and if travellers passing through still heard it in the 1780s, it probably survived in remote areas until the 1800s or 1810s). As is normal with language death, descendants of the last native speakers undoubtedly knew some of the language, less with each generation, until perhaps the 1850s or 1870s (though it could hardly be declared fluency most likely), and I would not be surprised if there are still a couple of hundred Gothic words in use by their descendants today in Tatar/Ukrainian/Russian/whatever language it is they speak now.
I can't speak for everyone here (obviously), but IMO there's nothing wrong with promoting a Gothic revival of course, just a concern that a Gothic Wikipedia is not currently the best way to do it. It seems it is not actually spoken by anyone fluently, or used in day-to-day communication, which is the sort of thing Wikipedias are for (for looking up encyclopedia-type facts). It is apparently an interesting language, with some amount of information available and a community of people interested in it, which would make it a good candidate for hosting the extant historical texts in wikisource, and developing a working dictionary of the language in a Gothic Wiktionary. If that were done, and if people started to use the language, then the case for a Gothic Wikipedia would be much stronger. It's just odd for there to be an encyclopedia for a language in which there is apparently no contemporary writing and no good dictionary.
-Mark