[Wiktionary-l] Klingon Wiktionary closed

[Brion Vibber]

Elisabeth Anderl wrote:
> What legitimate purpose to Wikimedia's mission do serve then Esperanto, 
> Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, etc. Wiktionaries?
> You might want to lock all invented languages then.

Of the above, Esperanto has the best claim since it's actually used "in
the wild", with real speakers, including native speakers, and has over a
century of literature, music, novels, magazines, letters, plays, and
films to draw from as a corpus.

As for the others, long-established policy has generally been to allow
(especially older) languages originally created as general-purpose
auxiliary languages, while disallowing those constructed languages
created primarily for use in fictional works or hobby purposes.

Klingon is a part of a fictional universe; compare it to Tolkein's
Sindarin and Quenya (although it is a bit more developed), not to Esperanto.

The Klingon Wikipedia was closed on that basis after quite a bit of
debate, a decision finally being made by Jimmy's fiat; had we been aware
there was a stub Klingon Wiktionary it would have been closed at the
same time, but it escaped notice. (Toki pona was also closed some time
ago amid debate on where in the auxlang-conlang continuum it lies,
despite my support for it. Klingon is not alone.)

Now personally, I would be happy to let the language committee or
whoever's supposed to be deciding these things these days make a final
decision. I'd also be happy to pull the block during such an 'appeal'.

For now, I'm just applying the existing policy to something which got
forgotten.

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)