Akan Wikipedia

» see ak.wikipedia.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Wikimedia Foundation handed out language codes fast in the middle of the 2000s, and ak was one of them. The oldest edit still sitting on Akan Wikipedia is dated 6 August 2004 and was made by a Japanese volunteer who was opening small wikis in bulk that summer. Nobody checked whether the code pointed at a language somebody could actually write a sentence in.

The code points at a family. Akan is the name of a people in Ghana and of the speech varieties they use, Twi and Fante among them, so anybody writing on that wiki was writing in one of them under a label that covered all of them. Twi had a wiki of its own. So the ak site spent nearly two decades accumulating articles that belonged next door, and every new Ghanaian editor had to work out which of the two addresses was the real one before they could start.

On 21 April 2022 a Ghanaian editor, Robertjamal12, filed a closure proposal on Meta arguing that the content was the same as the Twi wiki's and that the entire article set, fewer than 600 pages, could be moved by hand. The Language Committee took it, the Board of Trustees did not object, and on 1 April 2023 the decision was recorded. The deletions ran through April and finished on 15 May 2023.

~ the case file ~

~ the deletion log ~

The log is public and it reads like a demolition schedule. A handful of pages went through the winter of 2023, then 65 on 1 April and 204 on the 4th, with another 35 cleared on the two days between. After a pause, 38 more on 3 May and a final 90 on 15 May. That last day is the one this grave uses, because it is the day the content namespace was emptied.

The site's own statistics API will tell you where that left it: 1,709 pages, 29,902 edits, 13,932 registered accounts, one administrator, and zero articles. A wiki with fourteen thousand registered users and nothing to read is a strange object to leave lying on the public internet, and yet ak.wikipedia.org still answers, still rendering a main page with a search box over nothing.

~ closed from the inside ~

What makes this one unusual is who asked. Wikipedia editions have been closed before by people annoyed at them, the Klingon one most famously, and those closures read as somebody else's judgment landing on a community. Here the request came from the Ghanaian editors themselves, the announcement was co-written by two of them on Wikimedia's own blog, and it was titled not a goodbye but a hello: Fante was approved for a wiki of its own and the Twi wiki got the articles.

The other way for a Wikipedia to go dark is the one that happened where I live. Turkish Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey from 29 April 2017 until 15 January 2020, and for nearly three years reaching it from home meant routing around the block, while the encyclopedia itself stayed perfectly healthy and simply could not be seen from here. Akan Wikipedia was the reverse case: never blocked anywhere, reachable from everywhere, and empty on purpose.

Closing the wiki was the small part. On 2 April 2023 Amir Aharoni filed a Phabricator task to pull Akan support out of MediaWiki and off the Wikimedia servers, on the same grounds: ak is a macrolanguage code and the software should be pointing people at tw and fat instead. That task was still collecting subtasks three years later, because a language code that has been live since 2004 ends up wired into translation interfaces and label fields nobody remembers exist.

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