Herero Wikipedia

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

~ the last words ~

Ask hz.wikipedia.org how many articles it holds and it answers zero. Not a small number, not a handful of stubs: the counter reads nothing at all, and the article namespace contains exactly one page, the Main Page. Six other language editions were shut in the same summer and every one of them finished with something left on the shelf. Choctaw kept six articles, Marshallese four, Muscogee one. Herero is the only one that came out at the bottom.

It was created on 29 August 2004 at 07:33 UTC. The Marshallese Wikipedia was created the same morning, four hours and change earlier, so this was a batch operation rather than a decision about Herero. The Foundation was opening editions in more or less any language that had a code, on the reasonable theory that speakers would turn up if the door was unlocked. Herero is a Bantu language of Namibia with something like 240,000 speakers, so the theory was not unreasonable in this case either.

Almost nobody turned up. The pages that did appear, around twenty of them, were made by one account, Kanon6917, and the closure discussion established something awkward about them: by his own statement, he did not speak Herero. The pages were mostly a single word placed next to an image. A defender of the wiki pointed out, fairly, that this still had some value, since it linked pictures to words and a beginner could learn from that. The counter-argument was that the words were not explained in Herero and so were not dictionary entries either.

There was one page with several consecutive sentences on it, titled Orupa. When somebody finally checked it, the sentences were in Zulu.

~ the record ~

~ the vote ~

Johannes Rohr opened the proposal on 22 January 2007, with a description of the wiki as clinically dead ever since its inception. He noted that the nearest thing to an article was a page called Ombeibela, which was a list of the books of the Bible, and that two others, Jesus Kristus and Oparadisa, consisted of an image and nothing else. He deleted those two himself before filing.

Support accumulated slowly over six months and the arguments divided into two kinds. One kind was about content, or the absence of it. The other was about maintenance: an editor reported that the only edits the wiki had received that year were vandalism and the stewards cleaning it up, and another noted a Polish IP address quietly expanding the Christianity stubs and adding links to a Jehovah's Witnesses site. Several voters made the same observation from different angles, which is that the wiki would never have been approved under the language policy that existed by 2007. It had been created before those rules were written.

On 20 July the closing administrator, MF-Warburg, announced he would wrap the discussion in four days rather than the customary seven, and wrote the parenthesis out loud: yes, four, not seven. The result was recorded on 24 July 2007 at 12:36 UTC. By 08:37 the next morning the surviving pages had been moved to the Wikimedia Incubator and the move was marked finished.

~ the incubator ~

Nothing was deleted, which is the part of Wikimedia's practice worth crediting. The pages went to the Incubator as Wp/hz and nineteen of them are still there, including the two Rohr had deleted on the way in. Reading the list is the clearest picture of what this wiki ever was: Ovaherero, Otjiherero, Angola, Ovapostele, Jesus Kristus, Oparadisa, Omboa. A handful of ethnonyms and a small body of Christian vocabulary, the predictable residue of a language whose main written circulation came through missionaries.

The wiki itself was never removed. hz.wikipedia.org answers today, locked, serving a Main Page and nothing behind it, recording 4,486 edits and 3,869 registered accounts against its zero articles. The account number is an artifact of unified login rather than a crowd that ever showed up.

One vote on the closure page is dated 26 January 2016. Somebody arrived at a nine-year-old discussion about a wiki that had been shut since 2007, read it, and added a line supporting closure. It is still sitting there in the numbered list, out of sequence by nine years, and nobody has tidied it away.

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