Marshallese Wikipedia

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

~ the last words ~

Marshallese is the language of the Marshall Islands, and in August 2004 it got a Wikipedia. The first edit landed on 29 August 2004 at 03:33 UTC, from an anonymous address, on the Main Page. The second one came seventeen days later from a different anonymous address, and the whole of its edit summary was "ebon = Marshallese." That is the founding record of the project: two strangers, no accounts between them.

I was at university in those years on a TTNet connection, and the comparison I keep reaching for is the Turkish Wikipedia, which in 2004 was also small enough to read in an afternoon. It survived. Nobody planned that better; Turkish simply had speakers who were already online in large numbers. That is the whole variable, and the Marshall Islands did not have it.

On 21 August 2007 an editor named Ahoerstemeier opened a closure proposal on Meta-Wiki and described what was actually there: "The only activity at the Marshallese wikipedia is the index.php spambot. Just one real article, one translated prayer, two articles with only interwiki links and an image." Every supporting vote after that was a link to Special:Recentchanges or Special:Allpages, which is to say the evidence was the absence of evidence.

The voting ran for eight months and finished thirteen to five. A steward signing as VasilievVV closed it on 4 May 2008 at 20:13 UTC. The result was not a freeze but a deletion: move the content to the Incubator, delete the pages, close the database to editing. The opposing voters had asked for exactly the Incubator move, so in the end they got the half of it they wanted.

~ the record ~

~ a spambot and a prayer ~

The inventory is the part I cannot stop reading. One real article and one translated prayer, plus two pages holding nothing but links to other languages. Against that, an automated script hitting index.php often enough to be the single most active participant in the project, and a human editor named Dresib who turned up on 14 April 2008 to report that he had "just reverted lots of anti-semitic spam" and to observe that the wiki "seems to get more attention from spammers and vandals than from Marshallese speakers."

One supporter went further out than anybody asked him to. On 24 September 2007, Jose77 voted to close on the grounds that "a Google search shows no active Web sites in a .mh domain other than the single-page registry site." He had not checked the wiki. He had checked the entire country's top-level domain, found one page, and reported back.

~ seven days became four months ~

On 3 January 2008 an editor named Cometstyles wrote: "I propose to close this discussion within 7 days from now as per lack of real edits/spam/vandalism, if there are no objections." The discussion closed on 4 May 2008. The seven days ran to four months and a day, and nothing in the record explains the gap, because nothing happened in it. Two more votes arrived in that whole stretch.

Against the arithmetic, Chabi had filed the only oppose that argued from the islands rather than from the statistics page: "If the people that speak this languge cannot use a computer, let them more time. I've seen a person working there." Eighteen years later mh.wikipedia.org still resolves, still serves a Main Page, and the API will tell you it holds 207 pages, 4 articles, 4,215 edits and 580 words of article text across 2,253 registered accounts, exactly one of which is active. The Incubator draft that was supposed to grow into the replacement is 119 bytes and was last touched in October 2022.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »