Norfuk Wikipedia

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

~ the eulogy ~

Wikipedia runs an edition for every language that can field a community, and the policy has always been generous about what counts as a language. Norfuk got its edition under the code pih, a shared code covering Norfuk and Pitkern, which are the closely related creoles of Norfolk Island and the Pitcairn Islands. Both descend from the same unusual event: the mutineers of HMS Bounty settling Pitcairn in 1790 with Tahitian companions, and their eighteenth-century English blending with Tahitian into something that is neither.

The wiki's own logs date its opening precisely even though the Meta-Wiki record does not. The first entries in pih.wikipedia.org's log are account creations on 24 October 2005, beginning with a Wikimedia developer and then a foundation board member, which is the signature of a wiki being switched on rather than discovered.

What followed was nineteen years of not quite happening. The project accumulated pages without accumulating prose. The closure discussion describes the content as short, single-sentence stubs, and notes that the one contributor who claimed fluency had not edited since 2012. There was a single administrator. Most logged activity in the later years was cross-wiki vandalism cleanup by global sysops who do not speak the language and were not pretending to.

On 19 March 2025 the Wikimedia Language Committee accepted the third proposal to close it, with the unusual addition that the content would be deleted outright rather than exported to the Incubator, on the grounds that its quality did not justify preserving. The deletion log shows a global sysop clearing the wiki on 1 April 2025, with entries reading "No useful content" and "Mass deletion of pages".

~ the dossier ~

~ the language ~

Norfuk is a seriously endangered language, which is what made the closure argument uncomfortable rather than obvious. Estimates put speakers at around 400 as of 2008 and the number has gone down since. Norfolk Island made it an official language in 2004 and there are revitalization efforts in the island's schools.

None of that produces encyclopedia writers. A written standard that most speakers never learned to write in cannot sustain a reference work, and the closure discussion made the point that there was no existing body of Norfuk literature to draw on. The committee was looking for writers, and the island has speakers.

~ the third proposal ~

This was not the first attempt. The page that finally closed it is titled "Closure of Pitkern & Norfuk Wikipedia 3", which means two earlier proposals failed. That pattern is common across the small editions: proposals to close tend to die because defending a tiny language community is more sympathetic than auditing it, and because someone always argues that activity could pick up.

The third proposal, opened on 8 March 2024, took just over a year to resolve. It won on evidence rather than sentiment, by pointing at specific articles and asking whether anyone could verify that the Norfuk in them was Norfuk.

~ the training data argument ~

One argument in the closure discussion did not exist when the earlier proposals ran, and it is the reason this grave belongs to 2025 rather than 2012. Wikipedia dumps are standard training material for language models and standard reference material for linguistic datasets, and a Wikipedia edition is a tagged corpus of a named language. If the Norfuk edition was largely unverified text, then every dataset built from it was learning an idiosyncratic invention and labeling it as a real creole.

That inverts the usual case for keeping a struggling small wiki alive. For twenty years the argument was that a small edition costs nothing and might help a language. In 2025 the committee weighed that against the datasets now being built from the dumps, and deleted the content instead of exporting it to the Incubator.

~ what the api still answers ~

The domain has not been taken away. Requesting the main page returns a 404, but pih.wikipedia.org/w/api.php still answers a statistics query, and the numbers it returns are the autopsy: 1,051 pages, 45,590 edits, 13,015 registered accounts, 1 administrator, 8 users counted as active, and 0 articles. The search index reports 84 words in total.

Thirteen thousand accounts is a global single-sign-on artifact rather than a community, since anyone with a Wikimedia login is registered everywhere. The number that describes the project is the last one.

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