Siberian Wikipedia

» see ru-sib.wikipedia.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Wikimedia Foundation turned the first application down. Yaroslav Zolotaryov had asked for a Wikipedia in Siberian and had presented Siberian as a natural language, one of the living tongues of Russia, and the language committee did not accept that. The second application described the same thing as a constructed language. On 1 October 2006 it was approved and the subdomain went up at ru-sib.wikipedia.org.

Zolotaryov was a businessman in Tomsk who had started building the language in April 2005, first in his own blog and then on a site called Siberian Freedom, with a small group of enthusiasts working alongside him. He said he had taken the grammar from the old settler dialects of Siberia and then archaized the vocabulary, mixing in Tatar roots and borrowings from Pomor speech. He was open about one of the design goals: the language was meant to be partly unintelligible to Russian speakers.

By 2007 the edition held about seven thousand articles. Roughly five thousand of them were stubs about individual years, each carrying one sentence that amounts to saying somebody ought to add something here because there is not much written yet. A number of the remaining entries were Belarusian Wikipedia articles pushed through edits. The editorial line was openly anti-Russian, which ran straight into the neutral point of view rule that every other edition is built on. A bureaucrat from the Russian Wikipedia put the structural problem plainly: nobody was going to write in this language in order to correct that, because writing in it was the whole point of writing in it.

In 2007 I was at university in Ankara and Wikipedia had already become the thing you opened to end an argument. None of this reached me. The dispute ran in Russian, on a coordination wiki most people never visit, about an edition written in a language that had existed for eighteen months. Knowing it was happening at all took being inside the Russian Wikipedia community already. I read the whole file for the first time in 2026, off a category listing of closed sites.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the vote ~

The closure discussion is still on Meta and it reads as a record of a project working out a problem it had no rule for. Zolotaryov defended phrases his critics called slurs by arguing they did not carry the same weight in Siberian and that Russian speakers were misreading them. He defended the obscenities in his Siberian translations of Shakespeare on the grounds that he was setting a democratic register against an elite one, and that this was how the lines would sound in a Siberian village.

Support for closing came mostly from Russian editors and from people invested in Wikipedia as a project. The opposition came mostly from eastern Europeans and from people who read the whole thing as a question about free expression. The vote finished on 5 November 2007 and the edition closed with it.

~ the deletion ~

Closing an edition normally just means freezing it. Siberian got the other outcome. A separate proposal, opened by Johannes Rohr on the grounds that Siberian named no indigenous language and had been invented in 2005, asked for the edition to be removed from the site matrix and deleted outright. It carried 42 to 4 in October 2007, and a developer filed the deletion request in bugzilla as ticket 11680 on 20 October.

The arguments against deletion were archival rather than political. One editor wanted the main page kept as a historical record. Another described the project as the most perfectly executed troll the internet had yet produced and thought that alone justified keeping it. What settled it was practical: the content had already been copied out to sib.volgota.com, so deleting the subdomain destroyed nothing.

~ what is left of it ~

The Internet Archive has the front page from 12 July 2007, filed under the title Головна сторонка. That is close to all that survives at the original address. Zolotaryov's language outlived the Wikipedia built on it, and a version of the wiki runs today at sibwiki.org, on its own hosting and under nobody's neutrality policy.

Wikipedia has closed language editions before and since, almost always for the quiet reason that nobody was writing in them. This one was closed because too many people were.

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