Sichuan Yi Wikipedia

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

~ the eulogy ~

Nuosu, also called Sichuan Yi, is spoken by around two million people in southern China and written in a syllabary of more than a thousand characters that was standardized in the 1970s. On 29 August 2004 it got a Wikipedia at ii.wikipedia.org, in the period when the Foundation was opening language editions on request and finding out afterward whether anybody would write in them.

Nobody did. Three years later the wiki held fifteen pages that could be mistaken for articles, and when somebody actually read them they turned out to be mostly images with a caption, or text that was not in Yi at all. The main page was titled 首页, which is Chinese. The account list, meanwhile, kept growing, because an open MediaWiki install on a Wikimedia domain attracts registrations and spambots regardless of whether it has any content.

On 10 July 2007 a user called Prince Kassad filed a closure proposal on Meta. The text is four sentences long and the first one does the work: the wiki "has got no activity in the past except for registration, interwiki bots and spambots". He named the only two pages he could find that were genuinely Yi encyclopedia entries and suggested they be moved to the Incubator, where unproven language projects live until they prove themselves.

~ the dossier ~

~ the only vote against ~

The section headed "Arguments against closing Yi Wikipedia" received exactly one entry, on 10 July, and it was a string of Yi syllables with an exclamation mark. The proposer replied the next morning that a search showed the string was gibberish, and that the characters had been copied out of the Main Page and the names of the articles linked from it. Nobody added a second objection in the nineteen days that followed.

On the other side, Johannes Rohr, who had filed the closure proposal against the Choctaw Wikipedia back in May, wrote that the existing articles were without exception image-only pages and in his view did not even deserve to be preserved in the Incubator. MF-Warburg gave notice on 23 July that the discussion would close in four days, then posted the result at 14:13 UTC on 29 July 2007: CLOSE.

~ the summer of 2007 ~

The decision came in a run of them. Six language editions were shut inside twenty-seven days that July and the Yi Wikipedia was the last of the six. Whoever was working the list was going by article counts, and this one had two real pages.

~ what is still there ~

ii.wikipedia.org answers today. It runs the current MediaWiki, it is locked against editing, and Special:Statistics reports three articles across 188 pages, with 11,657 edits from 2,159 registered accounts, one of whom is active. The search index counts 75 words of article text across the entire encyclopedia.

Wikidata describes the project as a former edition "now found at incubator:Wp/ii", which is where Nuosu has been waiting ever since. The Incubator is the right place for it and always was.

Turkey knows the other version of this. Every Wikipedia, in every language, was blocked here from 29 April 2017 until 15 January 2020, so for nearly three years the encyclopedia was something you reached through a VPN or not at all. That is a government switching off a living thing. What happened at ii.wikipedia.org is the opposite problem and somehow the sadder one: the door was never locked by anybody until there was plainly nothing inside to protect.

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