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Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Ripuarian Wikipedia

< Proposals for closing projects

The result of the following proposal for closing a WMF project is to KEEP the project. Please, do not modify this page.

The ripuarian language is a local dialect in Germany based on the middle-franconian. It neither has any ISO-code nor any rules for writing.

The ripuarian wikipedia (ksh.wikipedia.org) isn't really used with the intension to create real articles. There are mostly senseless stubs that sound like conversations in anime movies (most stubs contain questions with question marks) or carneval.

For example http://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huuhouß only contains a small sentance that there are a few skyscrapers in cologne and http://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulltrakootwäll (very high frequency/VHF) that a radio makes a strange noise if you turn around the frequency button of an old radio.

--GoaSkin 14:57, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am really surprised to read your "complaints" about articles in the Ripuarian Wikipedia. No real articles? I have written 241 articles [[1]] in ksh.wikipedia. There wasn't 1 stub among them. Plaese, make your decision whether articles like the one I mentioned are worth to be called "mostly senseless stubs". I will be pleased hearing from you. --BBKurt 22:14, 30 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Arguments for

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Indecisive

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I do not really mean to say, that this wiki should be deleted, however, it is quite true that a very large share of the articles is garbage. It is either non-encyclopaedic, not serious, using the local language in a carnevalistic, comedy-style way, with which it is strongly associated in Cologne, or it is just complete junk like all the articles on telephone city codes, look ksh:Saachjrupp:Tellefon_Fürwaal_(Dütschland). O.K., methods of inflating your article count have been developed my many wikis, the unrivalled champion being Volapük, however, even the botmasters there did not create such an utterly pointless set of articles. What's next? Articles about different temperatures (20°C, 21°C and so forth), about various lenghts (1km, 2km)? Please stop this madness! --Johannes Rohr 12:29, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If one, quote: does not really mean to say, that this wiki should be deleted end-quote, one should not add ones thoughts to section arguements for deletion. Is volapük a subdivision of ripuarian, or why is it of concern here? A pseudo arguement perhaps? Does it matter how editor create their articles? If one thinks, some article were junk, one should edit them and make them better, in the first place. That is what a wiki means, is it not? If one spents almost 50% of his arguement text on unwritten articles and on things that many wikis do, then one has weak or no point, I believe. I get the impression of a fascist-like or blackmailer-like attitude here: Either you write about what I like and you do it the ways I tell you, or else I shall close your wiki because I decide on quote non-serious end-quote. (Random page link brought me here. This is strange a type of discussion that you are having hiding inside this wiki, in my opinion) --93.131.48.154 22:51, 9 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Arguments against

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  1. The Ripuarian Wikipedia is very active and there are still many good quality pages. The ISO-code (ksh) is really existing and covers Kölsch, but because other languages are rather similar they could easily be put on one wiki (like nds) I'm sure the little problems could easily be fixed. --OosWesThoesBes 16:44, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    The english wikipedia shows none as ISO-code in the table, the other language versions don't discuss it. The greater dialect, the middle-franconian is spoken in Luxemburg (as letzeburgisch) and in parts of the netherlands and belgium (limburgs), they're official. In Germany, this dialect covers all the western side of the rhine-river - from the french border to the dutch border. Ripuarian is nothing more than a local variation of this greater dialect, spoken in cologne and some suburbs. If any sub-dialect should be used for an own wikipedia, we could start with more than 20 else only for the middle-franconian (rhine-hassian, palatinian, moselle-franconian etc.) The lower-saxon is a different dialect, spoken in northern Germany. It isn't an official language in Germany but has an orthography. The lower-saxon/plattdüütsch was the only language in northern Germany a few 100 years ago and used in many books. Today, the orthography rules are operated by an university-institute. --GoaSkin 19:08, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Please don't judge if you don't know anything about it. Ethnologue tells us that Kölsch is part of Ripuarian Franconian subfamily, that's the reason why Ripuarian doesn't have a code. I'm fearing that again the dialect - language discussion is coming up. It's useless to discuss this. --OosWesThoesBes 04:45, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  2. The Wikipedia of Ripuarin languages is to be kept.
    Indeed, GoaSkin makes a series of false assertions contradicting the last 250+ years of scholarly research and publicised scientific findings. It was imho far too cumbersome and time consuming to go into lengthy and detailed analyses of all his errors at this place. So I shall just exemplify some without having to deliver a scientific paper.
    • There is no such thing as a/the Ripuarian language, and the Ripuarian languages are not part of Moselle Franconian. These two pretty distinct language groups have a common border roughly along the river w:Sieg, between w:Siegen and w:Weyerbusch.
    • An ISO 639 language code for Ripuarian has been requested and is going to be issued. Since a subdivision of Ripuarian has an own ISO code already, there is little doubt that "some other Ripuarian" must exist, or have existed, outside ksh, since otherwise such distinction would not have been made by the ISO committe. There may be some need to determine wether or not "Ripuarian" is to be classified a macrolanguage or just a language group.
    • Ever since before the official start of the Wikipedia for Ripuarian languages, there was no doubt that, the new language code shall be used, once it becomes available, and that ksh was only a temporary choice.
    • Such as German, English, Swedisch, Afrikaans, Limburgs, Luxemburgian, … Kölsch are all local variations of the West Germanic, you can always put related languages under a collective Name. This does not make them equal. All these claims, like Moselle-Franconian was a superset of Ripuarian, etc. simply say nothing, even if they were true. Most are plain wrong.
    • A common, and as far as a project like Wikipedia is concerned, very practical critrion is mutual understandability. Reseach states that, extremes in the w:Dialect continuum of the Ripuarian languages, when spoken, show a mutual ad-hoc understandability as low as some 20%. Written understandability might be slightly better when a common othography is used, yet still, e.g. the two Ripuarian dialects Kirchröadsj, and Hommersch are w:Abstandsprachen to each other. This makes very evident that, already the grouping of all the Ripuarian languages in one project, might be overly broad. There is no way to widen the selection of languages in this project without sacrificing practical understandability altogether.
    • As of Kölsch alone, there are three well founded published orthographies, found in Hönig (1877), Wrede (1956), and Tiling-Herrwegen/Bhatt (2002). Also, Cornelissen/Honnen/Langensiepen et al published an orthography common to all Ripuarian varieties (and more) in 1986. There are few dozen other published ones concerning other individual Ripuarian dialects.
    • Ripuarian languages exist under three different distant w:Dachsprachen, i.e.German, Dutch, and French (and under 4 different national/state/cultural authorities, each having their own language policies), so it is easily intelligible that, diverging local traditions of writing the respecive local language of the Ripuarian Group exist under the respecive umbrellas, and varying circumstances.
    • Whether or not a language has an official status is expressis verbis of no relevance for the creation, or maintenance, of a Wikimedia project.
    • Whether or not a single orthography exists, or is used, is as well of no relevance for the creation, or maintenance, of a Wikimedia project. Btw., there are dozens of precedents in other languages or groups of dialects.
    • The nds dialect continuum (having two Wikipedias using distinct orthographies!) according to scientists, has/had the magnitude of 4000 orthogaphically different subdivisions, and a way larger number of different spoken variants. There is no such thing as central orthographic authority of nds, even though some try to establish one for about one third of the (mostly currently quickly dying) nds-DE variants. (See also sources mentioned here)
    • nds is an official language in Germany. (I had a set of protocols of federal state parliament debates in Plattdüütsch, which I returned, so I cannot easily ref them atm, but I will, if need be)
    • There is a Palatinean Wikipedia incubator project.
    • There is no justification for putting pfl, lb, li, Northern Moselle Franconian, or so called "Hessian" (a folkloristic term, hardly lingustic) together with Ripuarian in one project. None of the others have a chance of understanding enough of Ripuarian, believe me. Ask the other projects, if you doubt.
    • If we were to separate dialects further, we would not add 20 language projects for West Germanies dialects only, we would add 100, maybe 120, Ripuarian variants groups alone, which each are gramatically, lexically, and phonetically quite distinct.
    • In any wiki project, you will find pages that don't suffice whatever criteria (yet), stub pages, etc.. Most likely, most of those will be fixed over time, sooner or later, depending on the number of contributors, etc. Likely, the best way to deal with them, is to just make them better. Second best might be to make potential writers aware of glitches. Suggesting closure of a project based on two samples representing 0.02% of all pages, cannot be taken serious.
    • Not only that. What GoaSkin writes about those sample pages is again pretty bad, showing that he does not understand enough.
      1. The quoted sentence does not say there were skyskrapers in Cologne, and it does not mention skyscrapers (Wollekekrazer) at all. What GoaSkin 'forgets' to mention is, that this page says, that it is duplicated under another lemma, and the pages should be merged.
      2. The other is a typical stub page, marked as such, and needs several improvements. So what? (Again, the attempted translation is almost 100% incorrect)
    • By the way, statements like,
      1. the Wikipedia were "n't really used with the intension to create real articles." (good mindreading!)  
      2. There were "…mostly senseless stubs" (sure, if one cannot translate, one does not grasp sense)
      3. "…that sound like conversations in anime movies" (hey, he can hear the written stuff! Gosh, I wish, I could, too!)  
      4. "(most stubs contain questions with question marks)
        1. Even Ripurian questions do have question marks!  
        2. Simply a lie. There may be w:rhetorical questions like in the untypical sample quoted, but not even 8 Articles out of 9000+ have one at all. Beyond their number, this is a matter of style, which should please be left to editors who understand the language and are part of its culture.
    … these disqualify themselves, and in the end their writer, GoaSkin, too.
    Summarizing, I'd say, the whole proposition is ridiculous. (I tend to see it as another one of the recent series of, partially anonymous, attempts to challenge the existence of most small language projects of the wmf.) --Purodha Blissenbach 17:14, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  3. I agree. There are quite many good articles there, the average article size is 2.4 K, as you can see [[2]] at position 131. This clearly says, there cannot be so many useless stubs. Quite many Wikipedias are having lesser averages. --77.190.64.58 09:57, 27 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
My main intension to request a deletion is the case, that too many articles contain only nonsense, used for those who like to hear the Kölsch dialect for joking, kidding. Articles, that would be deleted rapidly on any other Wikipedia version. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a comic or poetry book. The advice that the ripuarian is only a micro-dialect inside the middle-francionian (by the way, the articles about Ripuarian also say, that it is a variation of the middle-franconian) only beside. --GoaSkin 13:32, 27 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Who are you to rule that reading Wikipedia must not be fun? ;-) You hardly understand the language, so how can you judge? Your samples do not support your prejudice. Writing style are not to be copied between Wikipedias or cultures. Give up, you have no case. --77.190.64.58 16:46, 27 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The Ripuarian Wikipedia definitely has issues. But none which could be solved by closing the project. Quality issues have to be solved on-project.
Purodha, this request is futile, no need to put much energy into it, it won't succeed. But it's your own fault, that it came to this request. Put some energy into cleaning up the project. Huuhouß was marked a Dubbelatikkel since a year. Since it consisted of no content not present in Huhaus it was possible even for me, not speaking any Ripuarian (at least not able to write Ripuarian in that orthography), to solve the situation. Ulltrakootwäll too was a duplicate of another article. And I know, that you suffer redirectitis, creating up to 17,000 redirects for a single article. I know, that your orthography is non-standardized, but 17,000 is a bit over the top, isn't it? Things like that add up and lead to requests like this. --::Slomox:: >< 17:45, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That we sometimes have (too) many redirects is a donwside of doing many of them with a bot. The better solution was to add some logic to the article finder, or search algorithm. Unfortunately, I don't have the capacity to do that atm. When noone has the energy to get some double articles sorted out, then noone has the energy to do it, and it is not done. I am sorry, I have already processed several hundreds of suggested page deletions in the last few months, that noone else took care of. Some foreigner tried his luck, too, and deleted everything w/o discussion, and a lots of stuff, that was not marked for deletion any more, but had been in the past - he only more than doubled the amount of work for us :-( I am tired of having to do all this maintenance and cleanup work all the time. Since quite a while I am virtually the only one who does it.
I've seen that you resolved the double article. I intentionally left them alone for the time being for those who maybe wanted to see themselves. You also cleaned the double redirects stemming from your edit. There is no compelling need to do so, we have a bot doing it, too, after some time.
Thank you for your support! -- Purodha Blissenbach 19:11, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Strong Oppose. Many new pages in just a few days. This project should be kept open. ☺Coppertwig(talk) 01:22, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose --Holder 12:49, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Oppose It over 200 articles! --Pineapple fez 01:23, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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