Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Greenlandic Wikipedia

This is a proposal for closing and/or deleting a wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is subject to the current closing projects policy.

The proposal for closing kl: is currently open for discussion by the community.

Type: 2 (non-routine proposal)
Proposed outcome: closure
Proposed action regarding the content:
Notice on the project: (Please warn the project.)
Informed Group(s): (Which chapters, wiki projects, and other community groups have been informed, if any.)

I wrote an article about this topic some months ago in the German Kurier, which you can find here. I am the only active admin in the Greenlandic Wikipedia. When I became admin, there were around 1500 articles, most of them consisting only of a few words or completely unintelligible. I deleted most of them some years ago, so now there are only around 250 articles left, which more or less consist of some sentences, which seem to be written by Greenlanders. In the last 20 years there have only been one or two Greenlandic users in the project, even though the language has around 60,000 speakers and is the official language in Greenland. There are almost no articles written in the last five years.

I learned Greenlandic as a foreign language, I am an academic in this field and have previously worked at the Greenlandic language secretary. There they are working with language technology and machine translation, and they made the first Greenlandic machine translator, which though produces a lot of mistakes. But they are very vigilant about correct language and that there aren't produced any machine translated Greenlandic texts, which could influence and harm the Greenlandic language as an indigenous language with few speakers. With nearly no possibilities to write Greenlandic without actually learning the language, Greenlandic and the Greenlandic Wikipedia only had few problems with wrong and bad language on Wikipedia, but absolutely no growth either, since there haven't been any users in the last decade whatsoever. When the language secretary launched the first machine translator, some people began spamming the Greenlandic Wikipedia with machine translated articles, which where absolutely rubbish, making no sense at all, but since the translator translates every word it doesn't know from the lexicon, to "+???", uses of the translator have been quite obvious. Then Wikimedia launched its own AI translator, which was even worse, and this one produced completely random letter sequences, that often didn't even looked like Greenlandic. Some months ago Google Translate launched a Greenlandic AI translator and this one is quite impressive since it is able to construct complex Greenlandic sentences, which seem intelligible. Nonetheless it often makes mistakes and actually it is quite bad at semantics. In the start "I am a Greenlander" was translated to "I am a fish" and "reindeer" becomes "parrot".

Now every few days some people around the world write articles in Greenlandic using Google Translate and they seem fine, but are insufficient nonetheless. I just deleted five articles from the last few days: (1) a country named "Ælbani", which should have been "Albania", I don't know, where this meaningless spelling comes from, (2) about Romania, stating that the country lies in the south of the European Arctic, using "background" as word for "flag", (3) about a Russian town, most people never have heard of, using some sentences, which ignore Greenlandic grammar and using foreign words, making it unintelligible for native speakers, (4) about "winter", but the sentences were missing half of it, (5) about Canada, stating the country has 41 inhabitants instead of 41 million.

In bigger projects there are many users, that can spot those articles and they get deleted, but in the Greenlandic Wikipedia I am the only user, who is checking, what is written and edited, and none of the users, who "write" these "articles", cannot even comprehend, what they produce. I have connections to the Greenlandic government, and they would actually see Wikipedia as a threat for the Greenlandic language, directly counteracting official Greenlandic language policies.

This is really bad for Wikipedia's reputation and it's a problem, that I am the only person in the Wikimedia Community, who is able to check at least to some extent, if the articles are intelligible or have factual og grammatical mistakes. That said, Greenlandic actually is one of the bigger small languages, and my guess is, that there are dozens of Wikimedia projects, that haven't seen a single user, that speaks the language, for years.

In my opinion this project is an absolute fiasco: Without any users you would think, that a dead project maybe does not do anything useful, but either it would harm, but actually it corrupts the Greenlandic language and the societal and political wish for language preserving. I would actually recommend to close the project (and many others), but I know, that project closure proposals almost never get accepted, so at least I want to discuss the problem and get some comments from the global community, especially other users, that have to do with indigenous languages. --Kenneth Wehr (talk) 11:29, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion: Closure of Greenlandic Wikipedia

Support Closure Part of me is thinking back to the Scots Wikipedia page and how it affected the Scots language as a whole. It's mistakes affected even official documents. I think this project is too small and unnotable, especially since Greenlandic is a first language for so few people. Sangsangaplaz (talk) 03:29, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can you expand a bit on why it’s not possible for those people in Greenlandic government to get involved in building upon Greenlandic Wikipedia instead of closing it down? Especially if you are quoting some ‘connections’ you have there. I get that low-quality material is a problem, but it doesn’t seem like a huge problem given that the entire wiki is only 243 articles. Those can be checked and copy-edited in a week at most, and maintenance of such small quantity of pages does not require a lot. stjn^[ru] 15:20, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi User:stjn: Greenland is a Western country, but with so few people, they neither have the ressources or interest in contributing for free, since many people have to earn money in order to pay their bills and food, and they use their spare time for other purposes. I have tried for years to find people in Greenland, who want to contribute to Wikipedia, and have found none. There are many Greenlanders, who aren't good at Danish, and those don't know English at all, but those have the least capabilities to contribute to Wikipedia, and those, who can read Danish and English, would use other language versions. I believe, that 99 % of the Greenlandic population doesn't even know, that there is a Greenlandic Wikipedia. The government doesn't have any money to invest in such things, since they already lack money for many standard welfare purposes.

I can read and write Greenlandic, but not on a native level, and it's hard for me to evaluate, if an article is sufficient Greenlandic, even if it seems okay at first glance. With no native speaker user at all, the project is hopeless.

That said, I would say, that there is an even bigger problem with to other wikis: Greenlandic is an official language and it has ca. 60,000 speakers. It is related to Inuktitut and Iñupiatun, which are spoken in Canada og Alaska. While Greenlandic often is the only language, people speak sufficiently, all speakers of Inuktitut and Iñupiatun also speak French or English, and they have even fewer speakers (ca. 40,000 and ca. 10,000), making it even harder to find a Wikipedia community there. Even though I didn't learn those languages, I can understand enough for being able to evaluate, that around 80 % of the articles in these language versions are completely insufficient, too. Many don't contain any text at all, only the page title and an image, others seem like fake language with strange spellings for countries you cannot find anywhere else on the internet. They seem to have been written by a user stating he has Portuguese as his native language with no or nearly no knowledge of Iñupiatun. If the Greenlandic Wikipedia, no Greenlander ever has asked for, is closed, those other two (iu: and ik:) also should be. --Kenneth Wehr (talk) 10:35, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Amqui:, as the only admin for iu.wiki (and active in other Indigenous wikiprojects), should probably be looped into this. ik.wiki has no admins. Safrolic (talk) 02:41, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support Closure per above. As of posting this comment, there are insufficient people who could contribute to the project. I hope small wikis should be closely monitored for AI generated text. --Ahri Boy (talk) 01:20, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Closure. As long as we have motivated Wikipedians looking after a project, the Wikipedias of small languages in particular should run. With Kenneth we have an active maintainer. We should not hinder him in his commitment, but rather ask how we can continue to support him. --J. Patrick Fischer (talk) 13:59, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure There is no point in having a Wikipedia with almost no content when no one with sufficient command of the language ever writes new content. It is pointless to demand or expect Kenneth to continue to clean up machine-translated contributions with language errors in a dead Wikipedia. If some Greenlandic speakers want to contribute at a later time, they can propose a reopening at that time. --Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 14:17, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose closure. As was discussed yome years ago somewhere within this multiple wikinews clusure diskussion inactivity is no reason for closing a wikimedia projekt. Also the project has an active admin who can be helped by global admins and other involved in the small Wiki surveiling project (or however its proper name is). Also I think that WMF should reach out to the greenland government. It is their language to preserve which also is what a government should do and a Wikipedia language version is undoubtly helping preserve that language alive. So a functional Wikipedia in greenlandic should be an observe their geoverment should be interested in. --Matthiasb (talk) 16:08, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am about to contact some people in Greenland in order to collect some official statements, because I don't really want to talk on behalf of Greenland, when nobody actually is aware of this. So I will come with more information in maybe a week or two. @Matthiasb: As Dipsacus fullonum writes, I don't know, why I have to maintain the project nobody actually is interested in. And even though I maybe can use my spare time on this, global admins aren't any help at all, since they cannot read anything in this project and can't recognize vandalism or spam or fake language, as it is the case for many other wikis with zero active native speaker users. --Kenneth Wehr (talk) 18:53, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(not logged in since I'm on the phone rn) It's my understanding that the foundation has a multi million budget for diversity and inclusion etc. Earmark some money to get at least a small Greenlandic school project going? I suppose as usually you don't get money if you don't ask for it.

In any case, a Wikipedia that doesn't have a single native speaker seems to be somewhere between pointless and patronizing. --2A02:8071:B685:2C00:C93:B80:CD6B:AFC0 06:56, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure per Dipsacus' statement. --Achim55 (talk) 20:20, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure. If the only user of kl: concludes after several years that maintaining it is pointless, it cannot be a solution to ask him to continue and make abstract demands. This rather shows disrespect for Kenneth's diligence. Users who react here with “oppose” may want to save other questionable projects with those abstract demands. However, this discussion should not be superimposed on the problem with kl:. --2003:F1:C700:7501:300C:A5D4:BBBE:FC35|Aalfons 22:25, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure It's clearly unsustainable. I reject the silly notion that if literally the only person taking care of it doesn't want to do so anymore, we should find ways to make it better rather than just let him off the hook. Kenneth has clearly done as well as any of us could, but the project is hopeless and it seems the native-speaking population do not value it, so I see no harm in closing it, and I could see active harm in forcing it to stay open with a single caretaker who is clearly at the end of their rope. Beeblebrox (talk) 03:26, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Closure It is important to have Wikipedias of small languages. I'm speaking Danish, but it is completely different in Greenlandic and I can't help. Perhaps a few people can collaborate, but there won't be that many native speakers. "Klein aber fein" is said in German. Preferably fewer articles but in good quality. I think that we should support Kenneth as an active maintainer and it is the wrong way to close the project. --Fyrtaarn (talk) 14:30, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure Kenneth, the administrator of the project has tried very hard to make this project work and if he doesn't see a way to make it work then I seriously doubt anyone can. Many of these "oppose closure" votes do not fundamentally address Kenneth's substantial rationale for closure and in my opinion are disrespectful of Kenneth and the effort he has put into the project. It's easy to "oppose closure" when you just expect someone else to keep maintaining a project without having to put in any effort yourself. I think the risk of the Greenlandic Wikipedia being overrun with poor quality AI-translated slop (which as Kenneth has written, he is the only thing really stopping at the moment, and is a realistic outcome if the wiki is kept and Kenneth stops actively maintaining the project) seriously outweighs any potential benefits of keeping the wiki open. Hemiauchenia (talk) 14:53, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose closure Would it be possible to contact Greenlandic/Danish media to write about the issue? Maybe new volunteers might join the project. (Also, some of those problems you listed, like Canada having 41 inhabitants, were easily fixable - I don't really understand the need to delete the article just because it had one mistake in it, assuming it only had that one.) --Krmarci (talk) 16:10, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have tried this since 2018. I had a Facebook group and tried with a workshop with advertisement, but no one showed up. There were two or three national news articles about me in Greenland, where I asked, if there were any interested volunteers. I have not found a single soul, wo is interested in contributing to a Greenlandic Wikipedia. The only people who have the time and financial ressources to do voluntary work, use to read the Danish og English language version, and it seems to me there are other possibilities for helping each other in such small communities than writing an encyclopedia from scratch. For your second question: I can find the obvious mistakes. If there are obvious ones, the less obvious ones also have to be there. I showed some articles to a friend and she said they sounded strange and clearly written by a non-Greenlander. That's also the reason why I – even though I can write Greenlandic – don't contribute by myself, because I might not write a more natural Greenlandic than AI does, even though I don't use to write wrong words or wrong facts like AI does. --Kenneth Wehr (talk) 16:55, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure. Would have never been moved out of Incubator because of a lack of participation. Everything is said about the current status of klwiki. It's about time to either go to read-only or move it to Incubator where it could have a chance for a restart although I believe Kenneth that this will likely not happen. Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 18:08, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure I find it strange, to leave this project open, if no one of the active writer supports the position, to leave the Greenlandic Wikipedia open. And as Kenneth has reported, there is so much "vandalism" with fake Translation. From my point of view, this fake Translation is even worse than "vandalism", as nobody from outside can detect it, and it might have bad influence on the Greenlandic language.
Last argument: Many Oppose closure voters arguing, there is an active admin (Kenneth Wehr). So he can continue with housekeeping at this project. But if he is silently leaving? Who will then take care? Who will then close the Greenlandic Wikipedia?
And some words about AI translator: I am using AI translators from German language to others in WikiData for translating Label & Description. And I use AI translators for translation from other languages to German. The translation is OK, but not good. I expect it is increasing over time. BUT: German is a big language, with roughly 100 Mio. speakers or more, with lot of written text (books, newspapers, even Wikipedia) to train the AI and there is a big Business behind. All this I don't see at the Greenlandic language. So, there will be no reliable translators in the next ten to twenty years; So no big improvement expected from my side for AI translators translating to Greenlandic language.
As Kenneth Wehr mentioned, he like to get some feedback from Greenlandic officials. This is good. I would change my mind, if the Government gets in or more native speaker get more aktive. --GodeNehler (talk) 18:21, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose closure. Unless we have heard from Wikimedia Danmark that they have tried and failed to revitalize Greenlandic Wikipedia, we haven't tried every reasonable approach and shouldn't be so hasty in nominating a project for closure. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:34, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose closure - We are on the doorstep of an age when machine translation is capable of fully populating content of something like Greenlandic-WP. While it might be necessary to temporarily lock down new additions, I suppose, it strikes me as extremely short-sighted to shut down this project completely. Carrite (talk) 01:05, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support closure - To all the editors voting to oppose this , will you work with the OP to help clean up greenlandic Wikipedia? If not then please dont make it harder for them. Wikipedia holds a tremendous power to completely reshape a language or even destroy it. We are all aware of what happened at scots Wikipedia. This seems like a similar situation. I doubt there is anything to be gained by having it other than the damage it is causing to the greenlandic language. Ratnahastin (talk) 03:04, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose closure - this is something, only the active Community of this language Wikipedia has to decide. -- Marcus Cyron (talk) 22:46, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

But it appears that the problem that this language wikipedia has no community, as the people that speak the language have largely not been contributing Cmrc23 (talk) 23:32, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]