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User:TrangaBellam/Sandbox

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Turkmen Wikipedia was authorized at some unknown time. My observations (time of initial drafting: November 2021; updates: April 2022) are:-

  1. There is no active community. One or two editors, raking in 50 edits every year, do not a community make.
    As told by a global rollbacker Styyx, there were a few active users in 2018-2020 with temporary sysop rights, but it seems that they just forgot about it or something after their rights expired.
  2. Serving as a den of spam and vandalism.
    Styyx informed me that tkwiki pretty much became the trash bin of the Turkish (and sometimes Russian) Wikipedia(s) [in Summer 2021]. Some articles about non-notable people [and companies] that got deleted there [tr.wiki] were created here, sometimes without even translating.
    Continues into 2022. Hundreds of machine-translated articles were dumped by an IP from Turkey and throwaway accounts, most of which are yet to be deleted. Or, untranslated listicles like this one. Or, link-spam. Or, attempts to promote machine translations into FAs.
    In my first edit on the wiki, I had tagged a page, filled with profanities, for speedy deletion. It had been in that state for years.
    An editor (globally locked for cross-wiki spam) uploaded a copyrighted photograph of a state-performer of Turkmenistan to the wiki, locally. The photo would be used by another SPA editor (about six months later) to draft the corresponding article. A week since, another editor blanked the page. The page stayed with no content for about a year until I reversed the blanking this evening.
  3. Potential editor base = Negligible.
    Turkmen is the lingua-franca of Turkmenistan
    Is a notoriously totalitarian state and ranks among the bottom 3 nation-states in all lists concerned with Freedom of Speech.
    Hence, there is no prospect of securing a stable editorial community from Turkmenistan unless we are looking at infiltration by state. In the last five years of the wiki, I did not spot a single IP address out of Turkmenistan.
    The lone editor who declared to be from Turkmenistan features a cryptic note on his user-page - Official acts by me in the line of my work were done from my office account. A section on his talk page is interesting. All the articles created by him are about absolutely non-notable figures.
    There are significant Turkmen populations in Iran and Afghanistan, who speak the same language.
    However, the script differs - they are using Perso-Arabic than Latin-Cyrillic since the last 100 years and are as good as nonexistent.
    Turkmen is mutually intelligible with Turkish and Azerbaijani to varying extents.
    However, as the experience of Styyx shows, it is quite difficult to translate this intelligibility to writing. That being said, one of those once-active local admins was from the azwiki.

TrangaBellam (talk) 15:25, 13 November 2021 (UTC)