The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. — CharlotteWebb 06:17, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Articles on individiual Wikipedia language editions[edit]

See below for the rationale.

Discussion[edit]

I see no reason to have articles for individual language editions of Wikipedia. None of them are particularly notable and they're all part of one site: Wikipedia, for which we have an article.

Most of the articles do not go any further than providing minor statistics. Such statistics are derived from various tools such as toolserv already available for public use.

In the case of several of these articles (most notably Chinese Wikipedia), that information should probably moved interwiki to meta/wikinews/whatever. The details about the infamous block is already explained in Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China

--Cat out 12:19, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep all. Spanish Wikipedia explains about the Enciclopedia Libre fork, Catalan Wikipedia explains it was the first to have non-english articles, German Wikipedia is a very complete article, etc...
  Also the statistics are interesting to read an explanation of the development of each project (better than the statistics page which can be quite confusing). I don't see any reason to delete those articles.--Xtv - (my talk) - (que dius que què?) 12:28, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  A wiki reaching 10,000 articles or 50,000 articles isnt all that notable and easy to read on a graph. How many admins/users/edits/articles a wiki currently has can be accessed via Special:Statistics
  As you point out Enciclopedia Libre has its own article, that means Spanish Wikipedia (the article) is redundant. Information on Catalan Wikipedia isn't all that notable. German Wikipedia probably belongs to meta. --Cat out 12:39, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

zh:Special:Statistics is quite difficult to read for me, better if there is a page in English explaining it.--Xtv - (my talk) - (que dius que què?) 15:43, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Reject keep all/delete all format of this discussion. A few of these, such as those mentioned by Xtv, are quite notable and deserve their own article. Others probably fail WP:WEB and ought to be deleted. —Angr 12:36, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree, these should be nominated separately, some of them may not be notable but others are. --KFP (talk | contribs) 12:39, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  I disagree. People should review the 66 articles link here. They can vote/discuss on which ones too keep and which ones to delete. --Cat out 12:44, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  A though, we could have two noms. One for the tiny pages (a paragraph or two) and one for larger ones. --Cat out 12:46, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. For example, the Finnish Wikipedia specifically is quite well known in Finland and it has received wide press coverage. However, this is currently not explained in the article. --KFP (talk | contribs) 12:50, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  Thats nice. Wikipedia is well known in Finland. Can be mentioned in the Wikipedia article, a wikinews article or meta article. --Cat out 12:53, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  My point is that the Finnish Wikipedia may be independently notable as it has been the subject of articles in newspapers and magazines such as Helsingin Sanomat and Suomen Kuvalehti and has also been discussed on national television etc. Also, the different language editions of Wikipedia are usually not just translations of each other but largely independent projects with different editors and different audiences. --KFP (talk | contribs) 13:07, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  In a blunt way to put it: every language version is an online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is notable as a whole and individual language versions are not.
  Statistics of any language version is indeed interesting and can be presented at Special:Statistics. Statistics on articles about individual language versions will become outdated in a matter of seconds.
  The social structure of any language wikipedia isn't notable, such a thing would also fail to meet WP:WEB as well as WP:OR.
  --Cat out 15:16, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  If the social structure of individual Wikipedia isn't notable, then why has the social structure of particular Wikipedias been covered in the press? When the New York Times covers AfD debates, they're covering the social structure of just one of the projects, as no project has exactly the same AfD policies and voting tendancies. Every Wikipedia is different in many ways. -- Zanimum 14:37, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep some content. I don't think these can just be deleted. Some of these variants of Wikipedia (perhaps most importantly the German one) are notable in their own right, because of ways in which they differ from the rest of Wikipedia. Some of them are only notable because of the notability of Wikipedia as a whole, and could perhaps be deleted. But I suspect that many of them have information which, if they are to be deleted, should be merged to Wikipedia. So, I think anyone who wants to delete them is going to have a lot of work on their hands sorting out the useful from the unnecessary. JulesH 13:17, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Move all to project space. Most are not notable as articles due to a lack of substantial coverage in multiple reliable sources. Some are, though, such as German Wikipedia. These could be copied back to article space and develop as articles, while the others could be left in project space to report statistics, events and such. Sandstein 13:19, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Move all to project space. I'm not convinced these should be documented seperately in article space, but there's no need to throw them out either. Sandstein's idea is a good one imho. --kingboyk 13:27, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  I feel meta would be a better place for such articles. Meta is underused. --Cat out 14:01, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  Project space isn't for encyclopedia articles, and Meta isn't an encyclopedia. The question is whether any of these websites is notable enough for an encyclopedia article, and some of them are. Cool Cat's claim above that the article Wikipedia encompasses all the languages could be true in principle, but it isn't true in practice. The article Wikipedia is exclusively about the English-language Wikipedia. —Angr 14:44, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  In that case merge to Wikipedia or Wikipedia non-english versions should be your answer? --Cat out 14:55, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  Exactly. Move them all to project space, and then anything enyclopedic and relevant can be merged into the main article. --kingboyk 15:43, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  No, not project space. They have no business at all in project space, which is for housekeeping tasks of English Wikipedia, not for encyclopedic content. Merging the ones that are too nonnotable to meet WP:WEB into Wikipedia, while keeping separate the ones that are notable enough is a good idea. So is moving English-version-specific information from Wikipedia to English Wikipedia (which is definitely one of the ones that should be kept). —Angr 16:18, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  If they're encylopedic content we have no business deleting them in the first place :) If they're not, I think they're fine in project space or perhaps on meta? --kingboyk 16:28, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Reject keep all/delete all format of this discussion per Angr, the problem here is that WP:WEB would accept some and reject others, so the macro-AfD would have to result in an overall Keep to preserve those of value. Some of these certainly are AfD-worthy debates, but the global AfD won't address those. Better 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to jail, right? :-) -Markeer 13:44, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  Can you be a bit more specific? Which ones you precisely believe should be kept? --Cat out 13:59, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. Mass nominations are discouraged for a reason. Many of these are quite deletable, at least in the English-language Wikipedia (they might be more notable in themselves), but others are not - commenters will focus in on the most or least deletable of them. I suggest that instead of nominating them all, you nominate a borderline case, like maybe the Japanese Wikipedia, and see how that goes. And yes, for the ones that aren't kept, cross namespace move is preferable to delete. Deco 15:02, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Reject keep all/delete all format of this discussion per Angr. German Wikipedia should be sufficient as an example of a fairly long article about a Wikipedia that is clearly notable enough in its own right. I don't really see the benefit of deleting such articles, moving them out of article space, or merging them. Rl 15:21, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep against the global deletion but feel free to renominate the useless ones individually. --Irpen 16:00, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  I do not have that kind of patience or time to spend on bureaucracy --Cat out 16:21, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Then don't. There is no deadline. -- Black Falcon 22:14, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: Some of those articles deserve to be deleted but many are valid and informative. Also, many of these articles do contain notable information, and while some may be stubs that list only statistics, quite a few provide encycolpedic information. RyGuy17 16:45, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Neutral comment - although I understand why users are complaining about this mass nomination, I do think that the nominator was correct to nominate all of these together. Logic dictates that either foreign-language Wikipediae in general deserve their own articles, or they do not. The only exception to this would be if some of them have appeared in the news (making them the subject of multiple non-trivial independent sources per WP:WEB), but I can't see that this is substantially the case. I'm not certain whether these articles merit deletion or not, but either all of them should be deleted or they should all be kept. Walton monarchist89 17:02, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • But it is the case that some of them have appeared in the news, making them the subject of multiple non-trivial independent sources per WP:WEB. The German Wikipedia, for example, was all over the news in Germany in light of the Tron case (see Tron (hacker)#Naming controversy for details), and because it has published books. Probably some of the others have also been in the news in countries where their language is widely spoken. Others haven't, and I'm not in favor of keeping those. But this nomination would throw the baby out with the bathwater. —Angr 20:00, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Choose a number (such as 50,000) and delete the Wikipedias that don't have more articles than this. 80.47.228.177 17:20, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Reject/keep whatever per Angr. ''[[User:Kitia|Kitia'']] 17:28, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Reject/keep. Some, like English wikipedia, absolutely need an article and as it is about the 10th most popular site on the internet it clearly doesnt fail the notability test. If any of the otehrs need deleting it should be doen on a case by case basis. Also wikipedia is 53KB and therefore it wouldnt be practicable to merge any useful info into this article, SqueakBox 17:32, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• strong keep its simply not ruth members in my wikipedia are not members in the wikipedia comunity. we see ourselves as a difrent comunity, diferent in mindset and diferent in laguge--yidi 17:41, 18 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]
• Reject keep all/delete all format of this discussion. Per above. Though some are self reference or not written in an encyclopedic tone, I believe most of them are notable on their own merit (except iff you count only English mentions, though I would reject such interpretations). Otherwise keep all.--Dami 17:47, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep or merge, oppose mass deletion. Ideally, all of these can be noted in a subarticle linked under the Wikipedia#Language editions section, perhaps entitled Multilingual Wikipedia. This solution also allows for individual language versions that fail notability standards on their own to be redirected to an article within the encyclopedia, thereby reducing the animosity which is sure to be perceived by some who won't understand why <insert favorite language version> doesn't merit inclusion. Tim Shuba 18:13, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - they are all notable.Bakaman 19:27, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Reject keep all/delete all format of this discussion per above. "Wikipedia is notable as a whole and individual language versions are not". Ascertaining this would be a research project requiring knowledge of numerous languages. Surely, Wikipedia is notable in part because it is available in so many languages? Ben MacDui (Talk) 19:35, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Speedy Keep/Reject keep all/delete all format of this discussion per discussion. Surely you're joking - Wikipedia for $language is not notable to Wikipedia?! --Dennisthe2 19:37, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Speedy Keep. All are notable, appear in local media, have social impact... What else do you want? --Tone 19:54, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep If English Wikipedia is notable (and it is) so should others be. The problem may be keeping them up to date, but should we not try to? Peterkingiron 19:59, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep They're neutral, they're verifiable. Let them be. --D. Webb 20:43, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Move to Project Space and assess from there. Most of them are crap and would fail all the reasonable notability guidelines. The rest of them are essentially duplicating information which should be housed in Wikipedia. If that article is too large, possibly there can be a mass merge of statistics etc. to another page, but as it stands we have a lot of Wikipediacruft. GassyGuy 20:46, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all, possibly renominating some individually. Valid forks from the main article, and clearly English and German Wikipedias (for example) would be notable at any rate. I'd consider moving some of the smaller Wikipedias into a list article, but a mass nom like this isn't the place to do it. BryanG^(talk) 21:33, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all. Very few new users actually know about Special:Statistics. Moreover, statistics in foreign languages don't do English-speakers much good. Finally, these pages are useful in encouraging multi-lingual readers to contribute to the other Wikis. -- Black Falcon 22:14, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all. These articles are not only notable, but they are also useful for Wikipedia users who want to visit a Wikipedia of a different language. Nevhood 00:03, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep the Russian Wikipedia since it was awarded a state prize last year for being a top educational website in the Russian language. User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 00:19, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge. I suggest we simply merge them all into an article entitled "Versions of Wikipedia" or something in that direction.SergioGeorgini 00:56, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. Many of the non-English wikipedias are large enough to be notable, and have very different policies and styles than the English edition. Perhaps merge all non-English wikipedias of size <10k as a compromise? Tbjablin 02:07, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• reject/keep If you actually tried to research these individual versions of Wikipedia, I would say that almost all of them would be notable. There may be several exceptions, but keep in mind that ntability for these Wikipediae should be based upon coverage by media worldwide; no english coverage for the Kashubian Wikipedia does not, by any means, preclude it from notability. Notability might also be established by these Wikipediae's connections with Wikimedia. Niffweed17, Destroyer of Chickens 02:22, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per Dennisthe2. MalikCarr 03:12, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. I am not going to go through each of the nominations here, but considering that in many cases Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in existence for that language, I would say that they are notable. Sjakkalle (Check!) 07:49, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Copy to meta. Then we'll decide what to do with them, individually, MER-C 08:53, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Overbroad blanket nomination. Many of these clearly meet notability criteria on their own, so I can't say delete to all. If there are those that don't meet the standards, even after very much checking, they should be moved to Project: namespace rather than deleted. --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 09:48, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all - The Chinese Wikipedia is notable at least and while relatively unsourced, there seems to be enough there for a full article rather than cramming it back into Wikipedia. Japanese Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, and Swedish Wikipedia look notable. [[It's harder to defend Latvian Wikipedia and Catalan Wikipedia but these should be nominated individually - Aagtbdfoua 14:06, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep All - If we delete all those interwikis, then we must also delete the Jimbo Wales article, angela besley's, wikipedia and so on. -- Walter Humala Godsave him! ^{(wanna Talk?)} 14:48, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• No, you're over estimating this AfD. Jimmy is independently notable as a businessman, etc, and so is Angela as an co-founder of Wikia. -- Zanimum 14:59, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep many but not all or merge: I agree some of the articles, as they are now, should be deleted. The Slovenian, Luxembourgish, Malay articles tell nothing but dry statistics, and there are many more in that category. But any article that tells the actual story of the site should be kept, or at least merged into a larger article. Without an article on the Persian Wikipedia, how will anyone know it was started by a university? Without an article on the Norwegian Wikipedia, how will anyone know about the changing language policies, or similarly the Serbian Wikipedia's technical issues? Really, these need to be tried seperately, not as a whole. If nothing else, in groups. -- Zanimum 14:59, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

* Delete all OR Move to meta OR Move to Wikipedia name space: I created two of these articles but I don't think that we should keep them. I only created them because they were red links in the template. My primary vote (which is not actually a vote) here is to delete them from Main name space. The Statistics page has more information than many of the articles. Nearly all of them are stubs. However, if the articles aren't deleted then I reccommend that they should be imported to meta or moved to project name space. --Meno25 16:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge all: Merge all articles (except may be the German one) into one article named Other languales of Wikipedia or any similar title. The articles are too short to keep. When we have enough data about a certain article we would create an article about it. --Meno25 18:21, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all but some of them could be nominated individually. Agree with Zanium.Vints 17:18, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all Obviously Wikipedia is notable enough for its own article. Thus it is important to document it. These foreign language parts of Wikipedia are also important to document. Now maybe the quality/content of these articles is minimal, but that doesn't mean any should be deleted. At the least, I'd say "Non-English Wikipedia" should be a section or article on its own, but I'd prefer each article be separate anyway, not just a table or list. And even if a case could be made for substance being necessary, with so many nominations, it's difficult to say which ones do meet that requirement. Checking them will be quite the burden. FrozenPurpleCube 18:03, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Neutral In a way it feels un-necessary with these kind of articles, but this is one of the better ones of these types......Turkish Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia and so on.

Cangbush

• Comment Is there a lack of server space for deleting those articles? -- Walter Humala Godsave him! ^{(wanna Talk?)} 20:53, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Server space is one of those things you should let the developers worry about. Besides, deleting a page doesn't actually free up server space. BryanG^(talk) 07:59, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. --5ko 21:59, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• keep alll definatly keep all, the arguement doesnt make any sense, and they cant be all merged into the wikipedia article beacsue its too long and policy itself will eventually make the article's longest sections be splintered off, the english wikipedia article is quite long, as is the german one, i really think they are very useful and most projects are not exactly like wikipedia, just about the only thing they all have in common is neutral point of view, some accept fair use others not, some require preview before save others dont etc etc and many combinations. as for enciclopedia libre, thats differant from the spanish language wikipedia they are two differant websites, EL is not associated with esWP in the least. the statistic pages offer just that, but the article pages offer information on milestones for any given wikipedia edition which a research would definatly want to find out, so would a reporter, or a student writing a paper. keep all. sure they start off as small stat pages, but they grow like any other article.qrc2006/email 01:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC) STRONG KEEP
• Keep -- the indiscriminate mass-nomination format of this AFD does very little to clarify issues, or lead to useful discussion. 04:45, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
• keep all and possibly delete the ones that do not yet have any content. The articles on the two non-en ones I know best had relevant things to say--some of which I knew and some of which I didn't, and all of which would have been helpful to know ahead of time. Having the material conveniently available here is extremely helpful. The material about the individual sites available on the individual sites does not necessarily pass COI, but these articles do.--Furthermore, the information on the different interpretaions of N and V and other policies is very relevant to discussions here. DGG 05:02, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• keep all --Igrek 08:34, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• keep all. No fooly jokes.♦ --Paukrus 12:38, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• keep all --Butko 12:50, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Violent Keep (clarification per request)--Alnokta 14:35, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all per the above, but spare the violence. (jarbarf) 18:07, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge It may be best to merge all of these articles into one main article. They should be kept, but as one main article listing all the different languages Wikipedia exists in. --19:21, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
• Keep there is always something special about each language edition! Teixant 22:12, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all I reject the notion that we can use the web measuring sites to measure how notable a non-English language site is how can we judge how well-trafficed the Kashubian Wikipedia is, e.g., because only 50,000 people speak Kashubian and Kashubian speakers form a majority in no country (by which most trackers track traffic). Carlossuarez46 22:43, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge. Since most of these articles provide nothing more than minor statistics such as inception date and number of articles, the data would be best handled in a table format in one article. The exceptions and special notes are few enough that they could be handled below such a table. The main article Wikipedia is large enough that such a merged article should be a separate article. --Dachannien^Talk_Contrib 23:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all. Re-nominate each one separately. Nohat 02:13, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all. I hate mass noms. Keep all articles and indivisually nominate each article which may fail guidelines. Sr13 (T|C) ^{Editor review} 05:34, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all. There is no way you can tell the story of 200+ wikipedia language versions in a single Wikipedia article. If you look at some of these language articles they talk about specific things not common on other wikipedias, and a lot of the ones I looked at provide a lot more information than simply statistics. I'd love all of them to stay. --Vanka5 07:51, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Reject keep all/delete all format of this discussion or, failing that, keep all. dcandeto 18:43, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all. Every national Wikipedia is a national domain and a standalone online community often large enough to be notable --ssr 22:49, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all. I concur with ssr's statement.. Illyria05 (Talk • Contributions) 00:13, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Mu A single AfD for projects ranging from hundreds of thousands of articles to merely hundreds is way too broad. Some of the projects (eg the German one) are significant enough for an entire page. Is there any main-space info about the (no longer wikimedia associated) Klingon wikipedia? Andjam 01:24, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all and pass legislation against these inherently problematic mass nominations. Yamaguchi先生 02:43, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all I agree with Yamaguchi on mass nominating things. Actually, it would be fun to nominate all cities of all countries for mass deletion and then ask "how about putting them all in the country's article?". If Wikipedia is a country, English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia etc. are its cities. For the same reasoning, all cities of all countries should be deleted as well. Then we should go on for mass deletion of all human beings that are from the same family. Such as George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and all those other Bushes should be united under "Bush family" article. It wouldn't be right. Wikipedia is the name of this family, and the family name of all Wikipedia family members. Turkish, Indonesian, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish etc. are our first names. --Nerval 03:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.