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Closure of Greenlandic Wikipedia (meta.wikimedia.org)

submitted 1 week ago by antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/wikipedia@lemmy.world

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A Language Committee member provided the following comment:

The proposal for closing the Greenlandic Wikipedia is accepted. Despite Greenlandic being an official language with roughly 60,000 speakers, the wiki has never developed a viable community: over the last two decades only one or two Greenlandic users have contributed, and there has been almost no growth in the last five years. Most articles are short or unintelligible, and machine-generated content—initially from experimental Greenlandic machine translators and more recently from AI tools like Google Translate—has frequently produced nonsense that could misrepresent the language. The sole active admin, with academic expertise in Greenlandic, has had to monitor and delete such content, but no sustainable community exists to safeguard the language. Given the risk of harm to the Greenlandic language, the seemingly negative attitude towards the project in Greenland, and the absence of genuine user activity, the project should be closed, with any remaining content moved to the Incubator for future use. --MF-W 20:53, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

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[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Canary in the coal mine for the rest of the project?

Personally I've always worried about Wikipedia's top-heaviness. It's much easier to create content than to maintain it. Of those 7 million articles in EN, an awful lot are "short or unintelligible" or outright "nonsense" - and on top of that they're becoming steadily out of date.

IMO this amazing project needs to move to retrenchment so as safeguard its reputation. Logically that means lots and lots of deletion. Not a popular opinion alas.

[–] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

As someone who browses a lot of Wikipedia in English, I haven't seen much outright nonsense

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Perhaps we have difference thresholds for what constitutes nonsense.

The main issue IMO is outdatedness, and it's reaching almost insurmountable proportions. Take a random article outside the 1000 most popular ones (and outside the generally decent ones on hard science) and you'll find that the "center of balance" of cited dates is now a decade or more in the past. "As of 2009, the proposed bridge is awaiting approval", "The budget was to be revised in June 2012", etc. The problem is absolutely rampant. And completely logical because that was the period when all the editing was happening - the number of editors has dropped off hugely since then. And yet there's very little appetite for deleting obsolete content. In my analysis that's because the original generation of Wikipedians skew by nature towards the idealistic and tend to believe that all those articles will be updated and fixed eventually, it's a just a question of time. Personally I'm not convinced. I think that idealism is misplaced and it's now undermining the project.

[–] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

I would take that as evidence of Wiki being a mature site. Old school encyclopedias had a lot of issues with outdatedness too. They tended to just not have articles about timely topics to reduce that, but they still struggled to keep up with the times. But it definitely is a big issue, especially with link rot and other problems of the old internet.