User:TrangaBellam/Sandbox
Turkmen Wikipedia was authorized at some unknown time. My observations (time of initial drafting: November 2021; updates: April 2022) are:-
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Is a notoriously totalitarian state and ranks among the bottom 3 nation-states in all lists concerned with Freedom of Speech.
- 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.
- Turkmen is the lingua-franca of Turkmenistan
TrangaBellam (talk) 15:25, 13 November 2021 (UTC)