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Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Greenlandic Wiktionary

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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 wikt:kl: is currently open for discussion by the community.

Proposal

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I normally am not someone who wants to close projects, but I will make an exception here, for the reasons I am laying out below.

The Greenlandic Wiktionary is currently completely inactive. Looking at recent changes over a couple of days, there are absolutely no edits, except for global renames. The wiki has no local admins besides the abuse filter. In fact, its community portal did not even exist before I went there to leave notification of the closure proposal. Inactivity by itself is not a valid reason for closure, but it is not the only reason I am proposing closure. Right now, this project stands alone in its language, since the Greenlandic Wikipedia was recently closed. The reasons for closing the Greenlandic Wikipedia included that its contents were unintelligible and no native speakers ever contributed to the project. It was mentioned that because people who did not speak the language were using machine translation and AI to add contents, the existence of Greenlandic Wikipedia was even a risk to the language, and this even received coverage in one article by an external publication.

Of the contents that do exist on the Greenlandic Wiktionary, relatively few of the definitions are actually of Greenlandic words. Many of its definitions are just translations of foreign words (example, example), which by itself wouldn't be an issue, since Wiktionary allows this, but given the concerns about use of machine translation stated above, it is unclear whether such translations in the Greenlandic Wiktionary would even be accurate. Of the Greenlandic words defined there, many are just proper nouns, like books of the Bible (example) or countries (example). There are even some definitions that might be questionable (such as this one, which was created by a Swedish IP and seemingly defines a word for "dream" which is, unlike most non-proper nouns, capitalized for some reason, as "insect" with no elaboration). Most of the users who created entries in this Wiktionary appear to have done so over two decades ago, and don't have userpages so it's unclear how proficient they are in Greenlandic, let alone if they're native speakers or not. Thus, there seems to be relatively little useful content there.

Lastly, and the main reason why I am proposing closure despite my general aversion to doing this: as things currently stand, I believe this project has no future. The above situation with Greenlandic Wikipedia involved everyone left who was active on the wiki, including both active admins (who could speak Greenlandic but were not native speakers), deciding the project wasn't worth continuing and that it should be shut down. Neither of these two users who were admins of Greenlandic Wikipedia (Kenneth Wehr and Kaare) ever edited Greenlandic Wiktionary, which is another bad sign. In addition, a new user claiming to be a native speaker of Greenlandic even voted in favor of closing Greenlandic Wikipedia as his first edit, and this user similarly never edited Greenlandic Wiktionary. In addition, on the closure proposal for Greenlandic Wikipedia, the national chapter for Greenland, Wikimedia Danmark, made a statement that did not take a side on the fate of Greenlandic Wikipedia, indicating they were either not able or not willing to do active efforts to revive it. Once the closure proposal was accepted, it was determined that none of Greenlandic Wikipedia's contents were even useful at all, and they were thus deleted and not imported to Incubator. This once again does not bode well for the contents of the Greenlandic Wiktionary. Since Wiktionary is much less visible than Wikipedia to the general public, finding new contributors to revive a dead Wiktionary would be an even heavier lift than trying to revive a dead Wikipedia, which further does not bode well for this project's chances.

Given the fact that the project is inactive, its contents are lacking and could even be inaccurate, and it appears absolutely no one at all who actually knows the language is interested in creating content in Greenlandic within the Wikimedia ecosystem, per the precedents established by the closures of Nauruan Wikipedia, Pitkern & Norfuk Wikipedia, and Cree Wikipedia, in addition to the aforementioned closure of Greenlandic Wikipedia, I believe the Greenlandic Wiktionary should be closed, and its contents moved to the Incubator. DraconicDark (talk) 21:58, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

also the article count is almost the same as it was in 2008, which is no real activity just set of increase and decrease over time. But not anymore active. ~2026-85850-2 (talk) 01:16, 8 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
crazy difference if about 18 years ~2026-85850-2 (talk) 01:16, 8 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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  • Support - Pretty much the same case as klwiki. Decently sized linguistic community, but zero activity from said native community. As is it's a liability to Greenland and Greenlandic as a language. --~2026-98862-6 (talk) 21:06, 13 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support When you look at some om the words in other languages, you find things like kl:wikt:Skilift, which is translated to "paarlaaffik". That word means something like "place/time of being mistaken/exchanged", but not "ski lift". You could translate it with "skifte" in Danish, so maybe something was mixed up here. Other words are not even translated, like there are several pages with Swedish words for various insects, but all are just explained with "sullineq" ("insect"). I don't know why you think that "uniaaluk" has anything to do with dreams, but it means "ant", so it is at least an insect. The Greenlandic articles are a lot of strange languages, that likely no one ever has mentioned in Greenlandic like kl:wikt:Akawaiosut. The Bible articles have explanations in the same quality as the klwp: kl:wikt:Erinarsugassiat Pingaarnersaat has something similar to: "In the bible book two tventi, chapters eight with its people, yes they cannot be listed history wasp Salomo, yes dancing their perseverance and young_animal-body Saba queen's." The article kl:wikt:Estland has just "Estland country Europe". Close and delete completely. --Kenneth Wehr (talk) 10:00, 15 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    @Kenneth Wehr: Thank you for this. This basically confirms what I had thought. Regarding why I thought "ant" was "dream:" that's what Google Translate says it is (which obviously is incorrect given what you said, but I thought it was an example of a flawed definition).
    I wanted to ask: did you know anything about the Greenlandic Wiktionary's existence before reading this closure proposal? DraconicDark (talk) 20:52, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    I did know that it existed but had never really looked at it and wondered who may have written it. But at that time, I also thought that there once had been a Greenlandic Wikipedia community, which had shown to never have been the case. --Kenneth Wehr (talk) 21:34, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per Kenneth Wehr. AtUkr (talk) 12:59, 15 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
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