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Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Iñupiaq Wikipedia

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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 ik: is currently open for discussion by the community.

Proposal

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I had supervised the Greenlandic Wikipedia for several years until it recently was decided to close it down, since there were no native speakers involved and it had been more and more exposed to spam with insufficient AI translations.

Greenlandic is the largest and most developed Inuit language with around 60,000 speakers. I was therefore surprised that there can be projects for the other Inuit languages that have way fewer speakers and without the same official status as Greenlandic. I therefore looked at the Wikipedia in Iñupiatun ("Iñupiaq" is actually the term for one person, not the language). I cannot find any native speakers in this project either. This isn't that surprising since the language only has around 1200 speakers left, almost all of them elders according to Louis-Jacques Dorais, since everyone speaks English nowadays. It seems that most articles were originally started by a native speaker of Turkish, and later a native speaker og Portuguese and a native speaker of English. All of them write on their user pages to have insufficient knowledge of the language and write articles by using online dictionaries and grammar resources. I don't speak Iñupiatun either and don't know anyone who does, but since I speak Greenlandic and am a PhD fellow researching in comparative Inuit languages, I can compare the articles with Greenlandic grammar.

When looking at the articles, I can see, that many of them only contain the lemma, a Latin (for taxa) or English translation and an image, but no text.

Most of the others are about countries, cities and subdivisions of federal countries. All of these articles are written as something, that looks like a transliteration of the Inuktitut syllable script, which only can render Inuktitut sounds properly. It is true, that when Inuit first came in contact with Europeans and Americans, they had problems articulating words and names from their languages, and therefore adapted them to their own phonotactics. Therefore, Greenlandic has very old loanwords like palasi (< præst "priest") or aapakaaq (< abekat "monkey"). Bilinguals don't have these problems, and since all Iñupiatun speakers also speak English, it would be surprising, if they had to change the words to Inuit phonotactics, especially written. I looked at some grammars and text examples, and couldn't find any examples for this. They just use the original names as one would expect. But here, ik:Donald Trump becomes Taanaltaq Turampaq.

Besides the strange phonological renderings, we can also find even stranger calques. The article ik:Marilaan (= Maryland) is also linked to as Mari Nuna ("Mary Land") and Mariim Nunaa ("Mary's Land"). One can also find ik:Nigiq Asitiaq, where nigiq means "North wind" or "East wind", but only in Greenland "South wind" (due to the Inuit orientation systems) and connected it to the pseudo-Iñupiatun form for "Ossetia". From a Greenlandic perspective, this makes no sense, and I doubt that it does here. If the articles have text, it looks like baby language from a Greenlandic perspective, often without any verbs or ignoring the most basic rules of Inuit syntax. A direct translation of the article about Maryland would be something like: Maryland or Mary Land grew up [according to the dictionary] United States of America. 6,045,680 hum[an] (2019). There are clear grammatical errors in every sentence and it even looks like the authors didn't even understand, that Inuit languages are ergative languages: ik:Apikasiaq looks like a word-by-word translation from English without any syntactical coherence. ik:Aglagvik (ini) looks like acceptable grammar, but it states: The desk has the young man become aware of. (with wrong orthography). Maybe there is another dialect, where the first word refers to a school, but it does at least not in the main dialect (it means directly translated "writing place", the same word is used in Greenlandic for both "desk" and "office"). I would guess that the rest of the sentence should be something like "is the children's education place", but it does not.

There seems to be no actual Iñupiatun in this wiki. I have written on the main page discussion (see link above) some weeks ago and got no response. There is no activity besides spam and the one or two mentioned users that obviously don't know the basics of the language besides a dictionary and some inflection tables. I therefore propose this project for closure. I would guess that it is the same for the Inuktitut Wikipedia, but haven't looked at it thoroughly yet. Kenneth Wehr (talk) 20:36, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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  • Support - Much like in the case of Greenlandic, Nauruan and Pitkern, the Wikipedia as-is would be a liability to the already moribund language, only worsening rather than improving the situation. Close it. --~2025-32352-92 (talk) 04:47, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - I fully agree. --DerMaxdorfer (talk) 15:37, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: rather than the current approach of incubate-create-close, I think we need a different approach to the smallest languages. With a process for reviewing and approving new additions, and giving editors a reviewer flag (similar to Flagged revisions perhaps). So that there is no incentive for spam but a slowly aggregative place to add translations of the 100/1000 essential articles, &c. Would this not avoid the 'worsening' effect described? –SJ talk  18:36, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That sounds like a good initiative. But please elaborate: What does the flag do, who gets it, and what happens if you are a user without? Is it like the reviewer user right in dewp? But that would require some native users. In my opinion every wiki where not at least one or two native speakers respond within a month after asking on the main page discussion/village pump, should be speedily incubated, because no one can assure, that it isn't fake. --Kenneth Wehr (talk) 18:48, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    As far as I can see, only three wiki created from Incubator have been closed again (two Wikinewses, the other one lrcwiki). Wikis like this one are from the time before that where Wikipedias have been created for every ISO 639-1 (two letter) code. - Apart from that, I think reviewers could be an interesting idea for some wikis, but that would be something for the communities to decide, if they exist. I agree with Kenneth that the most important thing is that there need to be active users at all who are (native) speakers. -- MF-W 23:24, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - If there are not enough natives to support this Wikipedia, it should be closed. Especially for the background, that this Wikipedia get even worse with "fake" translation from tools, that are not really trained and with Lemas, also generated by AI. --GodeNehler (talk) 12:34, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom and previous discussions. If Iñupiatun Wikipedia does have broken phrases form almost all of its (few) content, a removal to Incubator is just cutting losses before something bad happens. --Goodlucksil (talk) 22:03, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support similar to the Greenlandic Wikipedia, no native speaker contributors and an active danger to the language. --Icodense (talk) 09:20, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Tend to Support, by checking several local contents, the community has tried to redesign grammars, but still nothing considered successful, thus there seems nothing to fix anymore, it's just a failed Wikipedia. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 09:55, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Almost all of the circumpolar wps (also in the incubator) are chock full of this type of material; they could also be proposed for closing imo. Also ikwikibooks and ikwiktionary should be looked at for quality and closed if necessary. -Yupik (talk) 09:22, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support another tragic failure of an indigenous language wiki with no actual competent speakers participating in it. I don’t speak Iñupiatun but I’ll trust the proposer’s expertise here. --Dronebogus (talk) 13:17, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. The Kenneth Wehr's arguments are more than convincing. --Wolverène (talk) 06:15, 15 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with SJ that we might need some mechanism to protect and nurture the smallest projects. Maybe we should cooperate with institutes or government departments to regularly check if the content and users are genuine. Maybe we should freeze a site when all the known speaker-contributors become inactive (like a circuit breaker?). The smallest projects (and the Incubator as well, considering the current RfD for Wikipedia Ancient Greek test project, which is basically telling an identical story to this) should not be a playground for parole inventors and pseudo-polyglot enthusiasts. --魔琴 (talk) 04:19, 28 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I don’t know if Wikimedia can realistically support these projects. Wikimedia is huge, global, cosmopolitan, universal. These languages are tiny, insular, and intimately connected with group identity and culture. Plus restricting who can edit and tying legitimacy to outside authorities is kind of antithetical to the spirit of Wikimedia being the free educational platform anyone can edit. Gatekeeping is good for language preservation but bad for growing a wiki. Dronebogus (talk) 06:45, 29 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikimedia is a platform that anyone with competence can edit in good faith. One who doesn't know a language is not competent to write sentences in the corresponding Wikipedia version, even when good-faithed. When it comes to endangered languages, there is only a very small amount of people that is competent and even fewer would ever come to Wikipedia. And if all the known speaker-contributors become dormant at one point, I doubt the wiki will grow any further despite we keep the gates open.
    Since Wikimedia does not have the ability to decide who is a speaker or not, we can only seek help from outside institutes. They can help us verify the contents, and check if the regular users have the proficiency they stated to have from their contributions. I'm not proposing edit restrictions for live communities, or a change to the editorial process.
    I understand that gatekeeping is unnatural for the Wikimedia movement which was birthed from the failure of a gatekeeped project. But I don't think the current model works for the smallest projects. --魔琴 (talk) 14:48, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Move this project to Incubator. --Agusbou2015 (talk) 00:46, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
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