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Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Interlingua Wikibooks

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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 b:ia: is currently open for discussion by the community.

Proposal

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The Interlingua Wikibooks currently contains 257 pages in the main namespace. I have looked at all of these pages individually. Only a very small part of the project consists of coherent educational books or manuals written in Interlingua.

By my count, 82 of the 257 pages, approximately 30 percent of the main namespace, are written wholly or predominantly in languages other than Interlingua. This includes 62 pages in English, for example b:ia:Le Vocabulario International and b:ia:Methodo e Technicas, as well as English source texts of Interlingua translations such as b:ia:Notes on the history of the Twentieth Century, Part 1 and several pages of an Ido course, such as b:ia:Curso 07. There are also 15 pages in Latin, including useless placeholder text such as b:ia:Soenamona Coves/Donec 9, two pages in Spanish (b:ia:Curso2 01 and b:ia:Ido-espaniol), and one page each in Basque (b:ia:Etxepare, containing almost no content), Ido (b:ia:Curso) and Portuguese (b:ia:Proba9).

A further five pages contain no useful content at all. Consequently, 87 pages, approximately one third of the entire main namespace, are either empty or not written in the language of the project.

List of the 87 pages that are empty or not written in Interlingua

Pages without meaningful content (5)

English or predominantly English (62)

Latin (15)

Spanish (2)

Basque (1)

Ido (1)

Portuguese (1)

A substantial part of the remaining Interlingua-language content does not consist of books, but of other types of material. Dozens of pages form alphabetical word lists, such as b:ia:Interlexico a; there are 29 such pages. Another 26 pages form an English–Interlingua dictionary, for example b:ia:Anglese-Interlingua/a. This is more akin to Wiktionary material. The English–Interlingua dictionary already exists there at wikt:ia:Appendice:Dictionarios/Anglese-interlingua. Other pages are isolated definitions or similarly short lexical entries, such as b:ia:Nullification and b:ia:Interposition, which would be more appropriate for Wiktionary, and b:ia:Lingua Siloti, which resembles a Wikipedia article.

Another considerable group consists of standalone translations of literary, religious, historical or political texts. These include parts of Candide (b:ia:Candide, o le optimismo and its subpages), Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (b:ia:Rikki-Tikki-Tavi), chapters of the Bible, such as b:ia:Epistola I de Petro and b:ia:Apocalypse, the United States Declaration of Independence (b:ia:Declaration de Independentia del Statos Unite de America), the speech I Have a Dream (b:ia:Io ha un sonio) and other literary texts, such as b:ia:Notas sur le historia del seculo XX, Parte 1. Such material is more appropriate for Wikisource than for Wikibooks; s:mul:Wikisource:Main Page/Interlingua would be the appropriate place for such texts. The same applies to the collection of fables and short stories, such as b:ia:Historiettas e contos in interlingua/Le Tortuca e le Aquila and b:ia:Le sonio del princessa.

There are also several test pages, abandoned experiments, isolated fragments and pages whose purpose within Wikibooks is unclear, for example b:ia:Proba, b:ia:Proba3 and b:ia:Historiettas e contos in interlingua/Le historietta que membros de Facebook scribe insimul.

Only a small part of the project can reasonably be considered genuine Wikibooks content. The clearest example is an incomplete Linux Mint user guide comprising fourteen subpages, such as b:ia:Guida de Usator de Linux Mint/Driver additiona and b:ia:Guida de Usator de Linux Mint/Firefox. There is also a short grammar of Interlingua (b:ia:Breve Grammatica de Interlingua), which appears genuinely useful. In addition, there is a limited amount of language-learning material, such as b:ia:Pronunciation de Interlingua, b:ia:Exercitios de expansion syntactic 1, b:ia:Lection 01 and b:ia:Dictigramma. Some individual exercise pages could in principle be incorporated into an Interlingua course. However, as titles such as Lection 01 already suggest, they are fragmented, inconsistently organised and, in several cases, accompanied by parallel material in English or other constructed languages.

The project has no active local editing community. During the last two years (26 July 2024 to 26 July 2026), only sixteen edits were made in the main namespace (see this query), ten of which were removals of long-standing vandalism. These are the remaining six edits made during that period: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6]. The absence of local maintenance is also visible in the condition of the project. On 23 July 2026, I removed vandalism that had gone unnoticed since June 2024: [7], [8] and [9], originating from b:ia:Special:Contributiones/Cococococoococcoclclclc. Other vandalism from June 2024 also partly remained unnoticed for long periods; see b:ia:Special:Contributiones/81.248.177.61 and the dates on which these edits were reverted.

Numerous pages in unrelated languages, empty pages, misplaced dictionary entries and unstructured source texts have likewise remained in the project for many years. There is no community maintaining its content. Therefore, I propose the closure of this project and the preservation of the useful parts of its content in accordance with the closing projects policy. --Icodense (talk) 19:22, 27 July 2026 (UTC)reply

Discussion

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  • Support per nom, I cleaned out pages not written in project pages. It would benefit if we could actually diffuse project content among sister projects as outlined above with the proposed move of word lists to wikt:ia:. --A09|(pogovor) 13:34, 8 August 2026 (UTC)reply
  • Support per nom. Does Wikibooks have an equivalent of Multilingual Wikisource? If so, genuine Interlingua books can go there. If not, most Interlingua books seem to often have English sections / introductions (given that there are 0 native Interlingua speakers) and can likely go there just fine. SnowFire (talk) 19:52, 15 August 2026 (UTC)reply
  • Support — I have separately audited those books, and I can say that the genuine wikibooks can be transferred to Incubator, and the English–Interlingua wordbooks and wordlists can go to Interlingua Wiktionary, leaving the rest to be deleted. Idk about the original translations by Wikimedians. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs) 04:22, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply
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