Discuss the creation of this language project on this page. Votes will be ignored when judging the proposal. Please provide arguments or reasons and be prepared to defend them (see the Language proposal policy).
The language committee needs to verify the language is eligible to be approved.
Check that the project does not already exist (see list).
Ensure the requested language is sufficiently unique that it could not exist on a more general wiki.
Ensure that there are a sufficient number of native editors of that language to merit an edition in that language.
The community needs to develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval (automated statistics, recent changes). It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.
Item about the language at Wikidata. It would normally include the Wikimedia language code, name of the language, etc. Please complete at Wikidata if needed.
"Wikipedia talk" (the discussion namespace of the project namespace)
Enable uploads
no
Default is "no". Preferably, files should be uploaded to Commons.
If you want, you can enable local file uploading, either by any user ("yes") or by administrators only ("admin"). Notes: (1) This setting can be changed afterwards. The setting can only be "yes" or "admin" at approval if the test creates an Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) first. (2) Files on Commons can be used on all Wikis. (3) Uploading fair-use images is not allowed on Commons (more info). (4) Localisation to your language may be insufficient on Commons.
"Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces
For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings
Anything else that should be set
Once settings are finalized, a committee member will submit a Phabricator task requesting creation of the wiki. (This will include everything automatically, except the additional namespaces/settings.) After the task is created, it should be linked to in a comment under "final decision" above.
I propose the reopening of the closed Kwanyama Wikipedia: it was created August 9, 2004, and closed less than three years later on July 10, 2007. I believe this to have been a mistake for the following reasons:
The sole reason for the Wikipedia's closure, as ascertainable from the proposal for closing the project, was that it was not at that time active. This likely would not be considered a valid argument today, since guidelines for closing Wikipedias have gotten stricter.
What content the Wikipedia had was not noted to be frequent targets by vandals.
The Wikipedia barely had any time to garner a community, being closed only two years and eleven months after its creation.
With 250,000 Kwanyama speakers in Namibia alone as of 2006, and more recent estimates finding there are 1.7 million Ovambo speakers today, there are probably many Kwanyama speakers who can edit the Kwanyama Wikipedia, if it is reopened.
Only 10 people voted in the discussion to close the Kwanyama Wikipedia, a small amount compared to other similar discussions.
The Incubator can be hard to use for new editors, which might ward off prospective Kwanyama contributors.
The ISO 639-3 codes separate Kwanyama and Oshindonga. It could be that they should be merged at ISO 639-3, and it could be that the WMF could open an Ovambo language Wikipedia. The first would have to be argued with SIL, and the second would be an exceptional request. Otherwise, we'd have to treat Kwanyama and Oshindonga as separate languages. List of Wikipedias by language group#Bantoid shows that sub-Saharan African languages generally take tens of millions of speakers to produce a usable Wikipedia; I'd doubt if Kwanyama would be successful in any real way with less than a million.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:53, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. I read through the closure discussions for both Kwanyama and Ndonga and agreed that, while neither one had strong arguments for closure, having two mutually intelligible Wikipedias would be pointless (a precedent already set by the Moldovan Wikipedia). I like the idea of an Ovambo Wikipedia which merges both. There are about 1.5 million speakers, giving it more of a chance. FinkyOfNalanja (talk) 02:35, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Yes, guidelines for closing Wikipedias have gotten stricter, but (I think) our guidelines for opening a Wikipedia have also gotten stricter, because Wikipedia has also become a more popular spam/vandalism target. If Wikipedia Kwanyama hadn't closed, then it would exist today likely solely through grandfathering. We shouldn't be trying to create new exceptions.
On the merits, note that I infer (on quite weak off-Wiki grounds) that the OP doesn't speak even rudimentary Kwanyama: when discussing various deleted Wikipedias, they could recognize that Kanuri resembles Hausa, but make no original linguistic commentary on Kwanyama. If so, then the number of Kwanyama speakers interested in building a Wikipedia might well be zero! Of course, requesting a Wikipedia probably requires a modicum of English fluency, just to navigate this website; potential editors might exist but not know where to post their request. But Namibia has English as an official language. I think that the people most likely to have internet access and the free time to work on a Wikipedia likely include at least one English-speaker, in which case the argument above goes through. Bernanke's Crossbow (talk) 22:42, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
