Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Toki Pona 2

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Request for a new language edition: Wikipedia Toki Pona 2

​ submitted verification final decision 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). Obtain an ISO 639 code 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.
• The community needs to complete required MediaWiki interface translations in that language (about localization, translatewiki, check completion).
• The community needs to discuss and complete the settings table below:

What	Value	Example / Explanation

Proposal
Language code	tok (SIL, Glottolog)	A valid ISO 639-1 or 639-3 language code, like "fr", "de", "nso", ...
Language name	Toki Pona	Language name in English
Language name	toki pona	Language name in your language. This will appear in the language list on Special:Preferences, in the interwiki sidebar on other wikis, ...
Language Wikidata item	Q36846 - item has currently the following values: English label: Toki Pona native label (P1705): toki pona instance of (P31)/subclass of (P279): a posteriori language, engineered language / Wikimedia language code (P424): tok writing system (P282): Latin script, sitelen pona, sitelen sitelen number of speakers, writers, or signers (P1098): 3,100	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.
Directionality	LTR	Is the language written from left to right (LTR) or from right to left (RTL)?
Links		Links to previous requests, or references to external websites or documents.
Site URL	tok.wikipedia.org	langcode.wikiproject.org

Settings
Project name	lipu Wikipesija	"Wikipedia" in your language
Project namespace	lipu Wikipesija	usually the same as the project name
Project talk namespace	toki pi lipu Wikipesija	"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.
Optional settings
Project logo	File:Wikipedia-logo-v2-tok.svg	This needs to be an SVG image (instructions for logo creation).
Default project timezone	UTC±0	"Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces	100: nimi [Word] 101: toki nimi [Word talk]	For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings	wgCapitalLinks: false wgContentNamespaces: 100 wgNamespacesWithSubpages: 100 => 0 Namespace aliases: 'Wikipesija' => NS_PROJECT 'W' => NS_PROJECT 'toki Wikipesija' => NS_PROJECT_TALK 'tW' => NS_PROJECT_TALK wmgBabelMainCategory: jan pi toki "%code%"	Anything else that should be set
submit Phabricator task. It will include everything automatically, except additional namespaces/settings. After creating the task, add a link to the comment.

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Proposal

As this request was filed incomplete, I, as an experienced Wikimedian, fluent-ish tokiponist, and active editor on the Toki Pona "lipu Wikipesija", am happy to take over the responsibility of writing the proposal and seeing this through to the end. This is written on behalf of myself; User:Tbodt, admin/sysadmin of the aforementioned project; and more generally the lipu Wikipesija community.

Toki Pona has existed in some form since 2001. Its definitive guiding text, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, was published in 2014, and since then the community has blossomed, well past the size it was in 2005 when the original Toki Pona Wikipedia was shut down. The growth of the community can further be seen in the recent publication of Toki Pona Dictionary and the assignment of ISO 639 code tok in January. (See also phab:T236938 [Wikidata L10n] and phab:T300378 [TWN L10n].) The community-maintained document "Where is Toki Pona used?" shows that Toki Pona is used in a variety of settings, including a new monthly periodical of original writing.

This proposal is slightly unusual in that it seeks to have an external wiki considered as the "test project". I have cleared with a LangCom member that, at least in principle, this is possible. (If upon further review LangCom decides we must move to Incubator, we are open to it, but would prefer not to for the reasons explained in that discussion.) This external wiki, lipu Wikipesija, is notably a fork of a fork of a Wikimedia project to begin with: After the deletion of the original Toki Pona Wikipedia in 2005, the community moved to Fandom, and then from Fandom to an independent site last year. We thus have content dating all the way back to the original Toki Pona Wikipedia! At ilo:Sona (Special:Statistics) you can see that we have 1,370 content pages (main and "nimi" namespaces) and 19 users with actions in the past 30 days—7 of us with more than 20, 4 of us with more than 100. Recently we have begun focusing on creating the "lipu suli", the List of articles every Wikipedia should have; many such articles had already been created. Feel free to click around at [1] to see what we've been up to; as you might expect it's a lot of stubs, but I think within the bounds of what many young projects have (since, despite this project's old history, it had been largely neglected until it was moved from Fandom last May, and many of the Fandom pages have needed cleanup).

Sizable portions of the MediaWiki interface have already been translated to Toki Pona. Some of this is discussed at phab:T300378, and you can see more of it just browsing lipu Wikipesija. ilo:Ante toki shows some of our translation status, while other translations have been made at a software level.

We are aware that a high standard is demanded for creation of a conlang Wikipedia, and for that reason I wish GTbot2007 wouldn't have launched this request so haphazardly. Looking at Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Lingua Franca Nova 2 and Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Kotava, I think we may already meet or exceed the activity levels that those projects had when they were approved, but Tbodt and I wish to leave no room for doubt, and were hoping for the Toki Pona community to first organize a big effort to get lipu Wikipesija to certain milestones—perhaps 3,000 articles, at least 500 of which aren't stubs, and the 1,000 vital articles at least half-bluelinked... just approximate numbers off the top of my head, not necessarily what we'll go with. We then plan to advertise this pali suli (grand task) to various Toki Pona communities across the Web, from which there is a sizable number (estimated in the thousands) of tokiponists to draw. Now that this request has been filed, we will launch that pali suli, but in the mean time, we would request that LangCom defer consideration until the effort is underway.

A closing thought: There are many Wikimedians who may wish to do interlanguage work but only speak their native language. If approved, a new Toki Pona Wikipedia would be the Wikipedia that it is easiest to learn the language of. This could create a beneficial hub of collaboration and learning for editors from across the Wikimedia movement, and would mean that with quite little study, an editor from the U.S. and an editor from China could converse about contributing to the sum of all human knowledge. I think that's pretty cool.

For myself, Tbodt, and others from the lipu Wikipesija community, -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 18:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

@GTbot2007: I think you need to fullfill your RFL page, with a brief summary on the above section that why you think we need to let Wikipesija back as tok.wikipedia.org? You need to provide reasons to demonstrate that the Toki Pona has independently proved number of speakers, use as an auxiliary language outside of online communities created solely for the purpose, usage outside of Wikimedia, publication of works in the language for general sale.

Anyway, can the eligibility for coming Toki Pona back be discussed within langcom mailing list? I don't expect the relative discussions be always publicly shown (iirc the eligibility discussions about Kotava were privately), but there needs discussions on analysing it per LPP#Requisites for eligibility§4.2 to clear the minds of all users interested in this page. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 01:59, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Per incubator:I:AN#tok_code_doesn't_work, probably @Pablo Federico Streccia Viera and Mahmudmasri: are also interested in this RFL? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 02:04, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

There is not anything saying it has to be wikipesija.org’s text being used, I just used Wikipesija as a transliteration of Wikipeida. GTbot2007 (talk) 15:04, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Well yes, but why start from scratch when there's an existing Wikipedia-like project in toki pona, and a community built around that? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 20:58, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Well we probably don’t need the nimi namespace GTbot2007 (talk) 12:46, 31 March 2022 (UTC)

Why not? A number of Wikipedias have in-house Wiktionaries under the same domain, and this is smaller than that, just a dictionary for Toki Pona words, of which there's only 120-140. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:13, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

The problem is that if your request on additional namespaces are just about words, the idea will probably conflict with the Wiktionary's purposes, so why not try to start Toki Pona Wiktionary? Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 05:50, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Existing Wikipedias have separate namespaces for hosting content that others have in separate wikis (dictionary / books etc.) so that would be nothing new. -- MF-W 11:46, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

To add on to what MF-Warburg said, lipu Wikipesija's nimi namespace isn't meant to serve as a dictionary for all languages, but rather just for the 120-140 words of Toki Pona. Having such a small number of words is what makes Toki Pona unique, so it seems reasonable for a Toki Pona Wikipedia to devote some space to defining them. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 01:49, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

For the record, this is something that (albeit a bit controversial) did happen on a larger scale at Scots Wikipedia (Define:Main Page). –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 16:47, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

@MF-Warburg: Well, switch back to main topic of this page, in your opinion can Toki Pona be eligible for a Wikipedia now? Or this request should still be rejected despite got a valid ISO code? Sorry for my repeat, but I still can't see any related threads through [2]. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 02:50, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

The requestor said "we would request that LangCom defer consideration", so I'm waiting on some signal from them we should start considering. -- MF-W 09:29, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

I did not say that GTbot2007 (talk) 12:39, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

@GTbot2007: MF-W was referring to Tamzin. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 17:37, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

As someone said before, I'm also interesed on a Toki pona Wikipedia, I think the Toki pona subreddit is a prove that there is some Toki pona speakers. I tried to create a Toki pona incubator proyect some time before, but they said the same arguments. I think now that with some people interesed in translate articles (we can ask for help in the subreddit) we can do this proyect. PFSV-UY (talk) 05:56, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

To side with the Wikipedia request, a Wikisource should be considered. There's a lot of texts in the category, but only two active editors. Erick Soares3 (talk) 11:13, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Support I am also interested in a Toki Pona Wikipedia. I think now that it has a ISO code and a much more vivid community than 2005 the situation has changed enough to make it possible. --Stefangrotz (talk) 21:46, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

I Support the request because Toki Pona appears to be an actively used constructed language. It so happened that I live in the Russian Federation, so I learned the actual local statistics of spoken languages. It says that as of 2020-21 there are 6 speakers of Toki Pona in Russia (census results here). The number is not really insignificant, because 1) the locals can only list three languages in the census questionnaire, 2) it's still officially the 2nd most spoken constructed language in the country after Esperanto, 3) 5 speakers are living in the urban area and 1 in the rural area, 2 of 6 speakers are claiming to speak the language on a regular basis. It's stats for just one developing country, now imagine how many of Toki Pona speakers are living around the globe, and how many could be potential editors/readers of the tokWP. --Wolverène (talk) 21:43, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

For the record, it looks like Toki Pona has recently got Wikidata's interface support (i.e. not only monolingual language support, but also label/alias/description supports happened), see d:Q103641676 for example, it has a "tok" entry. Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 23:41, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

• Support mature language. EpicPupper (talk) 01:01, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Oppose This is not a normal language in which one could expect to make inter-wiki links and such. By design, Toki Pona has a very small vocabulary, so a single Toki Pona word corresponds to dozens of clearly distinct words in ordinary natural languages. How would you handle the inter-wiki link for noka? On the horse, there are arrows pointing to five different body parts. And that's just one animal ... there are two others there. There is never going to be a Wikipedia article in any language for "tail; rump; bottom; thigh; knee; foot; toe". That means you'd need seven inter-wiki links, at a minimum, just for this one Toki Pona word.

Again this is by design. It cannot be fixed because it isn't supposed to be seen as a problem.

None of the comments above address the problems that led to the shutdown of the Toki Pona project in 2005. It certainly wasnt shut down for lack of speakers .... we have a Wikipedia in Old English and one in Old Church Slavonic, both languages with no native speakers. It wasn't shut down for lack of users either, as we have had projects for natlangs with very few active users. No, the Toki Pona project was shut down because Toki Pona is an experimental language meant as an alternative to, not a replacement for, traditional linguistic communication. Soap (talk) 15:59, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

In the Bambara language, at bm.wikipedia.org, spoken by 15 million people, national language of Mali, "there are three color terms: dyema (white, beige), blema (reddish, brownish) and fima (dark green, indigo and black)." On the other extreme, "In Serbian/Croatian language there are differences in dark brown (mrk), brown (smeđ & kestenjast), red (crven), pink (ružičast) and orange (narandžast), as well as in blue hues: very dark blue or blue-green (teget), dark blue (modar), blue (plav) and ash blue (sinj)." w:en:Color_term#Color_term_hierarchy Languages differ a lot in how they chunk concepts into words, and wikilinks have to deal with that.--Prosfilaes (talk) 15:47, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

I suspect one reason languages often have a small inventory of color terms is that it doesn't greatly hinder communication to use analogies and multi-word expressions. For example, English and Spanish both use the name of a fruit as the word for the color orange, and in both English and Spanish the word for pink derives from the name of a flower. In Toki Pona, the color orange could be expressed perhaps as loje jelo "yellow red". Lacking color terms isn't a great problem.

The problem is that Toki Pona lacks precision across the entire lexicon. Again, the noka page on the Toki Pona encyclopedia contains an image with arrows pointing to individual body parts that are all noka in Toki Pona. It is not that noka means the bottom or back half of one's body and further precising terms are required to narrow the meaning down; noka signifies individually each of these body parts that we think of as distinct.

One of the earliest writings in Toki Pona was a poem entitled pilin ike, which contains the line

pipi jaki li moku lili e noka mi.

And cockroaches nibble my toe.

Here, the word noka is translated as toe because that is the translation the author provided, but there is nothing in the word itself or even the surrounding context that tells us this. One could easily translate it as thigh instead, if the author had intended to let the reader's imagination take control and form their own mental image. This is a common pattern across the language as a whole, and as I implied above, my impression is that it is not a flaw in the language, nor a problem that needs to be fixed, but rather the way the language was intended to work. Toki Pona is a very interesting experimental language, but writing in Toki Pona requires accepting the limitations of the language, and we can see this by reading the Toki Pona encyclopedia as it exists today. I ask again, if we were to integrate Toki Pona's wiki into Wikipedia, what would we link the noka page to? Best regards, Soap (talk) 10:19, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Isn’t that just a variation on the Bonnie and Clyde problem here? –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 23:31, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

I doubt we would link the noka page to anything, unless some other wiki has an article on the same concept. That occurs in many languages. The palisa noka page, however, could be linked to the Wikidata item for toe. Meanwhile anpa noka could be redirected to noka, with that redirect addded to the Wikidata item for foot; likewise sewi noka for leg. (Neither is a term frequently used in Toki Pona, but nor is either incorrect, so they'd be fine to create for purposes of having redirects to link to.) Finally, the noka page itself could use something like en:Template:Interwiki extra, probably pulling first from leg and second from foot, allowing there to be relevant outbound langlinks despite the lack of WD links. None of this is different than how we already handle different wikis slicing up concepts differently. -- [[User:Tamzin|<span 9[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 07:03, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Oppose per Soap. Toki Pona is intended to be vague and minimalistic. Many scientific concepts can't be properly expressed in it. How would you, for example, say in Toki Pona, "The Planck length is equal to 1.616255(18)×10⁻³⁵ m, where the two digits enclosed by parentheses are the estimated standard error associated with the reported numerical value, or about 10⁻²⁰ times the diameter of a proton. It can be motivated in various ways, such as considering a particle whose reduced Compton wavelength is comparable to its Schwarzschild radius, though whether those concepts are in fact simultaneously applicable is open to debate" if the language has no words for numbers above two, no words for mathematical operations, no words for concepts in physics like "proton"? So we can say that Toki Pona was designed to be unsuitable for a Wikipedia of its own.

While it is true that many natural languages also lack words for advanced scientific concepts or even numbers beyond 2, these languages would borrow from other languages to fix that problem. Massive borrowing from English, Portuguese, or Hindi wouldn't violate the nature of these languages. But such borrowing is impossible in Toki Pona.

But if you can prove me wrong, I'll be happy to change my vote. Translate the above statement about Planck length into Toki Pona with that exact meaning, without getting extremely verbose, and you'll convince me. Steinbach (formerly Caesarion) 23:31, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

@Steinbach: It's inaccurate to say that Toki Pona has no way to count past 2. The "purest" counting system uses 0/1/2/many, while a relatively more complex one uses a system similar to roman numerals (units of 1, 2, 5, 20, and 100). Philosophically, Toki Pona's approach to precision in large numbers is "Do you really need to get that precise?" But in cases where it is necessary, such as the one you give, many toki pona sources, including wikipesija.org, will simply use Arabic numerals. So to translate your above statement: "suli Panka li suli Mita pi mute 1.616255(18)×10⁻³⁵. (sitelen poki li ken nasa tan ilo. suli ijo Poton la ona li kipisi pi suli 10⁻²⁰.) ni li ken tan mute. ken la suli linja lili ijo li sama suli Sotosasi ona. taso jan li sona ala e ni: sona ni li lon tenpo sama anu seme?" (Back-translation: "The Planck size is a number of Meter sizes of the amount 1.616255(18)×10⁻³⁵. (The contained numbers may be erratic due to devices. Compared to the size of a proton, they are a piece of size 10⁻²⁰.) This can come from many things. Maybe a thing's little line size is alike its Schwartzschild size. But people don't know this: Is this knowledge true at the same time?") Now, I'm sure that's not perfect, because a) I don't know much about Planck lengths and b) whoever wrote that on enwiki doesn't know much about clearly explaining complex topics. But I hope that it gets across that it's entirely possible to describe complex topics in toki pona. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 06:50, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Indeed not perfect, the back translation you gave doesn't match the original that closely! My favorite thing about Toki Pona is you can't lean on jargon to talk about things you don't really understand. I commend Tamzin for attempting that translation, that article will have to wait for someone who understands what on earth a reduced Compton wavelength is and why it matters. But since I do understand scientific notation and why it matters I can be pretty sure that the article would just write the exact number with scientific notation, and it would be read out loud either as "mute" or perhaps in one of the more innovative numbering systems that do allow numbers beyond 2.

@Steinbach, if you would like, I can attempt a translation from within my area of expertise (software engineering).

Re borrowing: in Toki Pona it's more nuanced than simply "impossible". You'll notice Tamzin did use a bunch of proper nouns from physics terminology. Using borrowed names is like emphasizing a foreign perspective, saying "the thing as seen or understood or created by those who gave it this name". How acceptable this is depends on how relevant and useful this perspective is - there's a spectrum. For a person or place, not using their given name is like ignoring that they have an identity outside of the Toki Pona world. For a concept which can be broken down and understood, using a foreign name is basically saying you have no idea what you're talking about. And everywhere in between. Tbodt (talk) 04:43, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

You have partly convinced me. Changed my vote to neutral. I'm still on holiday though, and editing by phone sucks. I may give a more elaborate reply when back home. Steinbach (formerly Caesarion) 09:14, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Support I also support the idea of a toki pona Wikipedia. Wikipesija shows that it is possible and works about as well as wikis in other conlangs do. Additionally, the fact that toki pona has a quite active community could make this wiki very worthwhile as a project. --Rockoro (talk) 07:47, 4 August 2023 (UTC)