Wikipedia Goes Live for Five Languages through the Future of Language Incubation Initiative

As part of a new Future of Language Incubation initiative to support language onboarding, Wikipedia is now live for five languages: Pannonian Rusyn, Tai Nüa, Iban, Obolo, and Southern Ndebele!

Overview

The Future of Language Incubation initiative is an effort aimed at implementing recommendations to streamline the technical infrastructure and build social pathways that support language incubation, with a focus on equity and closing knowledge gaps, crucial for the long-term sustainability and inclusiveness of our movement. These recommendations aim to simplify the technical setup for creating language wikis and improve each phase of language incubation—before, during, and after. They include automating language additions, enabling new wiki features, enhancing the editing experience in Incubator, and streamlining wiki creation. On the social side, they focus on fostering inclusive communities and exploring ways to make Incubator more welcoming, with improved discoverability and orientation resources. These recommendations emerged from extensive conversations with staff and community members. This initiative represents a collaborative effort involving various WMF departments and teams, including Language and Product Localization, Research, Product Analytics and Data Persistence SRE, and Community Programs.

As part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan for 2024-2025, several ongoing experiments are designed to address the cumbersome technology and workflows associated with the incubation process. Key areas of focus include:

• Lengthy and manual processes for request creation, approval, and wiki site setup.
• Technical limitations of the Wikimedia Incubator, the sole centralized platform for incubating languages, which currently lacks modern features such as Content Translation, Wikidata integration, and Growth features available on other Wikimedia wikis.

The goal of these experiments is to implement and test different approaches to find what works to overcome challenges in the language incubation space (such as how currently it takes a really long time for wikis to graduate from Incubator), and ultimately explore ways to simplify the current incubation process. As of April 2024, the average duration for a language wiki to graduate from the Incubator stands at 4.4 years (e.g., Fon Wikipedia) and could be significantly longer based on the challenges the community is trying to resolve during the process.

Enabling New Wiki Features for Incubator

One of the initiative’s key experiments aims to provide Incubator wikis with access to new features that enhance editing activity. To achieve this, five new languages meeting minimum selection criteria were fast-tracked for approval by the Language Committee and graduated from the Incubator. The selection criteria included metrics such as the number of edits, new pages created, average monthly active editors, and time spent in the Incubator over the past three months. The requirements included that the wiki must be a Wikipedia, have at least two active editors, and at least 30 edits in the last three months. This initiative sampled five wikis from different clusters to represent a range of activity levels, from newly incubated wikis to those with established histories. Full details are available in this report.

Approved Languages

The Wikimedia Foundation teams collaborated closely with the Language Committee to gain approval for this experiment and successfully graduate the selected wikis from the Incubator. The progress of these five Wikipedias can be tracked here. 

Southern Ndebele (nr)

Visit: nr.wikipedia.org – Southern Ndebele is one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, with around 1.1 million native speakers. It has achieved 135 content edits and has 3 active editors after 4,124 days in the Wikimedia Incubator.

A contributor from the Southern Ndebele community, User:Bobbyshabangu expressed heartfelt appreciation for the initiative, stating:

“I cannot put into words how precious a gift this experiment is to the South African editing community. We have advocated for this for ten years, and to see this experiment happening this year is simply divine. I am looking forward to supporting the Isindebele Wikipedia even more going forward.”

Obolo (ann)

Visit: ann.wikipedia.org – Obolo is mainly spoken in Nigeria, with about 318,000 native speakers. It has 106 content edits and has been supported by 3 active editors for 1,774 days in the Incubator.

Iban (iba)

Visit: iba.wikipedia.org – Iban is predominantly spoken in Malaysia, with smaller populations in Brunei and Indonesia, totaling around 2,450,000 native speakers. It has achieved 415 content edits and has had 4 active editors over 2,870 days in the Wikimedia Incubator.

Tai Nüa (tdd)

Visit: tdd.wikipedia.org – Tai Nüa is spoken across several Southeast Asian countries and parts of China, with around 720,000 native speakers. With 503 content edits, it has spent 1,056 days in the Wikimedia Incubator, supported by 4 active editors.

Pannonian Rusyn (rsk)

Visit: rsk.wikipedia.org – Pannonian Rusyn is a Slovak language primarily spoken in Serbia and Croatia, with some communities in the United States and Canada. It has approximately 20,000 native speakers and has achieved 1,167 content edits. After 816 days in the Wikimedia Incubator, 9 active editors are working to help it thrive.

One positive outcome from this experiment is that it has sped up the approval process for certain languages. For example, previous requests for approval for the Iban, Obolo and Southern Ndebele languages, which had stalled in the growing backlog or lost momentum due to community inactivity, gained traction as the project steering committee actively advocated for their meeting the experiment’s minimum criteria.

What’s Next?

Looking ahead, the next steps for this experiment involve monitoring content growth and community engagement on the newly approved wikis. We will compare the progress of these production wikis against those still in the Incubator, following an established measurement plan. At the end of the three-month pilot period, we will conduct a review to assess the status of each wiki and determine whether adjustments are needed to support their ongoing growth and sustainability. Additionally, we are exploring experiments aimed at reviewing the current wiki site creation process and improving it to support a more simplified workflow. This will help creators of new wikis better sustain the process over time. We are also documenting journeys of languages, before, during and after incubation as part of these efforts. Stay tuned for more updates on the Future of Language Incubation page on MediaWiki.org.

Join us in welcoming these new Wikipedias to our movement!