http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/History_of_...ingon_Wikipedia

You can read the propaganda version above. Since I'm lover of irony, I thought I'd point out a few diamonds:



Ah, god.

And so, problems. Insurmountable problems!



They were passively dropped! Nobody dropped them. It just happened! It's one of those quantum mechanical things. Perhaps in some parallel universe, they weren't dropped. Who knows why such stuff occurs? Anyway:



It wath terrible! Nobody could form a community. It couldn't grow! It was going nowhere! The horror.

And so-- a Strong Man appears to Fix This.



Jimbo never said, but the maturation of Wikipedia and its sister projects as a whole to a vital worldwide resource was at stake.



But fortunately:

COMMENT from peanut gallery--

Although we can't imagine HOW it grows, considering all the VALID reasons it had to be locked, and booted off Wikipedia. Not having a community and all. One supposes that Wikia doesn't have any vital worldwide resources that they minded dedicating to some website that would make them AdSense money. And Jimbo, too.

Wups, say..... Wasn't Jimbo's decission on this a bit of a... conflict of interest? Considering that he owns some of Wikia? Where was the WMF board on this issue of siphoning-of-content from WP to Wikia? Did anybody even utter a peep? Did they notice the office supplies disappearing out the WMF door?

So who was responsible for this piece of self-serving historical tripe? Well, the part about it being moved to Wikia and continuing to grow was (not suprisingly) helpfully added by Angela Beesley. It continues to make Angela money there, also.

Most of the self-justifying stuff above, however, was written by UninvitedCompany (T-C-L-K-R-D) .

Anybody got any comments on this editor? Is he merely a licker of the brown sno-cone, or is there something I'm missing?

Three words : Minneapolis organ nerd.

The problem with this guy is that he's sincere and he's deadly serious.

If he had any way of seeing any subtext, he might be amusing Unfortunately, it's all sort of kartoffel and lutefisk-flavoured world view that just isn't that amusing....

Ah, yes. The Charles Lindbergh type. Know them well.

I didn't read the meta page, but there's only one reason the Klingon language projects were was shut down. That reason is, quite simply, the public humiliation of Der Jimbo. At some public event, someone else made light of the fact that there was a Klingon encyclopedia, so Jimbo right then and there shut it down in order to save face. This was another one of Jimbo's kneejerk reactions to an external stimulus. There was no reasoned discussion or deliberative weighing of benefits and costs; it was just Jimbo flexing his metaphorical pecs in an effort to wipe metaphorical egg off his metaphorical face.

I am tempted to write a short story about an alternate Earth where the Klingon Wikipedia was left alone, and Klingon becomes a genuine niche language among certain elements of the populace, resulting in an armed uprising.

I shall express my sentiments in Mogh's tongue: A brokh tsu dayn lebn!

My Guess —

Klingon porn is way too scary for hoomans.

Jon

In a universe without dates...

That's the thing. He over-reacts to every perfect troll on his talk page but greets rational inquiries with lip-service (or more often, ignores them completely).

While I've never seen him appropriately address any issue, a third of the communiteh still favors his "leadership" over whatever they believe would form in his absence.

I'm not sure whether this stems more from loyalty, group-think, or superstition.

"Too many chiefs, not enough Indians... but no-one willing to take responsibility." Isn't that a saying of K'Lass?

Mebbe Jimbo is afraid of ending up on Big Bang Theory?..........

Over the years we have generated many elegant metaphors to express the essence of Wikipedism, but I must say, that Klingon Boggle bit is an important contribution to the Å“uvre. Particularly when you consider that, from what we know of Klingons, they are an unusually warlike race of drama queens. You put that together with high-grade nerditry, throw in some turbulent adolescent hormones, and you have the very model of a Wikipedia admin.

You mean Kahless?

Whether or not you're a nerd, if you've got a linguistic bent Klingon in particular and constructed languages in particular are very interesting; as far as I know Klingon is actually more popular than Tolkein's elvish, and its deliberate limitations makes for interesting approximations and challengs.

That said, writing articles for no more than a thousand or so people (and less than a few dozen fluent speakers) seems like a bad way to spend a Friday night

It reminds me of the Church of Jedi consensus victories where 10,000s of people put down Jedi as their religion way outstripping all the usual cult religions in terms of "gaining legitimacy" and having far more laughs as they did so.

It is a bit of a logical inconsistency which, again, underlines the real motivations behind Pee-dia development and management. I do not see why they cannot have a Klingon wiki is they have all the other fancruft topic pages cluttering the main Wikipedias and outdetailing reality.

I hope they at least allow a Klingon Wiktionary?

Can't. Copyright issues: any such site would be derivative of Marc Okrand's official Klingon Dictionary. Paramount has sued, or threatened to sue, unauthorized Klingon language books and sites before; the only existing fansite is the Klingon Language Institute, who has a licensing arrangement with Paramount.

http://mughom.wikia.com/wiki/tlhIngan_Hol_...m:ghItlh%27a%27

This piece of self-dealing needs to be added to all of our sticky pages/blogs that focus on the Wikia scam.

I did my part.

If you forward that link to Paramount's licensing department I'm sure they'll be glad to send a DMCA takedown notice to Wikia's registered agent.

nuqneH?

Yes, do send an alert to Paramount, but send it in Klingon.

I don't see what the point is of making a fuss about this whole "Klingon Wikipedia" business. The sequence of events is something like:

1) Early-day Wikipedians create a version of Wikipedia in the Klingon language. This is good for a few laughs about the geekiness of Wikipedia, but is "mostly harmless" (as the planet Earth is in the Hitch Hiker's Guide, another geek favorite). Fertile territory for light humor, but nothing really big to build serious criticism around.

2) In a later stage, Wikipedia management (apparently Jimbo himself) had a burst of stodgy seriousness, of the "We're a serious encyclopedia, dammit!" variety, and removed the Klingon Wikipedia. One can't really argue against this move; there's little point to building an encyclopedia in a fictional language, after all.

3) Somewhat later, the project is revived as a Wikia site, with its name changed to "Klingon Encyclopedia" to avoid (ab)using the Wikipedia trademark. (But is "Klingon" trademarked by Paramount?) I don't see a good argument against this either; one of the functions of Wikia is as a place to build wikis that are for some reason not deemed appropriate by Wikipedia/Wikimedia, including in-universe geek-fiction stuff.

If there's some point in all of this, other than the usual humor built around observing geeky debates about whether or not to have a Klingon Wikipedia, it's that there's some alleged conflict of interest in Wikimedia casting off sites and the officially independent (but interlinked by key personnel, particularly Jimbo) Wikia taking them on. There is certainly potential for abuse there, such as if Wikimedia starts discontinuing things that are perfectly within its purview for the express purpose of letting Wikia take them on and get ad revenue from them, but that doesn't seem to have happened here; there was a fairly long period between when the site was taken off Wikipedia and when it resurfaced on Wikia, and I don't think it's ever been such a popular site to get significant ad revenue, anyway. Since it's free-licensed, anybody who wants can fork it.

If you're sure, why don't you do so yourself?

Wikia is full of IP violations. I have to guess the movie companies either 1) don't think they have a case, or 2) don't care. Alternatively, perhaps 3) Wikia has a license.

If Wikia has a licence, then the world has a licence as it would have been GPL'd. So we can kick nno. 3 into touch.

Wikia's free licensed?

The point is that Jimbo froze development of the thing on the site that WAS free-licensed, which sort of forces all development on the other site. It's rather like artificially hobbling and limiting the detail of Star Trek articles on WP, to encourage (in a rather Bonsai way) the growth of that material at Memory Alpha.

I don't think WP has a "natural" scope, except that it can't be a repository of completely original thought by the writer. So if you make up a new Klingon word, certainly WP would not have been right to float it. Same as any dictionary. But as a re-peater and summarizer for work published elsewhere, WP has already set itself essentially no limits. In particular, the idea that there no native Klingon speakers is particularly funny in the face of a continuing Espiranto Wikipedia. What country speaks Espiranto as the national language, again? About all you can do with Klingonese (what TOS used to call it) is make the argument that there are FEWER fluent speakers. But since when has WP been concerned with things being too trivial to print? It's NOTPAPER, you know.

Ah yes, I had the trademark violations in mind when I wrote that, but I suppose Kelly's point was on the copyright violations.

And I don't think you mean GPL. (Off hand I don't even know if it's GFDL or CC-BY-SA, but I'm pretty sure it's not GPL.)

I feel sorry for anyone who'd write a "Klingon Wikipedia". They must take "basement dweller" to a level that even English Wikipedia editors can't fathom. I shutter to think how they spend their Friday nights.