A project to revive abandoned Wikipedia pages was abandoned.

The abandoned settlement of Kadykchan in the Magadan Region at one time was the location of one of the Kolyma Gulags. The local mine was closed in 1996, people were evicted, houses were mothballed, the private sector was burned. Residents left cars in garages, clothes, things, children's toys. In 2014, only one elderly man with two dogs lived in a large village.

There is something attractive in abandoned ghost towns. Quite recently, thousands of people lived and worked here, children ran along the streets, “Lada” smoked at the entrance. And now only the wind makes noise in the window openings and on grassy playgrounds.

Its sad beauty is impressive abandoned buildings - entire cities or just the Olympic stadiums . Unfortunately, the sad fate of oblivion befalls not only human settlements, but also the pages of Wikipedia.

Many pages of the world's largest encyclopedia have not been edited for so long that they can be considered abandoned. The group of editors set a goal to look for such unfortunate pages and help them to revive, give up for adoption to the interested editor, combine information with other articles, or let the weary spirit go free, recommending such pages to be deleted. To this end, in 2006, editors-enthusiasts organized the Wikipedia project : WikiProject Abandoned Articles (“Wikiproekt of abandoned pages”).
')

The symbol of the project WikiProject Abandoned Articles. Picture: "Orphans", Thomas Kennington, 1885

To begin their work, enthusiasts have compiled a list of articles with the oldest editing dates, guided by a list of particularly ancient Wikipedia articles . It should be noted that most of the articles in the list of ancient pages cannot be called abandoned or outdated. Usually these are just reference pages for specific articles, with two links to two other pages.

For more accurate information about really abandoned pages, see the Wikipedia section : Database reports / Forgotten articles . Here there are specific informational materials that have not been edited for many years. For example, no one edited information about the Minister of Energy of Burundi since February 8, 2008, and information about the village of Lukovitsy in the Tula Region — since February 15, 2009. In the Russian-language section, an article about the village of Lukovitsy is carefully maintained, even the fact of flooding the village in 2012 by the River Upka is mentioned. But in the English-speaking section the village Lukovitsy looks completely abandoned. These are the pages that are considered "orphans": nobody follows them, does not update the information. Everything was forgotten about them, as if these people and settlements do not exist at all.

In most cases, abandoned articles are marked as blanks (stubs). So in Wikipedia called the article, which is at the initial stage of writing and has insufficient volume. Most often from several sentences.

Another list of abandoned articles is Wikipedia: Dusty_articles . It is compiled manually based on automatic lists. There are notable articles about the Communist Youth of Denmark (the wing of the Danish Communist Party) and the string background (referring to quantum fields in space-time, which corresponds to the classical solutions of string theory). No one has edited these articles since 2008.

“Wikiproekt abandoned pages” set a good goal. Unfortunately, he himself repeated the fate of those whom he tried to save from oblivion. At the moment, Wikipedia: WikiProject Abandoned Articles is listed as a low-active project , and none of the participants listed on the page responds . In the wiki community, the “inactive project” is a euphemism for an abandoned project, like a ghost town, it exists, but no one there or almost no one lives. The next on the scale of degradation status is an inactive project, it is already officially a dead city, like Ukrainian Pripyat (by the way, in this city the amusement park worked even the day after the explosion of the Chernobyl NPP reactor, during the evacuation).


The amusement park worked in Pripyat even after the Chernobyl accident. Photo: Timm Suess

Why the project to revive abandoned Wikipedia pages was abandoned is unknown. Perhaps over time, the list of abandoned articles became less and less significant. In 2007, when the project was active, Wikipedia was a completely different place. The community was smaller, and few knew about this encyclopedia either. The majority considered it an unserious project, in which false information is published. In those days, it was relatively easy to find the abandoned page of a great artist or another important topic. Saving these pages was obviously more interesting than the village of Onions and the Communist youth of Denmark.

Now Wikipedia is being edited at a speed of 10 edits per second . Every day, 800 new articles are added. If a deposit of abandoned pages has accumulated on the bottom of such a boiling pot, then very few people need it. Virtually all the excess was removed, even the Old Russian state was finally removed, renamed back to Kievan Rus . Among the abandoned pages are only very insignificant articles where almost no one goes. Although, perhaps, there are still good people who will help these "orphans".