The Karachay-Balkarian Wikipedia written in six months starts with 900 articles.

^{Everything on Habré is aware that Wikipedia is in 272 languages ?}

This fantastically quick and “informative” (in terms of number of articles) has not yet been launched! At least I do not know about it. But in any case, the result is very impressive - just half a year (!) Elapsed from the start of active work to the opening of a new Wikipedia section, about 900 articles were written (!), Most of which were written by one (!) Person.

The impossible turned out to be possible! It turned out that one soldier in the field! I bring to your attention a heroic little story about the most rapid success among the sections in the languages ​​of Russia (even Russian, with 300 million people, at one time trampled on for a long time ).
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Back in the fall of 2009, the Wikimedia Incubator for the Karachay-Balkarian Wikipedia was not in the best condition, and there were only 60 articles in the Karachay-Balkar language (by the way, as many as 300 thousand speakers, although not 300 million as with Russian). This is a formal indicator, but nothing good). In general, the Karachai-Balkar language on Wikipedia did not particularly develop.

And so it was (would) always ... Until I came ... Tamerlane is one very active participant who translated 100% of the Most often used MediaWiki interface messages to Karachay-Balkarian in one day. From that moment began active development. Another very active participant from this time began to write a large number of articles.

Due to such unnoticed work, in the middle of November, the project of the Karachay-Balkarian Wikipedia was tentatively approved by the traditionally stubborn Language Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation , which oooooochen slowly reviews applications and oooooochen slowly opens new Wikipedia.

But the activity did not decrease and by February 2010 the number of articles reached 900 (again I remind you that this is formal - articles can consist of a couple of lines). I could be wrong, but no one has yet reached the number of 900, even if the formal articles in the Incubator. Most likely, I can say that at the time of the opening of the Wikipedia section, not one of the Russian languages reached such a number of articles. If this is not the case, then please correct me.

The uniqueness of the future Karachay-Balkarian Wikipedia and the amount of energy spent is also indicated by the fact that already in the Incubator (!) The “Image of the Day” column for each day is translated into Karachay-Balkar language.
Moreover, there are already five “selected articles” in Karachay-Balkar ( what is it? ). Purely visually, you can appreciate the huge article "Ekinchi duniya kazauat" (World War II) .

And on February 18, finally, it became known that the creation of the Karachai-Balkarian section was finally approved and the website krc.wikipedia.org would work in two weeks.

I am very happy for native speakers because they will now have (1) unlimited in size and other “paper” parameters (2) not requiring the state to allocate money (3) an encyclopedia in their native language, (4) being freely distributed (no other the encyclopedia cannot be legally recorded on a disk and distributed to its neighbors or sold to those who do not have the Internet) and (5) which can be used as a wonderful tool for preserving / developing culture (any culture - in Japanese Wikipedia, Pokémon) wears This language and, therefore, the culture of Russia and the whole world. This is at least. For Wikipedia, you can come up with thousands of different applications ( an example is semantic analysis of texts using Wikipedia ).

I remind you that absolutely any language of the planet Earth can get its Wikipedia, for which (1) there is an ISO 639 letter code (such a code is even found in the Klingon language from Star Trek , so Wikipedia was opened on it) and (2) whose speakers (well , five people, for example) can always be active on Wikipedia. The carriers of such a suitable language are tried to help in the wiki project “Small sections of Wikipedia in the languages ​​of Russia” and in the Wikimedia Incubator itself .
By the way, Wikipedia does not require that information sources be in the same language as Wikipedia, so you can create Wikipedia from scratch in languages ​​that even newspapers do not leave.

PS: By the way, I have no relation whatsoever to the language, nor to the Incubator, or to the project to help small languages, so I am glad and delighted absolutely sincerely, because I can imagine how much labor was spent and I can only envy industriousness.

^{Since this seems to be the first text on Habré that I created from scratch,
This text is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
or Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License
(you can choose any of these two licenses of Creative Commons ; if briefly, copy and use as you like, just specify the author of the text, ie me, although I don’t care, but do not leave this text under a total and unlimited copyright = )))}

See also some discussion here and here .

UPD: Made some amendments, but the essence has not changed.