Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Toki Pona (2nd nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Delete. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:21, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Toki Pona

Toki Pona (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

An apparently non-notable, web-based constructed language. This article has a long history, created way back in early 2002; the history of this constructed language and its online community appears to be highly intertwined with Wikipedia, as it it was invented in "mid-2001," less than a year before this page was created, the creator of the language has extensively edited this article, and the apparently there was even a Toki Pona Wikipedia that has since been deactivated.

This article was previously nominated for deletion 2 1/2 years ago on the vague grounds of being "unencyclopedic"; it was kept, with most of the "keep" arguments on the grounds that it has a following on the Internet with several fan sites, a Yahoo group, and the now-defunct Wikipedia.

However, the original AfD did not deal with a very important point: the lack of available reliable sources to demonstrate notability and ensure that all of this information is verifiable. I've scoured the Google News archives, as well as my university's Lexis-Nexis search, but have been unable to find a single reliable source myself. Attempts have been made on the talk page to find sources, but the only ones that have been added are an article about constructed languages with a small sidebar entry about Toki Pona, and an article about the speed of thought that cites it among other examples of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, neither source addresses the language directly nor in detail, as WP:N defines. Additionally, the lack of reliable third-party sources makes it impossible to confirm crucial details such as the assertion that the language's creator Sonja Elen Kisa is actually a linguist, for instance, or to verify that the number of language speakers and "enthusiasts" is accurate. Krimpet (talk) 05:23, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

• Delete. Subject is not notable. The grammar information composing most of this article has never been published in any reliable source. Toki Pona has received no attention from academic linguistics. This language seems to only exist in Yahoo groups and websites published by its creator, who does not seem to claim any credentials as a professional linguist. -- Schaefer (talk) 06:35, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

• Delete, Wikipedia could stand to be cleaned out of a number of Conlang articles, which, like other internet-based topics, got in early when standards weren't so strictly enforced. This just doesn't meet the standards for having sources that support the text. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 06:59, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
• Comment, I think this might be as notable as many of the books we have. I do have a problem keeping it in this form which makes it look like a language when it's a study/book/research paper. Maybe it should be kept on this merits, although it would involve some work. gren グレン 08:54, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nom as failing WP:A and WP:N. Although it makes someone a fine hobby, and a few other people seem to like it, Wikipedia is not here to publicize things an editor made up which failed to demonstrate notability in the larger world out there. Edison 14:25, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. Toki Pona is in fact quite well known among esperantists and indeed does give interesting insights in the Sapir-Whorf-hypothesis. And there are a lot of people who did not come across Toki Pona through the author's website or through Esperanto meetings where Toki Pona is often taught as well. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And Toki Pona certainly is one of the well-known and wide-spread planned languages (the fact that it is only some 5 years old makes it of course less known than older projects such as Volapük, Esperanto or Interlingua). In my opinion, Wikipedia should be kept from "private conlangs" spoken by only one or a very few persons. For Toki Pona there are certainly a hundred or more speakers. I'm sorry that I cannot prove this, it's just based on personal experience. But it's absolutely not true that the editor just made it up for the article (this would be called "Original Research", wouldn't it?) — N-true 14:35, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment: Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth. The issue is not whether an editor "made up" the content or whether there are 3, 30, or 300 speakers. It's whether the reader can verify that the information in this article is compiled from reliable third-party publications. Once all the information that cannot be thus verified is removed, how much content do you expect will be left? -- Schaefer (talk) 15:18, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
    • Well, if that is the case... then why are we arguing about notability? It's obvious that the language is notable (there was a Wikipedia in it, once, 12 links from other articles, dozens from talkpages and userpages, 30 interwiki links which are not just stubs, various TP-groups on Yahoo!, StudiVZ or LiveJournal, just to name a few...). The facts about the language's structure can easily be checked with the official website or can even be verified/corrected by Sonja E. Kisa herself. Merely its usage and speaker count is not as easily retrievable. — N-true 15:32, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
      • Notability doesn't flow in circles: a subject's inclusion in Wikipedia can't be justified by its inclusion in Wikipedia. Groups on Yahoo! and LiveJournal are not encyclopedic sources. The grammar information on this page concerns a "language" with a dictionary of 118 words, and no literary works of reasonable length. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and the claiming there exists anyone who can express themselves fluently in a language limited to 118 words is extraordinary enough to warrant the attention of professional linguists the world over. No such attention has come. Not one word of Toki Pona has been published in any physical book, ever. I can't see where this "obvious" notability is coming from. -- Schaefer (talk) 16:38, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
      • The facts about the language's structure can easily be checked with the official website or can even be verified/corrected by Sonja E. Kisa herself. — If the only source for an article is the sole word of a Wikipedia editor, then that article is unverifiable. If the only source for knowledge on a subject is what is documented about it by its inventor/creator/author, then that subject is not notable. Uncle G 01:42, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep there are factual sources for the contained material, several academic articles and even books make reference to the language. A Google search is an insufficient test for notability! Canderra 17:13, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Please name some of these academic articles. I've done searches on both LexisNexis and EBSCOHost for "toki pona" with no results, and the results on Google Scholar (4 results, none of which is in English) don't seem to be written by professional academics or published in any printed journals. -- Schaefer (talk) 17:38, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
  • That statement is, as far as I can tell, untrue. I can find no books about this purported language. The German paper, alluded to by Schaefer, is self-published on a web site, and not a journal article at all. Uncle G 01:42, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep There Was a TOKIPONA wikipedia. c'mon, we've fished a good one.Kfc1864Cuba Libre!My name is Maximus Caesar Zabidus 23:16, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep for historical purposes, or as an alternative, transwiki to Meta. If a language was once taken seriously enough to have a Wikipedia in that language (although it has since been deleted and moved to Wikia), users should at least be able to find out what the language is like. (Note that the Toki Pona Wikipedia managed at one point to garner more articles than such languages as Tibetan, Somali, Lao, Khmer, and even Punjabi -- the latter of which has over 100 million speakers.) --Metropolitan90 06:05, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
  • The problem is that that fact was never considered notable enough by anyone outside of Wikipedia that they actually recorded it. The existence and demise of a Wikipedia is not a part of recorded human knowledge outside of Wikipedia. As such, it is unverifiable. The only way for a reader who has never heard that before to verify its truth is to labouriously perform primary historical research. There are no sources to consult that actually document the history that you are referring to. It is not part of recorded human knowledge.

    And the same goes for the language as a whole. No-one apart from its creator has actually documented it. There are no third-party primers, grammars, readers, tutorials, teaching aids, or other such published materials. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, a tertiary source. Everything in Wikipedia has to have gone through a process of fact checking, peer review, publication, and acceptance into the general corpus of human knowledge. Evidence that knowledge of this language has actually become part of the general corpus of human knowledge would be multiple non-trivial published works from people independent of the creator that are about the language. But no such works apparently exist.

    Keeping this "for historical purposes" is to argue that Wikipedia itself should be a primary historical source. Per our Wikipedia:No original research policy, Wikipedia is not a primary source. There are alternative outlets for primary research and primary source material. Wikipedia is not such an outlet. Uncle G 10:21, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

• Keep Reliable sources: [1] [2] [3]. Yes, the last two seem to be self published, but they are written by people who appear to be experts in constructed languages. I'm not certain, but these four non-english results on google scholar are probably also acceptable: [4], Additional evidence of notability: a course offered in the language at MIT. Saying that there are no sources to verify the information in the article is ridiculous: almost all of the information in the article is contained in that first source. There is a very in-depth article linked in the references section of the current article. It might be in Russian, but there is no wikipedia policy that sources must be in English. It was apparently published in "Journal Kompyuterra No. 26-27 (July 20, 2004)" and seems to include a complete section on Toki Pona and its application to investigating the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Also, the official web site of the language, while self published by its author, can be considered a reliable source for the vast majority of the content as it is mostly non-contentious. All-in-all, there is no shortage of sources here. JulesH 14:07, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

All three of those first websites you posted are self-published! The first is in the personal web space of B. K. Knight, a 21-year-old student at UGA. The second is from a self-published website by a guy named Simon Ager, and the third is just a blog hosted on Google's free Blogger service. The four Google Scholar results you mentioned have already been addressed: The only ones with a non-trivial mention of Toki Pona are the essays in German and Spanish, both of which are self-published online by their authors and not printed in any sort of journal, academic or otherwise. I don't speak Japanese, but the Japanese article only mentions Toki Pona once outside of footnotes, as part of a list of artificial languages. I cannot determine whether this article is self-published or not, but the reference is clearly trivial either way. The Russian article in the Google Scholar results is also trivial reference, as Toki Pona is part of a long list of artificial languages and is not given even one word of discussion (note the article even mistakenly lists it as two languages, Toki and Pona).

Finally, there is not a course offered in Toki Pona at MIT. The activity described in the link you provided is clearly stated to be a free, non-credit activity session with no advance sign-up required, held only once on 20 January 2004, lasting for one hour. The instructor is not an MIT professor, but rather the former president of the student Esperanto Club. This is not, by any stretch of the phrase, a "course offered in the langauge at MIT". -- Schaefer (talk) 15:45, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

• Delete per the arguments given by Schaefer and Krimpet. Maybe this will be notable someday. At any rate, it doesn't seem to belong in the article namespace. A greatly reduced version or some other record of it in the project namespace might be appropriate (since there was a WP in it). - Aagtbdfoua 23:10, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. I arrived at this discussion inclined to keep, but I agree that Wikipedia should not be a means for disseminating knowledge of what is still a mute lili (tiny) phenomenon. People searching for info about Toki Pona can turn to the "official website," Omniglot, etc. It does not yet seem an appropriate topic for Wikipedia. The fact that some Wikipedians are Toki Pona enthusiasts does not change this. -- Rob C (Alarob) 00:58, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion the mere fact that there are several hundreds or even thousands people scattered all over the globe (so it's not a closed group) out there who know about Toki Pona and perhaps want to know more about it, should be reason enough to keep the article. If it really get's deleted, we will have to delete Wenedyk and Loituma Girl and many other articles with no 3rd party sources for the same reason. With this argument, you could delete perhaps 10% to 20% of Wikipedia because those information could as well be retrieved from some official sites. In addition, the official website of Toki Pona only gives prescriptive information about the grammar and usage of the language, but a Wiki article presents meta-information about it. With the deletion, Wikipedia will lose information, that (quite obviously) lots of people were interested in. Toki Pona cannot be compared with something like a "private conlang", which would indeed be unsuitable for an encyclopedia. — N-true 01:27, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

With respect, none of the sources I checked online claimed that more than a few hundred Toki Pona speakers currently exist. The question here is not whether the topic is interesting -- I, for one, am interested, and am glad the deletion discussion happened to lead me to it. But as to whether it is appropriate to include the topic in Wikipedia -- yet -- I believe the answer is no. Note that no one is calling for the topic to be purged from the realm of human knowledge, nor are they stating that there's something wrong with your or my being interested in the topic. -- Rob C (Alarob) 01:44, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

• Weak delete I'm not sure about the notability of it...it seems non notable, and the references are terrible, but I have an inkling that it might just have something. Hence the weak delete G1ggy! _{Review me!} 07:30, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per lack of verifiability through reliable sources. Nobody can say it wasn't given adequate time to improve. Congrats on having the single most odd illustration I've ever seen in Wikipedia (the "body parts" guide). Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 02:12, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.