Volapük

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

The Volapük Wikipedia was created in February 2003, alongside the Croatian, Lithuanian, Armenian, and Bihari Wikipedias. The main page was created on 27 January 2004, marking the edition's official launch. It underwent a redesign on 3 March 2004, and a second one on 15 December 2006, which serves as the basis for the current layout. In January 2007, Wikipedian Sérgio Meira (Smeira) began to actively use a bot called SmeiraBot to create many new articles about Volapük-related topics, before massively adding stubs about cities primarily in France, Italy, and the United States. MalafayaBot was another active bot on the Volapük Wikipedia; it served primarily to greet new users, add interlanguage links, and clean up deprecated files, but also created hundreds of stubs about individual years. Between June and September 2007, the Volapük Wikipedia grew very quickly with the use of bots. On 7 September 2007, it became the 15th Wikipedia to reach the milestone of 100,000 articles, surpassing many editions in much larger languages including Arabic, Turkish, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Danish. Starting with only some 5,000 articles in June, it had over 110,000 articles by November of the same year, surpassing even the Esperanto Wikipedia to become the largest Wikipedia in a constructed language. In early September, Smeira's work was criticized by a few Wikipedians, including the founder of Esperanto Wikipedia Chuck Smith, who asked about his motive for favoring 'quantity at the great expense of quality'. In response, Smeira wrote: 'I thought I could try to get some new people interested in learning the language and contributing by doing something a little crazy -- like increasing the size of the Volapük Wikipedia as fast as I could, with Python programs for copying and pasting information onto pre-translated templates.' Soon after, on 21 September 2007, a proposal was submitted to Meta-Wiki to close the Volapük Wikipedia. A long discussion followed, as did eventual disputes and even vandalism. The final decision was to keep the Volapük Wikipedia. On 25 December 2007, a second, 'more balanced request' was created, suggesting a radical cleanup of Volapük Wikipedia, with the aim of removing all bot-created articles and transferring the remaining articles to the Wikimedia Incubator. This proposal was also rejected, on 28 January 2008. The Esperanto Wikipedia's number of articles caught up on 23 September 2009, two years after being surpassed, and it remains the largest Wikipedia in a non-natural language to this day. Since then, the number of articles has remained relatively stable on the Volapük Wikipedia, while the edition's collaborative quality has increased, as more effort is put into improving current articles rather than creating new ones, leading to a doubling of the depth indicator since SmeiraBot made its last edit in April 2008, after a total of over 1,150,000. Following discussions about the status and future of the Volapük Wikipedia, several initiatives led to the creation of measures to promote the development of quality articles throughout Wikipedia. On 7 November 2007, Sérgio Meira introduced the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles, a ranking of Wikipedias based on the size of its articles in a predefined sample based on the List of articles every Wikipedia should have. Two months later, on 8 January 2008, a Proposal for Policy on overuse of bots in Wikipedias was created on Meta-Wiki. Its purpose was to address perceived problems resulting from 'massive flood of additions from bots', but as of July 2014, it remains a proposal and is still in the process of gathering consensus for adoption.

Reader's Guide

The word Vükiped is unique among translations of the name Wikipedia because it conveys an adaptation of the original word's connotations while being composed entirely of existent Volapük morphemes. Instead of opting for an habitual calque of the English portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia, the Volapük Wikipedia's community preferred to devise a neologism, since a borrowing of the prefix wiki- would be inconsistent with Volapük morphology. The resulting Vükiped is composed of morphemes vü- ('inter-', 'among') and kiped ('to keep', 'to preserve', 'to maintain'), and has an implied meaning that roughly translates as: 'the effort to maintain this Wikipedia is shared among a group of folks'. The word was adopted in early 2004 for its autological conveyance of a central aspect of Wikipedia's nature and because it is both phonologically and orthographically similar to the original term Wikipedia. The first Wikipedia logo made for the Vükiped was created by Nohat and transferred to Wikimedia Commons on 8 June 2005. Until May 2013, the Volapük Wikipedia was the only edition with over 100,000 articles still using the first generation of Wikipedia's logo. It was among the last Wikipedias to make the switch to the second-generation logo. The second-generation logo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 12 June 2010, but only published on the Volapük Wikipedia almost 3 years later, on 4 June 2013, because priority was given to a Wikipedia's reach, as opposed to its size. The Volapük Wikipedia is the only edition with over 100,000 articles that has never replaced its logo with a commemorative version upon reaching new milestones. As of September 2026, the Volapük Wikipedia's approximately 55,000 articles account for approximately 10% of all the articles written in a constructed language, making it the second-largest edition in the family after the Esperanto edition, whose share is 70%. The Volapük edition's previously low depth increased dramatically after the bot's articles were deleted, going from a value of 15 on 1 July 2022 to 277 on 1 January 2023. It currently has a depth of 89.2. At close to 600 articles per speaker, the Volapük Wikipedia has, by far, the greatest number of articles per speaker of any edition of Wikipedia. These figures were based on a very optimistic estimate of 200 speakers of Volapük. Its editing community currently consists of 1 administrators (2.4% of all active users) and 41 active contributors, of which on average between 1 and 3 are very active every month, and there are in total 8 users with over 1,000 edits (excluding bots). As it mainly consists of 'Poplar Bluff' style articles, it fits the definition of a 'botopedia' (Russian: ботопедия), as coined by the Russian Wikipedia. Nevertheless, the Volapük Wikipedia also has 14 featured articles (Yegeds gudik), and a relatively low proportion of 0.12 featured articles per 1000 articles, on par with the Uzbek, Lithuanian, and Danish Wikipedias. It features a rich collection of articles about the history of the Volapük movement that are mostly unique to the Volapük Wikipedia or have shorter translations in other languages. As of 3 September 2026, 9 articles on the English Wikipedia could be expanded by translating from the Volapük Wikipedia. In 2013, the Oxford Internet Institute created a graph, as part of its Information Geographies project, and found that the Volapük Wikipedia had the 11th-largest amount of geocoded articles of any Wikipedia edition. It also noted that although most editions contained 'between 12% (Italian Wikipedia) and 20% (English Wikipedia) of geocoded articles', the Volapük Wikipedia contained 79%, and was deemed 'the exception'. In 2014, Tobias Treppmann created Wikipedia Worldmap, a program for comparative visualization of geocoded Wikipedia articles by language. He compared various pairs of Wikipedia editions, including Esperanto and Volapük, and came to the conclusion that 'Esperanto doesn't seem very interested in the U.S., but does cover Japan. Volapük, however, does know the U.S. and has a curiosity for the Baltics and some place in south west Africa'. The Volapük Wikipedia holds no files locally, relying strictly on Wikimedia Commons for images, sound, and other media.

Did You Know?

• The Volapük Wikipedia was the 15th Wikipedia to reach 100,000 articles on 7 September 2007, surpassing editions in Arabic, Turkish, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Danish.
• The word Vükiped is a neologism composed of vü- ('inter-') and kiped ('to keep'), roughly translating to 'the effort to maintain this Wikipedia is shared among a group of folks'.
• The Volapük Wikipedia was the only edition with over 100,000 articles still using the first-generation Wikipedia logo until May 2013.
• As of 2022, most of the bot-generated articles on the Volapük Wikipedia have been deleted, causing its depth to jump from 15 on 1 July 2022 to 277 on 1 January 2023.
• The Volapük Wikipedia has the greatest number of articles per speaker of any Wikipedia edition, at close to 600 articles per speaker based on an estimate of 200 speakers.