The Volapük Wikipedia () is the Volapük-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was created in February 2003, but launched in January 2004. As of , it is the -largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, with about articles, and the second-largest Wikipedia in a constructed language after the Esperanto Wikipedia.
The edition is most notable for raising questions about the role of bots on Wikipedia, which initiated the development of policies and alternative measures of Wikipedias' quality. Its large number of bot-generated articles brought attention to the Volapük language, which often exemplifies the extent of Wikipedia's multilingualism across national, minority, dead and constructed languages alike.
In 2022, most of the bot's articles have been deleted.
History
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. While among the largest editions, the Volapük Wikipedia received a considerable amount of attention from the Wikipedia community, bloggers, and even some media coverage.
In early September, Smeira's work was criticized by a few Wikipedians including Chuck Smith, founder of the Esperanto Wikipedia, who asked about his motive for favoring "quantity at the great expense of quality".
In response to the criticism, 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. In many Wikipedias this had already been done (I actually got the idea from the US city articles in the English Wikipedia).
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. Wikipedians were divided on the issue and the discussion was closed on 6 November 2007. 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 on improving current articles than creating new ones, which led to a doubling of the depth indicator since SmeiraBot made its last edit in April 2008, after a total of over 1,150,000.