Vepsian Wikipedia

Vepsian Wikipedia was created by a participant from France under the nickname “Budelberger” on December 11, 2008 , as one of the projects of the Wiki-Incubator ^[1] . At first, the project developed rather slowly, and the first application for opening an encyclopedia on its own domain, despite the presence of at least one native speaker, was rejected on December 20, 2008 ^[2] .

Nevertheless, the next application for Meta-Wiki, filed November 15, 2010 , was more successful, and on November 13, 2011, the language committee approved the transfer of the project to its own domain ^[3] . By this time, a sharp surge in activity occurred in the Veps section. On November 17, 2011, the project was finally approved ^{[4] [5] [6]} , and on February 1, 2012 it separated from the Wiki incubator and was transferred to its own address vep.wikipedia.org ^[7] . At this point, the section totaled 39 articles ^[8] .

Vepsian Wikipedia is one of the first wiki sections written in the language of one of the small indigenous peoples of Russia, as well as the first “Russian” section using Latin graphics as the main one. The possibility of writing articles in Cyrillic was also discussed, but in the end it was decided not to accept this innovation ^[9] .

Some time after the opening of the section, the article counter was reset to zero, as previously created articles were no longer recognized by the MediaWiki engine. As practice shows, such problems can arise due to the low coherence of articles (lack of internal and external links on the section pages). As of May 9, 2012, the article counter was still showing incorrect data, despite the fact that the de facto Wiki encyclopedia crossed the threshold of 1000 articles. As of May 10, the counter has already been fixed. Similar problems occurred not only in this section. The Wikipedia counter in Miranda also shows stray data; periodically, MediaWiki engine crashes in other small projects.

Most of the contribution comes from participants who are not Vepsians, but who have sufficient knowledge of the Vepsian language . As of 2012, there was only one active participant in the section, who had previously stated their knowledge of the language as a native ^[9] .

As of September 12, 2019, there were 6,117 articles in this section. Also, 11 108 participants are registered in the Veps Wikipedia, of which 19 have performed any action in the last 30 days, and 1 participant has administrator status. The total number of edits is 118,408.

The depth of the section at the moment is 38 units.