Do you want tostart a Wikipedia in your language?
TheVision of Wikimedia is:Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. So ideally, there should be a Wikipedia in every language that human beings speak.
If there is no Wikipedia in your language yet, you can create it! However, please realize that while the world-wide Wikimedia community will be happy to give you the technical support in creating a space for your language,you will actually have to do the writing, and it could require a lot of work. It will take some time until the Wikipedia in your language becomes ready to "go live". You need to be able to write your language well, and it is strongly recommended to team up with other speakers of that language.
While this is not a requirement, it is also useful to be experienced in editing a Wikipedia in another language.
There are editions of Wikipedia in more than 300 languages, so maybe there already is a Wikipedia in your language! Here are a few places where you can check for it:
If you cannot find an existing Wikipedia in your language, check the pageRequests for new languages—there may be a request for it already.
Please be patient. It can take up to four months or longer.
If you are not already experienced at writing in Wikipedia in some language, you might have many questions when you begin. For answers regarding your questions, you may contact other Wikipedians. For example, you can contact people usingmailing lists (especially "Wikimedia-L"),Telegram groups (especially "Wikimedia General" and "Wikimedia Language Diversity"), and the channel#wikimedia onIRC.
Here are some particular people on Meta willing to help:
Follow the instructions on the pageIncubator manual, and start creating the initial pages there.
Create the Main Page for the Incubator. You may also go to the main page of Wikipedia in another language, copy it, and translate it into your language.
Note that main pages tend to have advanced code, and in the first stages of creating the Incubator, the articles are much more important than the main page. The initial main page should be simple and functional. You can create a cool-looking main page later, after you gain experience editing usual articles.
You should translate the pageHow to edit a page into your language.
Another helpful link:Help:Starting a new page.
To start a Wikipedia in a new language, you also need to translate the user interface of the software that runs it, calledMediaWiki. This is done on the sitehttps://translatewiki.net. Note that it uses a separate user account. To prevent spam and vandalism, new translatewiki accounts must be approved by an administrator before they can be used to submit translations. To ensure that your account is approved, you have to submit several test translations.
If your language is not yet supported on translatewiki.net, you can request to add it. To request it, simply post a new comment on the pageSupport. For the policy about this, see the pageTranslatewiki.net languages.
Translating the "Most important" messages is a condition for creating a new Wikipedia, but much more should be translated so that readers and editors would be able to use Wikipediafully in your language.
Even before translating the user interface, it is recommended to decide what will be the basic terminology about wiki editing in your language. These are words such as "page", "user", "log in", "account", "editor", "block", and so on. The most convenient way to do it is to read theBasic glossary on translatewiki, discuss it with other people who know your language well, and translate that glossary. (It's recommended to translate at least the terms, but translating the explanations and the definitions is recommended, too.)
If your language has characters that are difficult to enter on keyboards used by speakers of the language, you should add support for it to theUniversal Language Selector. Ask for it atthe talk page of Universal Language Selector.
The name "Wikipedia" and the tagline "The Free Encyclopedia", which appear in the logo, must be translated, too.
Some notes:
Each Wikimedia project has a place where users go to talk about things. In the English Wikipedia, for example, this is theVillage pump page. The French Wikipedia hasLe Bistro. Please choose a name for the community page and then create the page.
There are a few rules that all Wikimedia projects must follow:
Other than these rules, which apply to all projects, each Wikipedia has created its own rules. For examples, the English Wikipedia has important rules aboutVerifiability,Notability, andArticle titles, as well as an extensiveManual of Style and several other policy pages. You should consider adding similar policies, but this is not a strict requirement, and you can do whatever is right for your language and your community.
Some rules you might want to have right away include:
You want to have a high-quality encyclopedia. Please write a few suggestions for writers. Are there any websites in your language about how to write? Maybe you want to add a dictionary or a grammar guide here. Put in everything that could be useful for writers.
You might want to write a few articles for your Wikipedia to get it started, and to give an example to other potential writers. You can translate articles from Wikipedia in another language, or you can write your own.
There is aList of articles every Wikipedia should have. This list is by no means a requirement, but it is a good source of ideas for articles about universally-important topics for articles to create. You can, and should, also write articles about topics that are important to your local culture, such as songs, crafts, foods, and important people from the region where your language is spoken, or your region's history.
You should join somemailing lists so that you will know what is happening in the world of Wikimedia in general. The mailing lists are also good resources that you can use to learn from the things that are happening on other Wikipedias.
Please make a localWikimedia Embassy for multilingual cooperation. Make a page in your wiki so that we can talk to you more easily, and write a name for a contact.
The pagegoings-on is a central place to find out about events in the whole Wikimedia community.
As this page says, the two most important things that you need to do to graduate from the Incubator are:
If you think that you have completed the localization, and that you have been writing good articles for a while, and theLanguage committee haven't yet noticed that your project is in a good shape, you may contact the committee on the pageTalk:Language committee and ask it to take a look.
If the committee thinks that you have been doing well, and an external expert checks the content of your wiki and finds that it is indeed written in your language, your project will be approved, and after some time, a separate domain will be created for the Wikipedia in your language. All the content from the Incubator will be imported into that new domain.
Congratulations! Here are some more things to do, however:
After the domain is created and the content is imported from the Incubator, it is usually possibly to immediately start writing new articles and to edit existing ones. However, it may take a few weeks for some other features to start working fully. Among them:
So please be patient until these things are properly set up, but please continue writing and editing articles. If anything is still broken after a month, please report a bug. The best place to report bugs isPhabricator.
You might need someone with administrator (sysop) status very soon. Add your request onRequests for permissions.
Go over all the pages in your new Wikipedia and addinterlanguage links to articles that are also available in Wikipedia in other languages.
Now your language is ready for the public! Try to convince your friends to join the project, and explain how the Wikipedia works.
Find appropriate forums, discussion lists, social media groups, and so on, where there may be people who would be interested in knowing that the Wikipedia has started in their language. Offer to write an article for a local newspaper about your work on the project, and its cultural value to society. Contact local radio and TV stations.
Lecture at conferences where the topic would be appropriate. Create a brochure or a poster about Wikipedia in your language. Add a link to Wikipedia in your email signature. Write about it on your blog.
The localization of the Most important messages is a requirement for creating a Wikipedia in a new language. However, there are many more features in the MediaWiki software that should be translated into all the languages. Someone should keep doing this, and ideally translate 100% of the features that are used on Wikipedia. This is time-consuming, but highly recommended for better development of the Wikipedia editing community in your language.
This is the most important thing! Graduating from the Incubator is an initial goal, but Wikipedia is a long-term project that doesn't really have an end. That's why itslogo is an unfinished puzzle.
Wikipedia in every language needs to grow and provide useful content to readers, so you need to write more articles, improve existing articles, and improve the rules about style, fact-checking, and other things. Of course, you shouldn't do it alone, so invite other people who know your language to do with you, and grow the editing community, too.
Thank you for working hard! But remember:This is the beginning and not the end. Good luck!