Volapük gets a bit of mainstream attention thanks to its bot-created Wikipedia articles

Saturday, May 03, 2008

I always love seeing what people not interested in IALs talk about when the subject comes up. I just stumbled across this page on Yahoo! Answers, a question posted two months ago:

How are there 100,000+ Wikipedia pages in Volapük when hardly anyone can speak it?

I know this is an obscure question, but it's been puzzling me.

Look up Volapük in the English version of Wikipedia, and you'll find it's a constucted language with approximately 20-30 speakers. And yet if you look on the international front page of Wikipedia, there are apparently over 100,000 articles written in Volapük! That's more than Czech, Arabic, Greek, Korean and other major languages.

How is this so? 20 speakers can't have written 5000 articles each, can they?

I don't think that's the best way to get attention though. I'd rather get attention for amazing detail in the articles than simply a large number of articles, but whatever gets people thinking about IALs is better than nothing.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

There must be some VERY enthusiastic Volapukers out there!

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