This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

This will certainly piss many users off, but it should be said anyway: the Toki Pona Wikipedia (or tokwiki), hands down, deserves the title of the most useless wiki to have opened in the last decade. It has no functional purpose; nobody speaks Toki Pona as their native language.

The language argument

Toki Pona is an experimental conlang that emerged in 2001, with the language's key feature being that it uses as few words as possible (137 words, according to the Toki Pona Dictionary; full list on Wiktionary). It was merely a philosophical concept, one that simplified thoughts and explored semantic minimalism. It is a language that relies entirely on context and broad compound phrases to convey meaning.

As a conlang, Toki Pona isn't unique. Esperanto is perhaps the best example of a successful conlang, with over 2 million speakers, with its origins tracing back to the late 19th century, well before we had any concept of "global*" languages. Interlingua is perhaps another example of a successful conlang, created in the 1950s by the International Auxiliary Language Association, which organised International Scientific Vocabulary. While Interlingua emerged after the concept of "global" languages, it had its own useful purpose and succeeded in that.

There are two key points of the official Language proposal policy that become relevant here: point 2, that it has an ISO 639 code, and point 4, the language has a "sufficient number of fluent users to form a viable contributor community and an audience for the content." Point 2 was fulfilled when the language received an ISO code in early 2022. Point 4, however, delves deeper into conlangs, stating the following:

If the proposal is for a constructed language such as Esperanto, it must have a reasonable degree of recognition as determined by discussion. (Some recognition criteria include, but are not limited to: independently proved number of speakers, use as an auxiliary language outside of online communities created solely for the purpose, usage outside of Wikimedia, publication of works in the language for general sale.)

This is where the justification for Toki Pona completely collapses. Other conlang wikis, such as Esperanto and Interlingua, were specifically engineered in such a way that facilitates precise, cross-language communication with expansive vocabularies capable of handling technical, scientific and diplomatic discourse.

Toki Pona, on the other hand, functions as an anti-auxiliary language, created as a playground to test the limits of linguistic simplicity and minimalism. Its "usage outside of Wikimedia" and "outside of online communities created solely for the purpose" is virtually non-existent, confined almost entirely to insular Discord servers, Reddit communities and niche internet subcultures. Try finding any real-life usage of Toki Pona beyond those communities, bar those few dictionaries, and suddenly it no longer becomes an easy task.

Usefulness

Wikimedia's fundamental mission is to build the sum of all human knowledge to as many people as possible. Usually, this manifests in two ways: providing vital information to a population that lacks resources or helping preserve endangered indigenous languages.

Toki Pona fits neither category, creating a zero-audience paradox beyond those insular online communities mentioned above. For one, Toki Pona has no monolingual speakers, with not a single person on Earth speaking the language as their native tongue. Because the conlang is learned entirely online through communities anchored in major world languages, every single person fluent enough to read the Toki Pona Wikipedia is already completely fluent in at least one other "global" language, with information far more useful and encyclopedic content than the Toki Pona Wikipedia.

Despite what many claim in its second RFL discussion, the Toki Pona Wikipedia is not filling an information gap, and likely never will. It is merely a playspace for amateur Toki Pona enthusiasts to write simplified articles for other amateur Toki Pona enthusiasts who could easily read the same information in their native language, which will almost certainly have vastly more useful information than whatever the Toki Pona Wikipedia will ever manage to produce.

Disclaimer

This essay is in no way intended to be an attack page on tokwiki, and I have nothing against those who contribute to tokwiki (who am I to tell you what you should and shouldn't do with your free time anyway?) – but I seriously believe that time and resources could better be spent on wikis that have an actual audience and reader base.

*"global" languages in this instance refers to languages used as a lingua franca by a significant portion of the global population, such as English, Spanish, French, Russian or Chinese.

This essay is partially coauthored by A09.