The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages () is the Ripuarian edition of Wikipedia. It was started on July 6, 2005, as WiKoelsch on a private server, and was converted to an official Wikipedia during April 2006. As only about a million people speak the Ripuarian languages, the Ripuarian Wikipedia is relatively small. Since both the use of Ripuarian, and the population capable of using a Ripuarian language, are decreasing, it is also an endangered language Wikipedia. The total number of edits on this Wikipedia is . History Preparation phase The first discussions about a Wikipedia in Colognian in the first place, or all Ripuarian languages on second thought, started 2004 in the German Wikipedia. Ripuarian languages are spoken mainly in the District Cologne in the South-West of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany and smaller adjacent areas in Rhineland-Palatinate, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The WiKoelsch Logo During the first half of 2005, the idea condensed and a first small group of contributors were willing to try it. One of them installed MediaWiki on his own server and made it available under the domain wikoelsch.dergruenepunk.de for everyone willing to contribute to it at July 6, 2005. After a phase of initial silence, slightly more than 1000 pages were created in the remainder of the year. Roughly half of them were stub pages and disambiguation pages, for instance about abbreviations. In September 2004 already, a request had been made to create a Wikipedia for Ripuarian languages, which spurred a discussion which finally led to the acceptance of the proposal by the Wikimedia Foundations board of trustees two days before Christmas in the same year. Although the Wikipedia is dedicated to all Ripuarian languages, it was - pars pro toto - to be created with the identifyer ksh for the wiki and interlanguage links to it. That was a SIL code, which was later to become an ISO 639-3 code. It refers solely to the Colognian language, the biggest and best documented Ripuarian variety. The ISO 639 joint advisory committee had refused to add ksh to the ISO 639-2, and to create a code for the Ripuarian group at that time. On March 24, 2005, the new wiki was set up under the domain ksh.wikipedia.org. Transition When the new wiki was created on the server cluster of the Wikimedia Foundation under the domain ksh.wikipedia.org and was going to be used, a series of outages of the