[2][3] 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.

In September 2004 already, a request had been made to create a Wikipedia for Ripuarian languages,[4] 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.

[5] Although the Wikipedia is dedicated to all Ripuarian languages, it was - pars pro toto - to be created with the identifier ksh for the wiki and interlanguage links to it.

Also, it was not possible to transfer data directly from one SQL server to the other, thus the newly developed page export and import feature of MediaWiki[8] had to be used.

[10] Since it was not possible to transfer user accounts and passwords, a volunteer developed and hosted a dual login web page allowing to supply two username/password pairs which were automatically verified against either wiki.

[11] Towards the end of April, 2006, the Wikipedia became eventually usable with page data and its history,[12] but cleaning up various remains of the problems left behind by the transition took several more months.

[17] Towards the end of the year 2006, a series of harsh and in part unnecessarily personal arguments were held about the spellings in the Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages.