Choctaw Wikipedia

» see cho.wikipedia.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

cho.wikipedia.org still answers. Its article namespace holds about twenty pages and the software counts six of them as articles. The English Wikipedia's table of closed editions gives the project a creation date of Unknown date, which the wiki itself contradicts: the first revision of its main page is stamped 22 September 2004 at 10:33 UTC. Nobody wrote down the day it opened, because opening one in 2004 was closer to a database entry than an event.

By the spring of 2007 the wiki had one working administrator and his log is almost entirely defensive, a run of page protections aimed at vandals who kept recreating the same titles. On 21 May 2007 Johannes Rohr stopped defending it and filed at Meta to have it closed, calling it stillborn after six months of his own maintenance.

The discussion ran the standard week. Seven editors supported closure, one opposed without explaining why, and the decision came down on 3 July 2007. Choctaw had around 9,200 speakers at the time by the figure quoted in the proposal, most of them in Oklahoma and Mississippi. Nothing in the request suggests any of them were asked.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ six articles ~

Chahta is the good one. It carries the tribal seal, a photograph captioned Ishtaboli for the stickball game, a population figure of 160,000 and a list of chiefs running from Tuscaloosa to Greenwood LeFlore. Everything after that thins out fast. Hattak puts a picture of Michelangelo's David above one line reading English: man. Nita is a photograph of an American black bear and the single word Nita, and that is the entire page.

Ohoyo is the one that stays with you. A photograph of a bride sits over one line reading English: women, with the plural left in by mistake. Under that are seventy-four interwiki links pointing at every other Wikipedia's article about women, in Afrikaans and Aragonese and Old English and Belarusian and on down the alphabet. Somebody went to real trouble wiring this page into the rest of the encyclopedia. Nobody wrote a second sentence in it.

Two of the remaining titles are redirects, and they point where these things usually point. Pater noster sends you to Piki vba, and Genesis sends you to Chenesis. When a language has no encyclopedia behind it, the longest text already translated into it tends to be scripture, so scripture is what turns up first.

~ july 2007 ~

Choctaw was not closed on its own. Seven Wikipedias were shut that year and six went inside twenty-seven days: Choctaw on 3 July, Hiri Motu on the 9th, Kwanyama and Muscogee on the 10th, Herero on the 24th, Sichuan Yi on the 29th. Kanuri had already gone in May. Whatever process was running that summer, it was working from article counts and getting through the list.

Muscogee is the pairing worth sitting with. Creek and Choctaw were neighbors in the southeast and neighbors again in Oklahoma after the removals of the 1830s, and their wikis were locked a week apart by a committee on another continent that was reading numbers off a statistics page.

~ the logo it never got ~

Ask cho.wikipedia.org for its site configuration and the logo field answers with chowiki.png, which is the plain English puzzle globe carrying the word Wikipedia and the line The Free Encyclopedia underneath it, in English. Editions that survive eventually get a wordmark in their own script. Cree has one in syllabics. This one was locked before anybody made it one, so for nineteen years it has worn somebody else's name across the top of every page.

The content went to the Wikimedia Incubator on 29 July 2007, where a Choctaw test project sits waiting for anybody who wants to write in it. The statistics page counts 1,947 registered accounts against zero active users. The most recent edit anywhere on the wiki was made in February 2026 by a volunteer replacing a hard-coded black in the site notice with a color that survives dark mode.

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