Cree Wikipedia

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

~ the eulogy ~

cr.wikipedia.org still answers. There is exactly one page left in its article namespace, the main page, and its title is written in syllabics: ᓃᔥᑕᒻᐹᔅᑌᒋᓂᑲᓐ. What sits on it is a box with a heavy black border holding one sentence in English, telling you the wiki has been locked and pointing you at the Incubator if you want to try again. The statistics API is blunter. It counts 22,648 registered accounts against zero articles.

Cree is not one language, it is a continuum that runs from Plains Cree in Alberta to the Innu varieties in Labrador. The pieces carry their own ISO codes. The western ones are traditionally written in Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. The eastern ones use the Latin alphabet. Anybody arriving at cr.wikipedia.org had to choose a variety and a script before typing a word, and whichever pair they chose was the wrong one for somebody else.

The proposal to close it went up on Meta on 4 December 2023, filed by an editor called Таёжный лес who works mostly on the Russian Wikipedia. The case was arithmetic. Nearly twenty years had produced roughly ten substantive articles, and the interface had never been translated. Vandalism sat unreverted for want of anybody to revert it. The Language Committee then sat on the proposal for twenty-one months. MF-W recorded the outcome on 27 September 2025 in the flattest wording available: the proposal for closing the Cree Wikipedia should be accepted.

~ the dossier ~

~ the code they handed out ~

In the middle of the 2000s the Wikimedia Foundation was opening wikis faster than it was answering the question of who would write in them. A code in the ISO list was close to sufficient, and cr was in the list. Page number one on the Cree wiki carries a timestamp of 28 August 2004, and the first user accounts do not show up in the log until September 2005.

Nothing in that process asked whether the code named something a person could sit down and write a paragraph in. Akan Wikipedia was closed in May 2023 over a version of the same problem, a code that covers a family rather than a language, and the two closures landed eighteen months apart without either being noticed outside Meta.

~ one thousand one hundred and two ~

The September decision did nothing by itself. Execution came ten weeks later, and it came all at once. The deletion log for 2 December 2025 holds 1,102 entries, every one of them stamped that day, and when it was finished the article namespace held the main page and nothing else.

MF-Warburg, the same editor signing under a longer name, rewrote that main page the same afternoon, swapping whatever had been on it for the bordered box with its single English sentence and its two links, one to the discussion and one to the Incubator. What to keep had already been settled. Nothing went to the Incubator at all, on the ruling that there was nothing on the wiki that could not easily be recreated, which is a harsher line to leave in a log than any deletion count.

~ the wikis that lived ~

The same lottery that produced cr also produced atj, the Atikamekw Wikipedia, and Atikamekw is a Cree variety. That one opened in 2017 with the Atikamekw Nation involved from the beginning, and today it holds 2,082 articles and eight active editors. Small, and alive, which cr never managed across twenty-one years.

Two rows down the same list of codes sits crh, Crimean Tatar, a Turkic language whose largest diaspora is in Turkey. It got no more planning than Cree did and it holds 29,734 articles. Crimean Tatar is close enough to Turkish that I can read a sentence of it straight off the screen, which is not a thing I can say about anything that was ever on cr.wikipedia.org. The Incubator page at Wp/cr is still open, and anybody who wants to start the Cree encyclopedia over is free to do it there.

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