Klingon Wikipedia

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

~ the last words ~

There was a Wikipedia written in Klingon. It lived at tlh.wikipedia.org in the pIqaD script and opened in June 2004, at a moment when the rules for starting a new language edition were barely written down and almost any request that reached the right person got acted on. Wikisource and Wikinews were being set up in the same stretch. Nobody had yet decided what a language had to be in order to deserve an encyclopedia.

Klingon had a better claim than most invented languages. Marc Okrand built it for Paramount and published The Klingon Dictionary in 1985, working out from the noises James Doohan had improvised for the first Star Trek film. It has a grammar that linguists find genuinely interesting. What it does not have is anybody who grew up speaking it. Arika Okrent's estimate, four years after the wiki closed, was twenty to thirty fluent speakers on the planet.

That turned out to be the problem in two different ways. There was no community to write the thing, and there was no way to write most of it even with a willing community, because the Klingon vocabulary is a finite published list. A word exists if Okrand has said it exists. Anything outside the list has to be reached by circumlocution, and an encyclopedia is mostly made of words outside any list.

On Sunday 7 August 2005, at 16:02 UTC, Brion Vibber told the wikipedia-l list that he had locked the wiki at Jimmy Wales's request. It would stay online and stop being editable. He added a parenthesis: perhaps it could be moved to WikiCities. That is exactly where it ended up, in December 2006, and it has been sitting at klingon.fandom.com ever since.

~ the record ~

~ why it was divisive ~

The fights were not really about Star Trek. Once Klingon had an edition, every other constructed language had an argument for one, and there are several dozen with a case at least as good. Wikimedia had no principle to point at that would let it say yes to one and no to the rest, because the principle it needed, something about real speakers and real usage, had never been written.

The other complaint was about appearance. Other editions carried interwiki links to Klingon from their main pages, and a number of editors felt those links made a serious reference project look like a joke. The links were quietly removed well before the wiki itself was locked, which meant that for a while the Klingon Wikipedia existed but was no longer pointed at from anywhere inside Wikipedia.

~ the seventh of August ~

Wikimania 2005 was running in Frankfurt that week, so the decision landed in the middle of the movement's own conference. Wales has never publicly explained his reasoning, and the Meta page that records the history says so plainly. The read that stuck is the practical one: Wikipedia had become a serious worldwide reference by 2005, and a niche edition that nobody intended to use seriously was no longer worth the argument it generated.

Toki Pona went at roughly the same time and for roughly the same reasons, and it also ended up on Wikia. Its story has a different ending. Toki Pona grew a real community of speakers over the following two decades and was readmitted as a Wikipedia edition in 2025, twenty years after being shown the door. Klingon has not been, and the closed dictionary is why.

~ the letter on the globe ~

The Wikipedia puzzle globe designed in 2003 had a different character on every visible piece, one per script. One of those characters was the Klingon r. It stayed there after the wiki was locked, and after the content moved to Wikia, and through every year that the edition did not exist, because nobody redraws a logo over a closed subdomain.

It came off in the redesign published in May 2010, replaced by the Ethiopic ው. So the Klingon Wikipedia was visible on the front of the project for almost five years longer than it was editable. Today tlh.wikipedia.org does not answer at all, which is rarer than you would think: most dead wikis are left readable forever.

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