Muscogee Wikipedia

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

~ the last words ~

Muscogee, also called Creek, is a Muskogean language of the southeastern United States, carried to Oklahoma by the removals of the 1830s and spoken by roughly 4,200 people at the time this story takes place. In the mid-2000s the Wikimedia Foundation was opening Wikipedia editions in nearly any language that had a code, reasoning that a wiki costs nothing to start and somebody might turn up.

Nobody turned up for this one. The oldest edit surviving in the Muscogee Wikipedia database is from 26 August 2004, on the Main Page, made by an anonymous address. In the three years that followed, the wiki accumulated thirteen pages. Most were empty, vandalized or written in English. The Main Page did not contain one word of Muscogee. The logo in the corner read "WIKIPEDIA" over the line "The Free Encyclopedia", in English, and the closed wiki still serves that same image today.

On 2 June 2007 an editor named Philip J filed a proposal on Meta-Wiki to close it. His evidence was a reading of the wiki's own statistics page, and he was careful to add that he was in favor of saving national languages as a rule, and that this particular one had nobody to maintain even its single article.

Eight editors supported closure and one opposed. Johannes Rohr announced on 3 July at 06:50 UTC that he would close the discussion in seven days unless somebody objected, and closed it on 10 July at 06:51 with four words: "Ending per discussion. Result: delete."

~ the record ~

~ the committee and the statistics page ~

Closure in that era was a vote on one Meta-Wiki page, opened by anybody, decided by whoever showed up, and the evidence was almost always a link to Special:Statistics and another to Special:Allpages. One supporter pointed out that Muscogee is strictly a family of languages rather than a single one, that the narrow sense of the word is the Creek language, and that Allpages did not list a single real article. Another wrote his vote in Limburgish with a translation attached, saying you cannot attract people to a Wikipedia whose main page has not been translated, because they cannot tell what language it is supposed to be in.

Muscogee was not singled out. Seven language editions went in 2007, and the one locked the day before this was Hiri Motu. Whatever was running that summer was working down a list sorted by article count.

~ the world of warcraft page ~

The best detail sits in the discussion itself. One supporter noted that exactly one page on the wiki, titled Geremor, might or might not be written in Muscogee, since nobody present could tell. Three weeks later he came back with an answer. He had searched the word, and Geremor turned out to be a World of Warcraft character, left there by the account Wikimedia editors knew as the WoW vandal, and he tagged it for deletion. The only non-English page on the Muscogee Wikipedia was a piece of somebody's game.

~ one article, 112 words ~

Closed Wikimedia wikis are locked rather than deleted, and mus.wikipedia.org still answers today. Its API reports 116 pages, one article, 3,606 edits and a grand total of 112 words of article text. It also reports 2,489 registered users and one administrator, though that user figure is an artifact of unified login across every Wikimedia project rather than anybody who ever edited here.

What was worth keeping moved to the Wikimedia Incubator on 16 September 2007, where a project can wait until it finds editors. Wp/mus is still sitting there, 180 bytes long, last touched this month. Turkish Wikipedia was thin in those same years and I remember it as mostly stubs, but Turkish had millions of people online writing in it, and that is the entire difference. A language with four thousand speakers, almost none of them writing it on the internet in 2007, was never going to produce an encyclopedia. The closure recorded that rather than caused it.

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