Serbian Wikipedia
 | You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Serbian. (August 2011) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
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Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
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| Available in | Serbian |
| Headquarters | Miami, Florida |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| URL | sr.wikipedia.org |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
The Serbian Wikipedia (Serbian: Википедија на српском језику/Vikipedija na srpskom jeziku) is the Serbian-language version of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was created on February 16, 2003, growing to exceed 100,000 articles on November 20, 2009. It now has about 695,000 articles making it the largest South Slavic Wikipedia.[1]
History
Serbian Wikipedia was created on February 16, 2003 along with Croatian Wikipedia. Before then, there was unified Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia. The main page was translated from English to Serbian on April 22, 2003 by an unknown user with IP address 80.131.158.32 (possibly from Freiburg, Germany), and user Nikola Smolenski finished the translation on May 24.
During September of that year, Nikola Smolenski wrote basic articles, and in the October issue of Svet kompjutera published his article about wikis and Wikipedia was published.[2] Soon more users began to arrive, both registered and anonymous. In October Nikola translated the user interface to Serbian.
Variants
The Serbian language uses two alphabets, Cyrillic and Latin. It also has two official accents: Ekavian and Ijekavian. Combining the scripts and accents give four written variants (Ekavian Cyrillic, Ijekavian Cyrillic, Ekavian Latin, and Ijekavian Latin).
When the Serbian Wikipedia was founded, it used only the Cyrillic alphabet, and both standard dialects. However, since both alphabets are widely used by Serbian native speakers, an effort began to enable the parallel usage of both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The first attempt was to use a bot for dynamic transliteration of every article. About 1,000 articles were transliterated before the action was stopped due to technical difficulties. This concept was later abandoned in favor of a model used by the Chinese Wikipedia. After a few months, the software was completed and now every visitor has the option to choose between two alphabets using tabs at the top of each article. There are special tags used to indicate those words which should not be transliterated (for example, names and words written in foreign languages). Anti-transliteration tags in use are:
-{text here}-, that prevents transliteration of the article text, andor__БЕЗКН__, that prevents transliteration of the article's name.
Though there are still minor technical issues, Cyrillic-Latin transliteration is working successfully. Ekavian–Ijekavian conversion, however, is much more complicated, and its implementation is not yet complete (it will probably require extensive tables of words in Ekavian and Ijekavian forms). However, despite the difficulties, this is probably the first successful attempt to develop the software which will allow parallel work on all four variants of the Serbian language.
Community
Starting from February 15, 2005, members of the Serbian wiki community have regular meetings in Belgrade (usually in Belgrade Youth Center) and there have been more than a hundred in the last four years. On December 3, 2005, they founded the local branch of Wikimedia Foundation for Serbia and Montenegro. This was the fifth local Wikimedia Foundation branch founded in the world. After disintegration of Serbia and Montenegro, the local branch changed its name to "Wikimedia of Serbia".
Wikimedia Serbia was the host of all four Wikimedia conferences for Southeast Europe.
Content
Serbian Wikipedia cooperates with the Faculty of Mathematics, Faculty of Physical Chemistry and the Philological Faculty of Belgrade University and Faculty of Electrical Engineering of University of Montenegro; students of those faculties occasionally write articles for Serbian Wikipedia.
Due to the similarity of the Serbo-Croatian languages, one of the features is copying adapting articles from one language version Wikipedia to another (Serbian, Croatian, Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian.) Another Serbian language project, Serbian Wikinews (as of October 2010) has more than 52,000 articles, so the Wikipedia articles are often accompanied with latest news.
A controversy erupted in 2006 over some 10,000 articles on French communities created by a bot. The problem was that such articles needed transcription, and that process went slowly.
Some 1500 (human-written) articles, including articles on a number of topics related to social work that even the English Wikipedia doesn't have, were bot-uploaded to the Serbian Wikipedia from the Dictionary of Social Work, after author Ivan Vidanović offered to release them under the GFDL.
During September and October 2007, new articles on more than 4,300 towns in Serbia and 1,250 in Montenegro were created. Already existing articles (about 1,600 towns from Serbia and 80 towns from Montenegro) were manually merged with bot-created articles.
From July 13 to July 17, 2009, about 2,400 articles on artificial satellites from Soviet-Russian Cosmos program were created, and in August came an additional 7,840 articles about deep sky objects from New General Catalog.
Reviews and research
![[icon]](/https/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (September 2010) |
Gallery
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The Serbian Wikipedia's 100K commemorative logo. (11 October 2009) -
The Serbian Wikipedia's 150K commemorative logo. (20 November 2011) -
Web Fest 2009 award in category best educational site in Serbia for sr.wikipedia.org
References
External links
- Template:Sr icon Serbian Wikipedia
- Template:Sr icon Serbian Wikipedia mobile version (not fully supported)
