| URL | sr.wikipedia.org |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | Serbian |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
The Serbian Wikipedia (Википедија на српском језику/Vikipedija na srpskom jeziku) is the Serbian version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was created on February 16, 2003. This language version exceeded 100,000 articles on November 20, 2009. As of November, 2011 it has over 150,000 articles making it the largest South Slavic Wikipedia.[1]
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Serbian Wikipedia was created on February 16, 2003 together with Croatian Wikipedia. Before then, there was unified Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia. Main page was translated from English to Serbian on April 22, 2003 by unknown user with IP address 80.131.158.32 (possible from Freiburg, Germany), and Nikola Smolenski finished the translation on May 24. Unknown user with the IP address 194.106.170.199 created on October 10, 2003.
During September of that year, Nikola Smolenski wrote basic articles, and in October issue of Svet kompjutera was published his article about wikis and Wikipedia.[2] Soon users has begun to arrive, both registered and anonymous. In October Nikola has translated user interface to Serbian.
In the beginning, articles were written only in Cyrillic script. Since March 3, 2006 software which converts scripts is installed, so both scripts became equal.
The Serbian language uses two alphabets, Cyrillic and Latin. There are two official accents: Ekavian and Ijekavian. Combining the scripts accents give four written variants (Ekavian Cyrillic, Ijekavian Cyrillic, Ekavian Latin, and Ijekavian Latin).
When Serbian Wikipedia was founded, it used only Cyrillic alphabet, and both standard dialects. However, since both alphabets are widely used by Serbian native speakers, attempts were made to enable the parallel usage of both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The first attempt was to use a bot for dynamical transliteration of every article. About 1,000 articles were transliterated, but then, the action was stopped due to the technical difficulties, and later, this concept was abandoned in favor of a model used by the Chinese Wikipedia. After a few months, 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 shouldn't be transliterated (names and words written in foreign languages). Anti-transliteration tags in use are:
Cyrillic-Latin transliteration is working smoothly (although there are still some minor technical difficulties), but Ekavian–Ijekavian conversion 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.
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 hundred of meetings 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 WF 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.
Serbian Wikipedia has good cooperation 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 similarity of 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 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 English Wikipedia doesn't have, were bot-uploaded to Serbian Wikipedia from the Dictionary of Social Work, whose author Ivan Vidanović offered to release under 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 were created additional 7,840 articles about deep sky objects from New General Catalog.
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