Serbian Wikipedia

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The logo for the Serbian Wikipedia.

The Serbian Wikipedia (Википедија на српском језику) is the Serbian version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was created on February 16, 2003. This version has, as of December 2006, more than 40,000 articles.

1 Variants
2 Community
3 Bot-created articles
4 External link

[edit] Variants

The Serbian language uses two alphabets, Cyrillic and Latin and two "dialects", ekavian and ijekavian. Combinations of scripts and dialects give four variants (ekavian writen in Cyrilic, ijekavian written in Cyrilic, ekavian written in Latin and ijekavian written in Latin).

When Serbian Wikipedia was founded, it used the Cyrillic alphabet, and both standard variants (the differences are minor). However, since both alphabets are widely used, attempts were made to enable the parallel usage of both Cyrillic and Latin. The first attempt was to use a bot to dynamically transliterate 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 favour of a model used by the Chinese Wikipedia. After several months, software was completed and now every visitor has the option to switch between both alphabets using tabs visible at the top of each article. There are special tags, -{word}-, used to indicate words that are not to be transliterated (names and words written in foreign languages).

Cyrillic-Latin transliteration is rather effective (although there are still some 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 variants). However, despite all 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.

[edit] Community

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Serbian Wikipedian meetups

Since February 15, 2005, members of the Serbian wiki-community have regular meetups in Belgrade (once a week), and on December 3, 2005, they founded the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation for Serbia and Montenegro. This was the fifth local chapter to be founded.

[edit] Bot-created articles

A controversy erupted in 2006 over some 10,000 articles about French communities created by a bot. The problem is such articles need transcription, and that process is going very slowly.