Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia
Logo written in two scripts (Latin and Cyrillic) | |
Screenshot Main page in February 2025 | |
Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
|---|---|
| Available in | Serbo-Croatian |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Editors | Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia community |
| URL | sh |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 336,582 (as of 22 March 2026) |
| Launched | 16 January 2002 |
| Current status | Active |
Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia (Serbo-Croatian: Wikipedija na srpskohrvatskom jeziku, Википедија на српскохрватском језику) is the Serbo-Croatian language version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was started on 16 January 2002, preceding the creation of separate Wikipedia editions for the standard varieties of the language, namely Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Wikipedia. The content is primarily written in the Latin script, with a converter to Cyrillic. The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia currently has 351 active users, 8 administrators, and 461,476 articles, with a total of 42.5 million edits.
History
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was originally launched on 16 January 2002 at sh.wikipedia.com and moved to its current domain, sh.wikipedia.org, on 23 December 2002. On 12 December 2002, a separate Bosnian Wikipedia was founded, later incorporating articles from the original Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia. Subsequently, on 16 February 2003, separate Croatian and Serbian Wikipedias were launched. As of 2026, a Montenegrin Wikipedia does not exist; an experimental Crnogorska Enciklopedija operated between 2006 and 2008, but proposals for a Montenegrin Wikipedia have been rejected four times by the Language Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation.[1]
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was locked in February 2005 due to inactivity but was reopened in May 2005.[2] Some users opposed its reopening, including Caesarion, who acknowledged the mutual intelligibility of Serbo-Croatian with Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian but stated that "the wounds of the nineties Balkan wars are all too fresh to... let Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks cooperate on one Wikipedia. We must use separate Wikipedias just to keep the whole project peaceful."[1] However, the arguments for reopening prevailed, largely due to the efforts of editors such as Pokrajac, who stated: "So, this Wikipedia (if you open it) will be absolutely NPOV, liberal and antinationalist. Many liberal and antinationalist people said that they are talking Serbo-Croatian despite Balkan war(s)."[1] Richard Rogers (2015) wrote that the establishment of separate Wikipedias for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian was a response to "burden of collaboration after the Balkan wars".[1] In 2023, interviewees of a qualitative comparative case study of the four BCMS-language Wikipedias found the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia to be "the least contentious environment of the four language editions" and that its editors "were the most likely to privilege an encyclopedic identity over a national one in the process of knowledge construction," which made it a considerably less attractive target for governance capture than Croatian and Serbian editions.[3]
In September 2014, the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia had become the largest South Slavic Wikipedia edition by the number of articles. By 2017, it had become the fourth-largest Slavic-language Wikipedia, with 0.44 million articles—accounting for 7.6% of all articles in Slavic-language Wikipedias. It ranked behind the Russian (1.4 million articles), Polish (1.24 million articles), and Ukrainian (0.74 million articles) editions but ahead of the Serbian Wikipedia (0.37 million articles).[4] As of March 2026, the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia is the second-largest South Slavic edition and the 33rd largest Wikipedia globally.[5] A significant portion of its articles, particularly those related to geography, astronomy, and chemistry, are stubs created by Wikipedia bots between 2013 and 2015. By 2023, bots were responsible for 41% of all edits and 55% of all articles created on the project since it was set up.[6]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d Rogers, Richard (2015). "Wikipedia as Cultural Reference". Digital Methods. MIT Press. pp. 166–177. ISBN 9780262528245. Retrieved 22 June 2021.
- ^ Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Serbo-Croatian. May 2005 – via Meta-Wiki.
- ^ Kharazian, Zarine; Starbird, Kate; Hill, Benjamin Mako (November 2023). "Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 8 (CSCW1). University of Washington. doi:10.1145/3637338.
- ^ Kamusella, Tomasz (2021). Politics and the Slavic Languages. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 95–96. ISBN 9781000395990. Retrieved 22 June 2021.
- ^ "List of Wikipedias". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
- ^ Alshahrani, Saied; Alshahrani, Norah; Matthews, Jeanna (2023). "DEPTH+: An Enhanced Depth Metric for Wikipedia Corpora Quality". ACL Anthology. Association for Computational Linguistics: 175–189. doi:10.18653/v1/2023.trustnlp-1.16.