Serbian Wikipedia

Community

Ever since the inaugural meeting on Tuesday, 15 February 2005, members of the Serbian wiki community have been holding regular gatherings. As of September 2013, 253 meetings took place — mostly in Belgrade, with about a dozen taking place in Novi Sad, along with a few in Niš, Pančevo, and Pirot.
At first congregating at each other's apartments, bars, restaurants, and public parks, by late 2005 community members began gathering at the Belgrade Youth Center, which provided meeting space free of charge. At the very first of these Youth Center meetings on Saturday, 3 December 2005, the community members founded the Wikimedia Foundation's local chapter for Serbia and Montenegro called Wikimedia Serbia and Montenegro (Викимедија Србије и Црне Горе). At the time, it was only the fifth local Wikimedia Foundation chapter anywhere in the world.
Following the May 2006 Montenegrin referendum whose outcome led to the breakup of the Serbia and Montenegro state union, the local chapter modified its name to Wikimedia Serbia (Викимедија Србије / Vikimedija Srbije). It is registered as a non-governmental, non-partisan, and non-profit organization and its stated goals include promotion of the creation, gathering and multiplication of free content in Serbian language as well as promotion of the idea that everyone should have equal access to knowledge and education. Later that year in December, the Serbian chapter hosted the very first Wikimedia regional conference for Southeast Europe.
Three more regional conferences were put together over the next several years, all of them hosted by Wikimedia Serbia.
In February 2012, Wikimedia Serbia organized an event called Open Wiki GLAM of Serbia as part of the bigger project of the same name. Standing for Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums, GLAM is devoted to the topics of Serbian cultural and historical heritage as well as protection of intellectual property and copyright on the Internet. Later that year in December, Wikimedia Serbia got its own office space located in downtown Belgrade at the beginning of the King Aleksandar Boulevard where most of the Serbian wiki community meetings now began to take place.

Content

Serbian Wikipedia cooperates with the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Mathematics, Faculty of Physical Chemistry and Faculty of Philology as well as the University of Montenegro's Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Students of those faculties have made occasional contributions to the Serbian Wikipedia by editing its articles.
Due to the similarity of the varieties of Serbo-Croatian, one of the features is copying and adapting articles from one language version of 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 by 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 the Soviet-Russian Cosmos program were created, and in August 2009 an additional 7,840 articles about deep sky objects from the New General Catalogue were added.
In 2019 the Serbian Wikipedia has 59 thousand unique categories and 18.39% of them do not have appropriate page in the category namespace. The average article in this language version has 7 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.096. The largest number of articles has Geography (21%) and Science (12%) category. In Serbian Wikipedia articles related to Life and Crime has the highest average quality. Content about Crime is read more often and has the highest authors' interest on average.