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Croatian Wikipedia

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Croatian Wikipedia (abbreviated hr-WP) is the Croatian-language version of Wikipedia.

Facts and statistics

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Started: February 16, 2003

Founders: ???

Current size: 223,605 articles

Total edits: 7,064,752

Active editors: 478 in the past month

Coverage

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Croatian Wikipedia is generally regarded by the rest of the Wikimedia Movement as having significant neutrality issues, resulting from the capture of the project by politically-motivated editors who have driven out or blocked others,[1], but also more elegantly supressed liberal content and hyper-presented conservative nationalist and catholic.[2][3] Gizmodo describes its bias as "promoting fascism, whitewashing World War II concentration camps, as well as anti-Serbian and anti-LGBT propaganda".[4]

As of start of 2021, the situation is slowly improving, though it is still periodically mentioned in the media as a bad example.[5]

Areas of strength

  • Croatia and Croatians-related content, but also
    • Coverage of Christian and especially Catholic content
    • Coverage of football/soccer (and somewhat other sports) up to very low level leagues and players

Areas of weakness

  • Controversial political and historic topics, but also
    • Lack of diversity among contributors
    • Lack of updates on many pages from first decade and lack of criteria and regulations for many topics
    • Lack of coverage of modern and contemporary culture, civil society, women, as well as minorities and human rights[6]

Operation

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Challenges

  • Achieving neutrality on charged political topics
  • Preventing administrator abuse

Competitors

History and impact

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Milestones/events

  • 2013: Significant media attention and cultural debate in Croatia about the project's bias issues, and subsequent Meta RfC
  • 2020: Global ban proposal of hr-WP admin Kubura
  • 2021: 3 most problematic admins removed by community in March (Roberta F. remained admin on sister projects). The WMF comissioned and, a few months later, published the Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment, conducted by an anonymous academic researcher. Findings confirmed historic revisionism and problematic content bias.

Prominent Wikipedians

References

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