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Serbian Wikipedia

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Serbian Wikipedia

The Serbian Wikipedia (Serbian: Википедија на српском језику, Vikipedija na srpskom jeziku) is the Serbian-language version of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Created on 16 February 2003, it reached its 100,000th article on 20 November 2009 before getting to another milestone with the 200,000th article on 6 July 2013, and then another milestone with the 500,000th article on 13 January 2018.

It currently has 554,321 registered users (1,904 active ones) and 713,341 articles, making it the fourth largest Wikipedia in a Slavic language and the 24th-largest Wikipedia. By 2023, bots contributed to 53% of the total edits and created 49% of the articles. The Serbian Wikipedia uses ZhengZhu's character mapping program to convert between Cyrillic and Latin scripts.

In 2024 and 2025, Serbian Wikipedia faced criticism for ideological bias, including the promotion of Serbian nationalist narratives and historical revisionism, particularly in coverage of the Yugoslav Wars. Investigations have also raised concerns about bias in articles related to current political events in Serbia, such as anti-corruption protests, where language and framing have aligned with pro-government perspectives. In March 2026, a group of administrators and users received global bans from the Wikimedia Foundation without public explanation.

Serbian Wikipedia was created on 16 February 2003. The main page was translated from English into Serbian on 22 April 2003 by an unknown user with IP address 80.131.158.32 (possibly from Freiburg, Germany), and user Nikola Smolenski finished the translation on 24 May.

During September 2003, Smolenski prepared the main page along with creating some basic article stubs. In the October 2003 issue of the Serbian IT magazine Svet kompjutera his article about wikis and Wikipedia got published, leading to a surge of new users, both registered and anonymous. Around the same time, Smolenski also translated the user interface page into Serbian.

Serbian uses two alphabets, Cyrillic and Latin. It also has two official accents: Ekavian and Ijekavian. Combining the scripts and accents give four written variants (Ekavian Cyrillic, Ijekavian Cyrillic, Ekavian Latin, and Ijekavian Latin).

When the Serbian Wikipedia was founded, it used only the Cyrillic alphabet, and both standard dialects. However, since both alphabets are widely used by Serbian native speakers, an effort began to enable the parallel usage of both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The first attempt was to use a bot for dynamic transliteration of every article. About 1,000 articles were transliterated before the action was stopped due to technical difficulties. This concept was later abandoned in favor of a model used by the Chinese Wikipedia. After a few months, the 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 should not be transliterated (for example, names and words written in foreign languages). Anti-transliteration tags in use are:

Though there are still minor technical issues, Cyrillic-Latin transliteration is working successfully.

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