Croatian Wikipedia

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

Facts and statistics

Started: February 16, 2003

Founders: ???

Current size: 223,605 articles

Total edits: 7,064,752

Active editors: 478 in the past month

Coverage

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,, but also more elegantly supressed liberal content and hyper-presented conservative nationalist and catholic. Gizmodo describes its bias as "promoting fascism, whitewashing World War II concentration camps, as well as anti-Serbian and anti-LGBT propaganda".

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

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

Operation

Challenges

• Achieving neutrality on charged political topics
• Preventing administrator abuse

Competitors

• Translations of English Wikipedia

History and impact

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

• Denny – first admin and bureaucrat; co-founder of Wikidata
• Kubura, SpeedyGonsales, Roberta F. and Zeljko – controversial ex-admins