Belarusian Wikipedia
There are two Belarusian Encyclopedias: one in the orthography of the Belarusian language which is official in modern Belarus (narkomovka, prefix "be:"), and another one in the pre-reform of 1933, classical orthography (Taraškievica, prefix "be-x-old:").
History
The first Belarusian Wikipedia was started on August 12, 2004. One of its creators and first administrators was Uladzimir Katkouski (user name: rydel). Katkouski/rydel (who died in 2007) created over 1,300 articles in the Belarusian Wikipedia alone.
Articles in the Belarusian Wikipedia were inconsistently written in both variants of the orthography, leading to conflicts between the adherents of the two.
A "clean" version in the official orthography was initiated in the Wikipedias "incubator" at Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki. However, the first application for a new Wikipedia was rejected in December 2006 by the Board of Trustees and Language Commission for technical reasons, quoting: "This discussion was created before the implementation of the Language proposal policy, and it is incompatible with the policy." A redrafted proposal was approved in March 2007.
Upon approval, in the evening of the same day, over 6,000 articles written in the pre-reform orthography were transferred from the "be.wikipedia.org" domain to "be-x-old.wikipedia.org", while the 3,500 pages from "Incubator" were moved to "be.wikipedia.org". However, due to a software bug, the move did not go smoothly: in the morning the articles seemed to have disappeared, and users could not log in. This led to a number of news reports that articles in old Belarusian orthography were deleted from Wikipedia.
Including the time in the "incubator", the current variant of be-wikipedia has existed since August 2006.
Rates of contribution
Initially the normative Belarusian Wikipedia overtook the classical one, but in about a year, it slowed down, and in fall 2008, the classical one was ahead.
On March 15, 2008 the normative Belarusian encyclopedia reached 10,000 articles.
On June 17, 2009, the classical Belarusian encyclopedia reached 20,000 articles, holding the 65th place among other Wikipedias. At that time, the normative Belarusian Wikipedia had about 16,000 articles, holding the 71st place.
On November 16, 2010 the normative Belarusian encyclopedia reached 25,000 articles.
References
External links
- (Belarusian) Belarusian Wikipedia in the official orthography
- (Belarusian (Taraškievica orthography)) Belarusian Wikipedia in Taraškievica orthography
- (Belarusian) Belarusian Wikipedia in the official orthography mobile version (homepage not yet configured)
- (Belarusian (Taraškievica orthography)) Belarusian Wikipedia in Taraškievica orthography mobile version (not fully supported)
- Statistics for the normative Belarusian Wikipedia
- Statistics for the classical Belarusian Wikipedia
Retrieved from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_Wikipedia
