Owner Wikimedia Foundation Commercial No | Website be.wikipedia.org Registration Optional | |
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Type of site Internet encyclopedia project Available in Belarusian
(Official orthography, Narkomovka) | ||
There are two Belarusian Wikipedias (Belarusian: Беларуская Вікіпедыя; Taraškievica: Беларуская Вікіпэдыя) : 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-tarask:", formerly "be-x-old:").
Contents
As of March 2014, the most popular editions of Wikipedia within Belarus are the Russian Wikipedia (with 84.0% of all page views) followed by the English Wikipedia (10.2%).
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.
In September 2015, the domain name of the classical orthography Belarusian Wikipedias was changed from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org, reflecting the official language subtag assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority in 2007.
Including the time in the "incubator", the current variant of be-Wikipedia has existed since August 2006.
Rates of contribution
Initially the official Belarusian Wikipedia overtook the classical one, but in about a year, it slowed down, and in fall 2008, the classical one was ahead. Today, the official Belarusian Wikipedia has again surpassed the one in the classical orthography.
On March 15, 2008 the official 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 official Belarusian Wikipedia had about 16,000 articles, holding the 71st place.
On November 16, 2010 the official Belarusian encyclopedia reached 25,000 articles.
In August 2015, the official Belarusian encyclopedia reached 100,000 articles.