Croatian Wikipedia
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The Croatian Wikipedia ( hr, Wikipedija na hrvatskome jeziku) is the Croatian version of
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
, the free
encyclopedia An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...
, started on February 16, 2003. This version has articles and a total of edits have been made (live count). It has registered user accounts, out of which are active (defined as having performed an action on Wikipedia in the last 30 days), and administrators. Since 2013, the Croatian Wikipedia has received attention from international media for promoting a
fascist Fascism is a far-right, Authoritarianism, authoritarian, ultranationalism, ultra-nationalist political Political ideology, ideology and Political movement, movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and pol ...
worldview as well as bias against
Serbs of Croatia The Serbs of Croatia ( sh-Cyrl-Latn, separator=" / ", Срби у Хрватској, Srbi u Hrvatskoj) or Croatian Serbs ( sh-Cyrl-Latn, separator=" / ", хрватски Срби, hrvatski Srbi) constitute the largest national minority in Croa ...
and
anti-LGBT Anti-LGBT rhetoric comprises themes, catchphrases, and slogans that have been used against homosexuality or other non-heterosexual sexual orientations in order to demean lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. They range from t ...
propaganda by the means of
historical denialism Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with '' historical revisionism'', a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinter ...
and by negating or diluting the severity of crimes committed by the
Ustaše The Ustaše (), also known by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croats, Croatian Fascism, fascist and ultranationalism, ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945, formally known as the Ustaš ...
regime In politics, a regime (also "régime") is the form of government or the set of rules, cultural or social norms, etc. that regulate the operation of a government or institution and its interactions with society. According to Yale professor Juan Jo ...
. Apart from whitewashing the crimes and vices of
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
-era criminals, the same is done for contemporary Croatian politicians and public figures; this is supported through massive usage of unreliable sources. Throughout 2014, fewer than two dozen editors made more than 100 edits a month; around 150 made more than 5 edits a month. Over 750 articles are ranked as featured ( hr, Izabrani članci).


2011 reliability analysis

In a study by Kubelka and Šoštarić from 2011, the reliability of the Croatian Wikipedia was compared to the ''
Croatian Encyclopedia The ''Croatian Encyclopedia'' ( hr, Hrvatska enciklopedija) is a Croatian national encyclopedia published by the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography. Overview The project began in 1999, and it represents a fifth iteration of the encyclo ...
'' – the Croatian national encyclopedia. Twenty-four reviewers, experts in specific fields, analyzed a representative selection of articles according to the parameters of informativeness, accuracy of presented information, sufficiency, direction and objectivity. Articles were analyzed in 11 thematic categories: arts and culture; history and biographies; medicine and health; technology and applied science; geography; religion; science; mathematics and logic; philosophy; sport and society; and social sciences. Articles were sorted into categories using
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
techniques, and feature weight statistics were calculated using
tf–idf In information retrieval, tf–idf (also TF*IDF, TFIDF, TF–IDF, or Tf–idf), short for term frequency–inverse document frequency, is a numerical statistic that is intended to reflect how important a word is to a document in a collection or co ...
. A total of 500 articles in 250 pairs were randomly chosen and sorted into categories to serve as
representative sample In statistics, quality assurance, and survey methodology, sampling is the selection of a subset (a statistical sample) of individuals from within a statistical population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. Statisticians attempt ...
s. In both samples, facts were manually enumerated – 3015 from the ''Croatian Encyclopedia'' and 3315 from Croatian Wikipedia. Comparison for factual accuracy showed that for every error in the ''Croatian Encyclopedia'', 2.25 errors were found in Croatian Wikipedia. Analysis by individual categories showed that most errors in Croatian Wikipedia were in the philosophy category, where on average two errors in ten articles were found. The only category where the ''Croatian Encyclopedia'' had more errors was natural sciences, where the ratio was 1.25:0.75 in favor of Croatian Wikipedia. Of those factual errors, the ratio was 21:12 for major errors, and 34:23 for minor errors. The overall ratio for minor factual errors was thus lower, the only exception being the society and social sciences category, where the minor error ratio was 3:1. The reliability analysis for Croatian Wikipedia indicated that 74% of articles were error-free, and 11% had minor errors. Major factual errors were found in 5% of articles, while 4% of articles had both major and minor errors. Overall 85% of articles were deemed "satisfactory" (error-free and containing minor errors), while in comparison 92% of articles in the ''Croatian Encyclopedia'' achieved the same rating. Forty percent of articles in Croatian Wikipedia were assessed as sufficiently informative, as opposed to sixty-two percent of articles in the ''Croatian Encyclopedia''. Sixteen percent of Croatian Wikipedia articles were assessed as "insufficiently informative", as opposed to five percent of articles from the ''Croatian Encyclopedia''. The criterion of objectivity measured the neutral point of view in articles; 91% of Croatian Wikipedia articles were assessed as being neutral, as opposed to 98% in the ''Croatian Encyclopedia''. Two percent of Croatian Wikipedia articles were assessed as non-neutral, as opposed to zero in the ''Croatian Encyclopedia''. According to their subjective preference, reviewers chose 53% of articles in the ''Croatian Encyclopedia'' as their preferred article version, while only 19.5% of Wikipedia articles were preferred, with 27% of articles being assessed as equal in quality.


Controversy about right-wing bias


Media reports about bias

In September 2013, complaints about
right-wing Right-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, authorit ...
bias of administrators and editors on the Croatian Wikipedia began to receive attention from the media, following the launch of a
Facebook page Facebook is a social-network service website launched on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. The following is a list of software and technology features that can be found on the Facebook website and mobile app and are available to users of ...
titled ''Razotkrivanje sramotne hr.wikipedije'' () which was created with the intent of bringing attention to the issue. According to Jurica Pavičić, a professor at the
University of Split The University of Split ( hr, Sveučilište u Splitu) is a university located in Split, Croatia. It was founded in 1974. and is organized in 13 faculties and 124 faculty programmes. As of 2009, a total of approximately 40,000 students have gradua ...
and '' Jutarnji list'' columnist, the gradual takeover of the Croatian Wikipedia was started in 2009 by "a small group of conservative administrators" who blocked editors for having "liberal-to-moderate views on controversial topics". Reported examples of bias include
historical revisionism In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or times ...
such as watering-down and denial of the crimes committed by the Ustashe regime, and equating
anti-fascism Anti-fascism is a political movement in opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals. Beginning in European countries in the 1920s, it was at its most significant shortly before and during World War II, where the Axis powers were ...
with forms of
totalitarianism Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...
. Other issues included the bias against
Serbs of Croatia The Serbs of Croatia ( sh-Cyrl-Latn, separator=" / ", Срби у Хрватској, Srbi u Hrvatskoj) or Croatian Serbs ( sh-Cyrl-Latn, separator=" / ", хрватски Срби, hrvatski Srbi) constitute the largest national minority in Croa ...
and the
LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is a ...
population.Trolls hijack Wikipedia to turn articles against gays
''Gay Star News''
Editors who tried to remove the biased sections were reportedly being harassed by administrators and quickly received permanent blocks under various pretexts. The issue was reported by Croatia's daily ''Jutarnji list'' and even made its print edition's front page on 11 September 2013.


Government reaction

Two days later, Croatia's Minister of Science, Education and Sports, Željko Jovanović, called for pupils and students in Croatia to avoid using the Croatian Wikipedia. In an interview given to '' Novi list'', Jovanović said that "the idea of openness and relevance as a knowledge source that Wikipedia could and should represent has been completely discredited – which, for certain, has never been the goal of Wikipedia's creators nor the huge number of people around the world who share their knowledge and time using that medium. Croatian pupils and students have been wronged by this, so we have to warn them, unfortunately, that a large part of the content of the Croatian version of Wikipedia is not only dubious but also ontainsobvious forgeries, and therefore we invite them to use more reliable sources of information, which include Wikipedia in English and in other major languages of the world." Jovanović also commented on the Croatian Wikipedia editors – calling them a "minority group that has usurped the right to edit the Croatian-language Wikipedia". Wikipedia's co-founder
Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedi ...
said that complaints about the bias of the Croatian Wikipedia were "nothing new" but that Jovanović's denunciation was alarming. Wales also reiterated his opinion that the existence of separate Croatian and
Serbian Wikipedia The Serbian Wikipedia ( sr, 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 ...
s, both written in
Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and ...
, is wrong.


Interviews with historians

In 2013, in an interview given to
Index.hr Index.hr is a Croatian tabloid online newspaper, launched in December 2002 and based in Zagreb. It was founded by Matija Babić and was originally designed as a news aggregation website, providing news content from Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia ...
, Robert Kurelić, a professor of history at the
Juraj Dobrila University of Pula The Juraj Dobrila University of Pula ( hr, Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile u Puli, la, Universitas studiorum Polensis Georgii Dobrila) is a university in Pula, Croatia. It was founded in 2006 and has eleven constituents. History The establishment o ...
, commented that "the Croatian Wikipedia is only a tool used by its administrators to promote their own political agendas, giving false and distorted facts". As two particularly prominent examples he listed the Croatian Wikipedia's coverage of the term ''Istrijanstvo'' (
Istrianism Istrianism or Istrianness is the name given to the Regionalism (politics), regionalist identity developed by the inhabitants of the part of Istria located in Croatia. Istria is the biggest peninsula in the Adriatic Sea and a multiethnic region di ...
), defined as a "movement fabricated to reduce the number of Croats", and ''antifašizam'' (
anti-fascism Anti-fascism is a political movement in opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals. Beginning in European countries in the 1920s, it was at its most significant shortly before and during World War II, where the Axis powers were ...
), which according to him was defined as the opposite of what it really means. Kurelić further advised "that it would be good if a larger number of people got engaged and started writing on Wikipedia", because "administrators want to exploit high-school and university students, the most common users of Wikipedia, to change their opinions and attitudes, which presents a serious issue". Also in 2013, Snježana Koren, a historian at the
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences or the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb ( Croatian: ''Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu'') is one of the faculties of the University of Zagreb. History The Faculty of Philosophy is the oldest fac ...
, judged the disputed articles as "biased and malicious, partly even illiterate", in an interview with Croatian news agency
HINA Hina may refer to: People and deities * Hina (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name * Hina (chiefess), a name given to several noble ladies who lived in ancient Hawaii * Hina (goddess), the name assigned to ...
. She further added that "These are the types of articles you can find on the pages of fringe organizations and movements, but there should be no place for that on Wikipedia", expressing doubts on the ability of its authors to distinguish good from evil. Koren concluded that the ulterior motive of such writings was to rehabilitate the
Independent State of Croatia The Independent State of Croatia ( sh, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH; german: Unabhängiger Staat Kroatien; it, Stato indipendente di Croazia) was a World War II-era puppet state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (1922–1943), Fascist It ...
, a
puppet state A puppet state, puppet régime, puppet government or dummy government, is a State (polity), state that is ''de jure'' independent but ''de facto'' completely dependent upon an outside Power (international relations), power and subject to its o ...
of
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
, and that "there is no other way to characterize such efforts than as Ustashe movement". The Croatian Wikipedia page on the
Jasenovac concentration camp Jasenovac () was a concentration camp, concentration and extermination camps, extermination camp established in the Jasenovac, Sisak-Moslavina County, village of the same name by the authorities of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in I ...
was regarded as a prime example of its historical revisionism and distortions. The Croatian version of the page referred to the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp as a "collection camp" and labour camp, downplayed the crimes committed there as well as the number of victims and relied on "right-wing media and private blogs" for "a large number" of its references.
Hrvoje Klasić Hrvoje Klasić (born 6 December 1972) is a Croatian historian. Since 2003, Klasić is a professor at the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. His work focuses on contemporary Croati ...
, also a historian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, stated to the
Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Balkan Insight is a website of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) that focuses on news, analysis, commentary and investigative reporting from southeast Europe. It is run by journalists in southeast Europe. BIRN was founded in 2004 ...
in 2018 that "although Jasenovac was in part a labour camp, referring to it as that alone is misleading", arguing that "referring to Jasenovac as simply a collection and labour camp is to use 'the same language' as Ustasa propaganda" and also added that "a number of articles and topics are done in a completely revisionist manner n the Croatian Wikipedia with highly emphasised nationalist and, I would dare to say, pro-Ustasa sentiment".


Disinformation assessment by Wikimedia Foundation

In 2021 the
Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...
posted a job ad for a Disinformation evaluator position, with the aim to further examine disputed content on the Croatian Wikipedia. In March 2021, a number of changes were made to remove administrative access from a group of editors considered responsible for the entire affair, some of whom also had their names published in Croatian media. One of these was exposed to be an editor of a known far-right web portal. In June 2021, Wikimedia published its Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment. It concluded that "A group of Croatian language Wikipedia (Hr.WP) admins held undue de-facto control over the project at least from 2011 to 2020. During that time, the group intentionally distorted the content presented in Croatian language Wikipedia articles in a way that matched the narratives of political organisations and groups that can broadly be defined as the Croatian radical right." According to the assessment, the administrators had abused their power to ban dissidents and selectively enforced and broke rules, resulting in project capture.


References

*


Further reading

* *


External links

* {{Wikipedias Wikipedias by language
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
Internet properties established in 2003 Croatian-language websites Wikipedia controversies Historical negationism