According to the Guinness Book of Records, Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia and anyone can access its editing. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias are present in the polycentric language of our area. Among them, in terms of the number of entered articles, the Serbian Wikipedia is the most numerous with more than 686.000 articles.
"One group of people has given themselves the right to bypass the rules of the Serbian Wikipedia and the entire Wikimedia organization, and since the project is independent and only the people who edit it can change something, it doesn't look like things will improve anytime soon," says one of editor of the Serbian Wikipedia.
He also points out the problem faced by users who "do not have a right-oriented view of the world". This is how transphobia spreads and calling non-binary people "sick" without sanction and in violation of the universal code of conduct that applies to all Wikimedia projects.
"Major problems also arise regarding articles related to the wars of the 1990s and persons accused or convicted of war crimes, where events are revised or things are omitted in order to 'mitigate' the events," adds the aforementioned editor.
Filip Maljković, one of the first editors on the Serbian Wikipedia and the former president of the Wikimedia Serbia organization, emphasizes that people's ideological understandings are reflected in any segment of their creation, including the content of Wikipedia.
"I think that Wikipedia in the Serbian language has always had active editors from all parts of the political spectrum, sometimes left-wingers took the lead, sometimes right-wingers, there was often some balance, but sometimes there is an imbalance," he continues.
Although the principle of neutrality is important, Maljković adds that we cannot always be sure that the mentioned principle will be respected:
"The solution to the fight against the extreme right is to bring in or self-initiatively join 'left-wing' people and vice versa. Wikipedia has a lot of rules that protect all members as long as they behave politely, constructively contribute to the improvement of articles and the wider Wikipedia community".
WHO MANAGES THE SERBIAN WIKIPEDIA
Although anyone can become a Wikipedian, that is, a Wikipedia editor, content is controlled by administrators and bureaucrats who perform their functions on a voluntary basis. They are chosen by the community of this encyclopedia. There are 14 administrators on the Serbian Wikipedia, three of whom have even greater powers as they hold the position of bureaucrat.
One of the five basic "pillars" on which Wikipedia is based is neutrality, and during this research, five administrators were identified - three of them are also bureaucrats - who violate these principles by taking control of the Serbian Wikipedia project.
Ranko Nikolić is one of them, and on his Wikipedia profile page he calls himself a nationalist. He is active in editing the article about Ratko Mladić, for which he used his powers to lock that page, i.e. make it unavailable for editing by the wider community. At the beginning of the article, Mladić is not mentioned in the synopsis of the page as a person convicted of war crimes, which is not the case with the Russian and English Wikipedia. Mladić's decorations are also on the mentioned page, and the page is ranked among the 406 "good" articles on the Serbian Wikipedia, out of over 680.000 articles on this language project. In addition to the function of administrator, Nikolić is also a bureaucrat.
MareBg is an administrator, who states on his Wikipedia profile that he "supports the will of the people of Republika Srpska" and "does not recognize the independence of Kosovo and Metohija". The administrator and bureaucrat Kizula share their opinion about Kosovo. He has been banned from English Wikipedia for impersonation and paid editing.
Administrator and bureaucrat Sadko was permanently blocked from the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, where he fell into the so-called editorial wars for the articles Montenegrins, Serbia, Serbization. Before that, he was blocked two more times on the same project, as well as on the English Wikipedia for editing pages related to Eastern Europe. That is why he used other editors on the Serbian Wikipedia to make changes on the English one.
Three of these administrators founded in 2021 Discord communication server that is currently inactive, next to the server Discord of the Serbian Wikipedia community founded two years earlier.
The subject of administrators' actions was also dealt with in a scientific paper from 2013 entitled "Manipulation among arbiters of collective intelligence: How Wikipedia administrators shape public opinion". He showed how a large number of Wikipedia editors, after being "promoted" to administrators, changed their behavior by focusing on controversial topics.
"The conscious and unconscious biases of these few but powerful administrators may be shaping information on many of the most sensitive topics on Wikipedia," the paper's abstract reads.
HISTORICAL REVISIONISM AND JUSTIFICATION OF CRIMES/CA
Doctoral dissertation of Dr. Stefan Janjić, assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad and editor of the portal FakeNews Tracker, concerns the Wikipedia projects of our language area. More precisely, the level of editorial pressure on articles about the Second World War and the wars of the nineties in the former Yugoslavia on the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia.
"On Wikipedia, in this respect, we can find diametrically different practices - from the article about the Drina martyrs, nuns who were killed by the Chetniks - to articles about Srebrenica, Jasenovac, 'The Storm' and the Independent State of Croatia. In the first case, three Wikipedias offer an almost identical article, while in the latter, controversial cases, we have large to drastic differences in interpretation," Janjić told "Vreme".
He adds that these differences today are "smaller and more decent" compared to the period three years ago when he conducted his research. Janjić believes that the decision of the Wikimedia Endowment to revise the years-long relativization of Ustasha crimes on the Croatian Wikipedia also had a positive impact.
"When we talk about our victims, we resort to fable and poeticization, and when we talk about our crimes - we use the passive diathesis, which hides the subject in the sentence ('the crime was committed', 'the shell killed'...)," adds Janjić. "Nevertheless, based on the analysis of more than a thousand articles, I would say that the prevailing negative opinion about Wikipedia is unjustified, because most of the texts on these sensitive topics are written politely and - as far as possible - objectively."
On the Serbian Wikipedia, during the writing of this article, attention was focused on the interpretation of events during the nineties in Yugoslavia. Thus, the article about the genocide in Srebrenica, judged by the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia, was called Massacre in Srebrenica. It is also locked for editing by the wider community. It cites attacks on Serbian villages since 1992 as the background of the genocide, and one of the controversies that followed this "event" is the ignoring of "Muslim crimes against local Serbs, which preceded this crime." In the article entitled Operation Krivaja, is a similar narrative.
Dr. Jasmin Medić, a historian at the Institute of History of the University of Sarajevo, explains that the example of this article denies genocide and wants to "subtly show that it is a reflection of revenge because crimes were allegedly committed against the Serbian population."
"Then, according to the established practice of deniers and relativizers of genocide, civilians from the (relatively speaking) other side present themselves as soldiers, and 'our' victims are always civilians," says Medić.
In the article Massacre in Srebrenica the crime in Kravica that took place on July 13 and 14, 1995 is also described. It is stated as a fact that the then commander of the police squad, Krsto Dragičević, spotted his neighbor among the captives, who took advantage of his "relaxation" and killed Krsto, trying to injure others as well. That's why the policemen, "scared in the highly heated atmosphere, and fearing for their own lives", make the decision to liquidate all the prisoners present, which they do. At least 1000 Bosniaks were killed in Kravica at the time, according to the conclusion of the trial panel of the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 2010.
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A special article is dedicated to the Racak case, and it was chosen as one of the 308 "great" articles on the Serbian Wikipedia. It begins with the sentence that the Racak case is the name for "an armed conflict between Serbian police and Albanian terrorists during a police action on January 15, 1999." According to the conclusion of the Chamber of the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 2011, at least 45 Kosovo Albanians were killed in Racak, including one woman and one child. In the mentioned document, it is stated that most of the killed were over 50 years old, most of them were shot in the head from close range and that when they were killed, most of them were wearing civilian clothes. The number of civilians killed in Racak is not mentioned as a fact on this Wikipedia page.
The page about the Chetnik leader Dragoljub Draža Mihailović was also locked on the Serbian Wikipedia. An entire subheading on the Serbian-Croatian Wikipedia project is devoted to the crime against the Muslim population in the article dealing with Draž. However, it is much shorter in Serbian and does not include his direct responsibility.
"When it comes to Draža Mihailović and his movement, it has been undoubtedly proven that in various stages during the war he implemented criminal goals and policies with elements of genocide, while at the same time the cooperation of Chetnik commanders with Nazi and occupation forces is well documented," explains historian Dr. Sanja Radovic.
FROM KULINA BAN
There is also an article called A self-hating Serb, which is described as "a pejorative term used for a member of the Serbian people who represents the views of the aggressor". The aforementioned bureaucrat Sadko expanded this definition by adding "other interest groups". For the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was stated that the cause was "a violent attempt by the pro-Muslim government from Sarajevo to establish the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina". When a certain editor tried to change it, Sadko reversed those changes.
"The causes of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina were complex, and one of the most important immediate causes was the inability of the three constituent nations to agree on the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina," explains Dr. Sanja Radović. In the meantime, this claim in the mentioned article has been changed.
The bureaucrat Sadko also canceled the changes made by the editors who tried to change that the Matica Montenegrin research was considered "pseudo-research".
The fifth noted administrator at the time of writing is using the account name CarRadovan who calls Kulina bana an ethnic Serb who used the Serbian language.
Although the Montenegrin Wikipedia does not exist, over the years this issue has been discussed at least three times in 2006, 2007 and 2010. However, all three times the proposals were rejected.
"Wikipedia should not be divided along political lines, and we encourage Montenegrin editors to cooperate with Serbian editors on one wiki or, at the very least, to have Montenegrin pages in addition to Serbian pages. If political divisions make this difficult, remember that the goal of the Wikimedia Foundation is to give every person free, unbiased access to the sum of all human knowledge, not to information from individual political communities", was the response of the Language Commission of the Wikimedia Endowment all three times.
THE UNUSUAL CASE OF THE CROATIAN WIKIPEDIA
For more than a decade, Croatian Wikipedia has been exposed to historical revisionism related to the Ustaše and Croatia's role in World War II. That's why the Wikimedia Foundation hired an outside expert to prepare a report in 2021 on the disinformation spread by problematic administrators.
This was followed by their global ban from Wikipedia and the removal of administrator powers in March 2021.
"The group used their positions of power on Wikipedia to attract new like-minded contributors, silence and ban dissenters, manipulate community elections, and undermine the original conflict resolution mechanisms of Wikipedia and the broader movement," the report said.
It is added that the group used disinformation tactics, discrediting other editors, as well as open harassment. Although ideologically oriented content on Wikipedia has been real since 2007, the situation has further worsened between 2013 and 2019. The purpose of disinformation, the aforementioned document says, is to evoke a strong emotion in the reader - anger, despair or helplessness, as well as a sense of belonging. a certain group.
In the case of Croatian Wikipedia, the report states that articles affected by "historical revisionism and manipulation of facts" affected the online and public spheres. Thus, in 2013, the Croatian Minister of Science and Education warned high school students and students about the use of Wikipedia.
"It has been shown that in the absence of timely attention and community action, a consolidated group of administrators occupying key positions in a single language project can be able to create, shape, profile and modify large amounts of content contrary to the five pillars," writes the expert.
The same report also mentions bias when editing the article about Ratko Mladić on the Serbian Wikipedia.
WIKIPEDIA SOUTHFUTURISM
Wikimedia Serbia is the fifth branch of the Wikimedia community in the world, and as an association of citizens, it has no direct influence on the functioning of Wikipedia, nor on its organizational structure.
"Even though its field of action is Wikipedia in the Serbian language, Wikimedia Serbia is not responsible for the content and events on Wikipedia. Each language variant of Wikipedia has its own rules of functioning and policies that editors are obliged to adhere to," says Miroslav Loci, the president of this organization.
He adds that having administrator rights does not give any user immunity on Wikipedia.
Thus, the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation would have the authority to respond to admin abuse. When addressing their media team, "Vreme" did not receive answers to the questions.
Referring to the aforementioned case of the Croatian Wikipedia, Miroslav points out that this problem is "unique in the Wikimedia movement", and that it was successfully suppressed.
"Accordingly, and within the Movement Strategy, the Wikimedia Endowment has dedicated a significant segment of its activity to preventing all forms of disinformation and propaganda," Loci answered for "Vreme".
The author of the report concerning the Croatian Wikipedia mentioned as one of the potential solutions the unification of existing Wikipedias that share the same polycentric language, following the examples of other linguistically unified projects on Wikipedia: English, Chinese, German, Korean and others. Therefore, the proposal is that there should be only a Serbian-Croatian Wikipedia project. Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, expressed the same opinion for the Croatian "Jutarnji list" in 2013.
"It is obvious that the above cannot be achieved because the communities of editors were created independently of each other, each with its own specific rules, and merging into one project would cause an editorial war of changes that would lead to the project becoming unsustainable." The editors are free to edit several language projects, according to the level of knowledge of the target language", asserts Miroslav.
Dr. Stefan Janjić points out that on the Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias, we can see progress "and a gradual liberation from unfounded claims and a style that does not befit an encyclopedic discourse". He adds that although a complete consensus among the three Wikipedias is not possible, work should be done on that idea.
"I believe that the administrators of the three Wikipedias could organize occasional joint meetings, that it is possible to pay more attention to the comparison of data, to a stricter selection of references, to eliminate the counterfactual approach ('what if') and to create new articles for topics that have not yet been covered. ", concludes Janjić for "Vreme".
TARGETING FORMER WOMAN EMPLOYED IN WIKIMEDIA SERBIA
In April, the already mentioned Sadko expressed his dissatisfaction with the current work of the former employee of Wikimedia Serbia on the Serbian Wikipedia project. She currently works in an organization that deals with human rights, whose actions and goals are "well known to every informed person and are not worthy of detailed analysis", writes Sadko. However, he does not share those values (and neither do Ranko Nikolić and MareBg who supported him). He says that her employment at Wikimedia Serbia is a "personnel lapse" and a "serious personnel stain" of this association. The organization in which she now works supported the Resolution on the genocide in Srebrenica, which caused the dissatisfaction of the aforementioned administrator and bureaucrat.
"The mentioned activity, a political act, wrapped in many nice words and appeals for kindness and reconciliation, is nothing but completely perfidious chauvinism, targeting and spreading intolerance towards members of one nation or currently an entity, as well as preparing the ground for a further series of acts in an exclusively Western-centric and the interest of the neighbors", explains Sadko.
He added that she did not show any work results. His appeal aimed to prevent something similar from happening again, because it is "neither human nor civil nor Serbian to remain silent".
Soon, Miroslav Loci addressed this Wikipedia discussion, condemning the attack directed at their former employee.
"Even though this is aimed at an individual, it is also defamation of the reputation of Wikimedia Serbia." We are of a clear position that we do not enter into the political preferences of individuals, but we make a distinction between the expression of views and public labeling and targeting of persons and organizations", Loci wrote below. This attack was reported by Wikimedia Serbia to the security team of the Wikimedia Endowment, i.e. "to some body from abroad", as Sadko says.
This action of the employee Sadko saw as spreading religious and national hatred which is "evident and unquestionable", signing at the end as a "free-thinking Serb".
