Wikislavia
Wikislavia was a free online encyclopedia. It was founded from 2006 by a group of wiki-dissenters who where exiled from the Russian Wikipedia because of cultural and POV-persecutions. These include banning and harassing people who think differently and deleting information that would be damaging to the interests of Moscovite anti-nationalists. Wikislavia had a inclusionist policy and it included not only articles, but also wiki-sources and educational materials. The initial number of pages amount to more than 30,000 and that new website was growing quickly with more than 2000 pages a day. Wikislavia contained pages in dozen languages, not only in Russian but also in other Slavic and Turkic languages. Wikislavia was also a website dedicated to a political ideology, mostly (Siberian) nationalists and esoteric Christians. They had a large amount of books and writing dealing with religion, philosophy and folktales.
Contents
Wikislavia’s increasing phase
Wiki project Wikislavia was developed at increasing rate. In 2007, it has reached the landmark of 100,000 pages, and then surpassed the second largest Russian-language web encyclopedia Wikiznanie becoming the major competitor of Russian subdivision of Wikipedia. Russian Wikipedia has been crawling to this number of articles for several years, while Wikislavia made it in less than one year.
Wikislavia’s swift success was partially due to GNU file document license that allows free information exchange between the wikies. The founders of Wikislavia put forward as their first goal collecting the data from several tens of Russian-language wiki projects.
Wikislavia’s leaders defined their project as maximally free uncensored encyclopedia. The main difference between Wikislavia and Wikipedia was that it is based on the philosophy of inclusionism, that is including virtually all information available through GNU FDL. Wikislavia's team believed that it is not worth wasting time on long discussions regarding the notability of articles’ subjects. Instead, they delegated the decision about notability to their readers. There was no article for deletion tag in Wikislavia. They required an encyclopedic style, though.
Wikislavia does not waste time on assigning ranks to the users. There was no elections of administrators and no superior authorities (the so called Arbitration Committee). Any person of good will was invited to Wikislavia, and anyone could become an administrator. Wikislavia covered a wide range of topics: science, literature, sport, business. It also included original texts. This range of information was very useful for making cross references.
Thus, new times had come. Wikipedia's monopoly was broken, and it then had a strong competitor. This competion would eventually benefit the readers because it stipulates development and gives more choice. “The more high-quality wiki-projects, the better”, sayed Wikislavia’s leader Yaroslav Zolotarev. And what about Wikipedia? As it could be expected, their participants were quite unhappy about the new competitor and immediately entered Wikislavia in their black lists in violation of their own rules (rule violation is a common practice in Russian Wikipedia). Now no user can include a reference to Wikislavia neither in the articles, nor in their user pages. Wikislavia's users wrote a couple of satyrical articles about these features, which infuriated many wikipedians.
Wikislavia's apogee 2007/08
Wikislavia reached its richest phase in 2008, when it became really polyglott in dozen different languages and Slavonic dialects of Eastern Europe, including together nearly 250,000 articles and around 1,100 registered users. In that time it was the third major wiki-encyclopedia on internet, since multilingual Wikipedia and the big Chinese “Baidu-Baike” (= White Encyclopedia).
At the beginning of 2009, Wikislavia had 9 lingual sections officially open on separate portals, plus the main portal Meta-Wikislavia connecting its lingual sections. The biggest one was the main Russian Wikislavia with 230,195 articles, and 667 registered users. Then followed Siberian edition (7,525 texts and 339 users), Croatian Wikislavia (561 texts and 34 users), Chakavian edition (Old-Croat: 540 texts & 18 users), and other minor starting sections with 7 to 40 articles and 3 to 7 users: e.g. Ukrainian, Don-Cossack, Russian-Latinized (in Roman alphabet), 'Moldavian', and Panslavic (in hybrid Slovio).
Wikislavia’s destroying and stopping
Also as other similar public wikis, in its early increasing phase 2006/2007 Wikislavia experienced some minor sporadical attacks by individual vandals without major problems. However, after its rapid increasing and becaming really multilingual, other serious organized aggressions iteratively followed mostly from the concurrent wikipedian fans.
The first deeper organized attack started in 2008 by the hackers from “Croatian” Wikipedia, who twice destroyed the basic wiki-software and main portal of Croatian Wikislavia; so it was stopped iteratively for few months of regeneration (In that time the powerful main admin of so-called “Croatian” Wikipedia was physically located in Israel). The result was the irreparable loss of some images, and urgent permanent protection on 1/3 of major articles in Croatian Wikislavia.
Then from 2009 followed another well organized massive invasion of the concurrent Russian Wikipedians against the main Russian Wikislavia. Nearly hundred vandals and fanatical hackers leaded by young admins of Ru. Wikipedia, then every day during some months vandalized and destroyed by erasing texts and inserting the provocative obscene images, inverting nearly a half of articles across Ru. Wikislavia, and also all contents of the main Meta-Wikislavia. Only dozen existing sysops of the entire big Wikislavia in 2009, really were insufficient to regenerate all these enormous devastations, and then Wikislavia's leaders decided to close soon the entire Wikislavia; it is completely stopped and shut down in December 2009.
The Croatian section of Wikislavia was the last one persistently active up to autumn 2009. Yet in autumn 2008, when Russian and other sections became vandalized, the majority (3/4) of important Croatian articles were protected and vandalisms consequently blocked and erased. The last new Croatian articles were included there on 12th December 2009, and then two days after the entire Wikislavia was dead. So this major competition which threatened Wikipedia's leftist monopoly was “democratically” resolved.
See also
External links
- Web.archive of the main Meta-Wikislavia 2008
- Web.archive of Russian Wikislavia 2008
- Web.archive of Siberian Wikislavia 2008
- Web.archive of Croatian Wikislavia 2008
- Web.archive of Chakavian Wikislavia 2008
