Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

How social media enforce glocalization - the processes of identity change in selected ...
Table 4: Wikistats: Wikimedia statistics for September 2010
NUMBER
OF
EDITORS
NUMBER
OF
EDITORS
(> 5 EDITS)
NUMBER
OF
EDITORS
(>100 EDITS)
NUMBER
OF ARTICLES
NUMBER
OF NEW
ARTICLES
PER DAY
GLOBAL 1,216,739 79,413 10,539 16.9 M 7,517
GERMAN 99,578 6,782 1,026 1.1 M 416
SLOVENE 2,777 123 21 101K 23
CROATIAN 2,414 146 20 91K 57
SERBIAN 2,238 193 48 123K 87
SERBO-
CROATIAN
280 34 8 34K 28
Source: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm (29 November 2010)
We have already seen in Table 2 that Wikipedia is one of the top ten websites globally
and in all of the analysed countries. From Table 4 above we see that regardless of very high
numbers of articles and editors only a small number of people actually contributed more
than five and especially more than a hundred edits in September 2010. That means that
a rather small and dedicated community contributes to most of the edits (fact-checking,
deleting language errors, dealing with vandalism attacks, content creation, etc.). Not going
into the analysis of what content is actually published, what interests us the most is that this
small community acts as a gatekeeper for producing content which is publicly available for
anyone with a PC, Internet connection and basic information literacy to look for articles
of his or her own interest.
Another precondition is the language barrier since different Wikipedia versions are
organized into language versions. Therefore, there is no Austrian version but a German
version in an online transnational community involved in content creation in the German
language. One curiosity is the existence of a Serbo-Croatian language version for which its
community claims to be the first online edition established in 2002 for Bosnian, Croatian
and Serbian. Single language communities were separated from it in 2003 to form their
unique language versions while the Serbo-Croatian community remained active. 18 Since
Serbo-Croatian is no longer an official language within any of the former Yugoslav states,
its existence on Wikipedia tells us about the way in which memory is reinterpreted and
disembedded from its local context and the way in which it enters cyberspace thus becoming
available for anyone with basic preconditions for using it. It also tells us not of a disappearance
of a territorially acquired language knowledge but of a connection between the “real” and
the “virtual” and of different ways in which the relation can be established and re-established.
18
Available at: http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srpskohrvatska_Wikipedija (4 February 2011).
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