Crnogorska Enciklopedija

» see wikii.itam.ws as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Montenegro voted for independence in May 2006. Later that year a non-governmental organization in Podgorica called ITAM switched on a MediaWiki install at wikii.itam.ws and started an encyclopedia in Montenegrin. It was named Montenegrowiki first and Crnogorska Enciklopedija afterward. The install ran version 1.6.8 and carried no advertising. The front page welcomed you twice, once in English and once in Montenegrin, with the line Wikipedia uses about an encyclopedia anyone can edit.

This was not a hobby wiki. ITAM had applied to the Wikimedia Foundation for a Wikipedia in Montenegrin and been refused, and the site existed as the thing you build when the official route is closed: a working proof that there was a language, a writing community and enough material to fill a reference work. Vijesti, the Podgorica daily, later described it as a test version that a large number of enthusiasts filled with text across different categories. The categories were the obvious six. Art, sport, social sciences, applied sciences, natural sciences, Montenegro.

Darko Bulatović and Damir Mustafić are the two names attached to it, as authors and as the people with the server passwords. ITAM itself was doing other things in the same years, running a wireless network project for Podgorica and angling to administer the .ME domain when that two-letter code came to Montenegro. The encyclopedia was one project among several at an organization Vijesti would describe, by 2011, in the past tense.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the year of development ~

The front page carried a banner through 2008 in both languages: let us make 2008 the year of the development of Crnogorska Enciklopedija. Underneath it sat a live article counter, and the counter is the reason this grave can say anything precise at all.

On 9 January 2008 the project had just over a thousand articles. The counter reads 1.765 on 11 April and 2.841 on 2 November. On 17 December it reads 3.005, with Lake Skadar featured on the front page and the same banner still up. That is roughly a tripling inside the year the banner had asked for.

Then the Internet Archive's record stops. The last capture of the main page is dated 18 December 2008, one day after the 3,005 reading. There are more than two thousand crawls of the site across 2008 and not one in the eight years that follow. The next time anything at wikii.itam.ws answers a crawler, around 2017, every path on the host returns the same page, and the page is the registrar advertising .WS domain names. It still does. Whatever happened happened over a holiday, and nobody posted a notice about it.

~ what Vijesti printed ~

The reporting on why is thin, and it is all one side. Writing in January 2011, Damira Kalač of Vijesti went back over the project with Bulatović and recorded his account: ITAM had expected backing from the Wikimedia community and had not received it, and the request for a Montenegrin Wikipedia was rejected twice. The reason given was heavy pressure from members of the Foundation's Serbian chapter, who the piece says used direct action and disinformation to block it. The same paragraph adds that a number of hacking attacks on Montenegrowiki from Serbia were recorded at the time.

~ 3,005 articles ~

The contents of Crnogorska Enciklopedija were carried across into the Incubator test version of a Montenegrin Wikipedia. That is where the writing went, onto a Wikimedia staging wiki, after the encyclopedia itself had stopped answering on a hostname nobody renewed.

Three thousand and five articles is not a large encyclopedia. For volunteers working in a language with few speakers, in years when nobody anywhere was paid to care about reference work of that kind, it is a great deal of writing.

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