The first Belarusian Wikipedia was started on August 12, 2004. One of its creators and first administrators was Uladzimir Katkouski. Katkouski/rydel created over 1,300 articles in the Belarusian Wikipedia alone. Articles in the Belarusian Wikipedia were inconsistently written in both variants of the orthography, leading to conflicts between the adherents of the two. A "clean" version in the official orthography was initiated in the Wikipedias "" at Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki. However, the first application for a new Wikipedia was rejected in December 2006 by the Board of Trustees and Language Commission for technical reasons, quoting: "This discussion was created before the implementation of the Language proposal policy, and it is incompatible with the policy." A redrafted proposal was approved in March 2007. Upon approval, in the evening of the same day, over 6,000 articles written in the pre-reform orthography were transferred from the "be.wikipedia.org" domain to "be-x-old.wikipedia.org", while the 3,500 pages from "Incubator" were moved to "be.wikipedia.org". However, due to a software bug, the move did not go smoothly: in the morning the articles seemed to have disappeared, and users could not log in. This led to a number of news reports that articles in old Belarusian orthography were deleted from Wikipedia. In September 2015, the domain name of the classical orthography Belarusian Wikipedias was changed from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org, reflecting the official language subtag assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority in 2007. Including the time in the "incubator", the current variant of be-Wikipedia has existed since August 2006.
Rates of contribution
Initially the official Belarusian Wikipedia overtook the classical one, but in about a year, it slowed down, and in fall 2008, the classical one was ahead. Today, the official Belarusian Wikipedia has again surpassed the one in the classical orthography. On March 15, 2008 the official Belarusian encyclopedia reached 10,000 articles. On June 17, 2009, the classical Belarusian encyclopedia reached 20,000 articles, holding the 65th place among other Wikipedias. At that time, the official Belarusian Wikipedia had about 16,000 articles, holding the 71st place. On November 16, 2010 the official Belarusian encyclopedia reached 25,000 articles. In August 2015, the official Belarusian encyclopedia reached 100,000 articles.
Topics
In 2019 the Belarusian Wikipedia has 115 thousand unique categories and 29.35% of them do not have appropriate page in the category namespace. The average article in this language version has 7 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.691. The largest number of articles has Geography and Society category. In Belarusian Wikipedia articles related to Events and Military has the highest average quality. Content about Business is read more often and articles in Government category have the highest authors' interest on average.
