Yiddish Wikipedia

Yiddish Wikipedia
URL	http://yi.wikipedia.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	Yiddish
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by

Yiddish Wikipedia is the Yiddish language version of Wikipedia. It was founded in March 2004, but the first article was written November 28 of that year.

Current status

The Yiddish Wikipedia had over 4000 articles as of July 2007.

Like the most Yiddish language users write, it is written exclusively in Hebrew fonts, and not in Latin script.

Point of view

The articles are currently written, to a large degree, by Satmar Hasidim. The combined Hasidic communities form the largest Yiddish-speaking movement in the world today.

Controversy

Although it has a variety of interest in all worldly subjects, the edit wars are mostly driven by the make-up of the Yiddish speaking community, that is the inside Hasidic politics, more inside the Satmar Hasidim dynasty, for instance the most edited article is Aaron Teitelbaum a figure head which is the most talked about in Yiddish speaking circles.[1]

Users and Editors

Like all wikipedias it has the traffic from all Yiddish words typed in Google, who puts a wikipedia article always in top of its results for that word.

But the editors are very few, although it has over 700 signed up editors in any given day only 3 names or less are active. that is because many Yiddish speakers do not have Hebrew graphemes on their computer. Also, most Yiddish speakers today are fervent orthodox Jews, called Hasidim, and their rabbis prohibit Internet use that is not strictly related to business.

External links

• Yiddish Wikipedia
• New Voices e-Gossip - If there ever was hope for our grandparents to turn tech-savvy and read about the latest in their mamaloshen, this is it. newvoices.
• Go on the web: Aviv Gefen (with non-hebrew spelling)? Yes. Its not a mistake. It's Yiddish. Ynet (Hebrew)
• Dr. Shalom Berger, An encyclopedia of people already in Yiddish The Forward (Yiddish)
• Is there such a think as a Free Encyclopedia?: - The Yiddish Wikipedia was the only wikipedia which did not delete an article which a Journalist has written his own autobiography. TheMarker (Hebrew)

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