Croatian Wikipedia: capture and release
A decade-old case of "project capture" of the Croatian Wikipedia (Hr.WP) by nationalist administrators may have been resolved with the help of a report published this month on Meta by the Wikimedia Foundation titled "The Case of the Croatian Wikipedia". The report was authored anonymously, presumably to avoid harassment, and is an independent view of an expert on the subject matter.
The admins, led by Kubura, inserted disinformation and used sockpuppeting and other abusive tactics, according to a separate RfC which globally banned him last November. Blablubbs, who participated in the RfC, said that Kubura had an "army of socks". Blablubbs decided to help at the RfC "partially because of the whitewashing ... and partially because of draconian crackdowns on dissent inside the project".
The admins were linked by the report to Croatian nationalist positions by their downplaying the UN war crime convictions of Croatians who fought in the 1991–1999 Yugoslav Wars, their use of biased unreliable sources and by their support of the World War II era Nazi-puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), as well as the military group, the Ustaše which the report calls "terrorist".
The report echos earlier accounts of administrator abuse including a 2019 article in The Signpost, "The curious case of the Croatian Wikipedia", Croatian and international news stories going back to 2010, and complaints by Wikipedia editors starting about 2007. The report concludes that "Hr.WP had been dominated by ideologically driven users who are misaligned with Wikipedia’s five pillars, confirming concerns about the project’s integrity from the global community."
Articles are being re-written and disaffected editors are rejoining the project. The report notes this progress but warns that the transformation is not complete and that the banned admins may use new accounts to try to recapture the project.
The report also observes that this case highlights a "significant weakness in the global Wikimedia community and – by extension – Wikimedia Foundation platform governance."