This story is at once a personal one, but its products could affect our whole movement. Thus I feel a duty to share it with you.
(Disclaimer: I am under the influence of sljivovica [1], which means that my English syntax could betray me.
Also, keep in mind that one of the comments which I got after the first AfroCrowd [2] session was that it's hard to follow me, as my narration makes people sleepy. Besides that comment, I actually helped on that occasion my fellow friend Milica to fell asleep. And I see that as one of my contributions to the better world: If my narration helps people to fell asleep, then it's at least more natural medication than sleeping pills.
So, brace yourselves! If you really want to read my whole email -- which I warmly suggest :D --, it's good idea to read it in bed, immediately before you want to sleep.)
* * *
Back to 1985, as 12 years old boy, I got my first computer. It was Schneider [3] branded version of Amstrad CPC 664 [4]. Although I was fascinated by computers earlier, that was the real beginning of my geekness. I still remember my first programs in Locomotive Basic.
But, during my high school years, I decided that I definitely don't want to study anything which requires mathematics. So, I wanted to study world literature, but was enough successful just to enter the course of Serbian language and literature.
Almost immediately after I started my studies, I realized that I am much more interested in grammar than literature and my divergence from my initial idea became wider as time was passing.
It actually culminated with starting studies in theoretical physics. However, I realized then that there are "studies" and *studies*. Theoretical physics obviously belongs to the real ones. So, I abandoned it and went back to my linguistics "studies"...
But the difference between "science" and *science* made quite a big influence on me. During my first and the only year of studying theoretical physics, I realized that all social sciences are on the level of pre-Newton physics. And linguistics is probably the best of the social sciences.
So, I wanted to fix that. I started to be interested in all the fields which intended to make linguistics more scientific. (All my interests were so diverse, that I could write another long story for each of them, so I'll avoid all of them except the most relevant one.) At the end I settled with formal/computational linguistics. And I got full support of my linguistics professors. The reason why I got such support has become much more clear to me during the next decade: Basically, I was the only student interested in that.
I went to the Computational Center of the Faculty for Electrical Engineering in 1995 and the new phase of my life began. Thanks to that institution and people around it, instead of working on formal linguistics issues, I became more and more interested in system administration. Speaking from today's perspective, system administration is my profession, while linguistics is my hobby.
In 1999 the third of my journeys began. While reading documentation, at the time when I could have been easily become a collateral damage of the bombs of the sole superpower, I was bizarrely but genuinely interested in the fact that GNU GPL can't be realistically implemented into the jurisdiction of my country as it wasn't localized. Thus I sent an email to licenses@gnu.org and one person responded to me. Just years later I realized who is RMS.
Between 1999 and 2003 I was a bit depressed because I knew that free software is not possible without free knowledge. Then I found Wikipedia and my fourth journey started. (I am still aware that free knowledge is not possible without free and just society and that free and just society is not possible without free love. But I didn't come yet to the position to work on that more systematically.)
With one year of absence, I am a member of the Language committee since 2008. During the first years of my duty I deeply believed that there are people who care about the global language diversity in general and systematic way. And I was quite disappointed to realize that nobody actually cares about them in that way.
So, for a long time I was thinking that the duty of Wikimedia movement is to take that responsibility.
Back to the present...
The project [5] of starting cooperation with Matica srpska [6] has been formally approved by WMF. And that's the crossroads of my five journeys: computers, Serbian language, free software, Wikipedia and one more.
The last one is the most important one. I see this project not just as a local initiative, but as the beginning of one initiative which only Wikimedia movement could achieve. Yes, it's about the idea that every language which has Wikipedia has a chance to survive. And this project will make the foundations for making that idea reality. To be able to tackle that issue, we have to have the software and the movement willing to work on it. And I am sure that we'll get both during the duration of the project.
That doesn't mean that it will be successful just thanks to the work of the core team of this project. It requires wide participation of all of you, all of us. So, please, join us! You have this thread and my email and there is no valid excuse to wait.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slivovitz [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/AfroCrowd [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Rundfunkwerke_AG [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC#CPC664 [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets_... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matica_srpska