Crossroads of five journeys - Wikimedia-l

13 Feb 2015


      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