Message: 7 Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2012 01:25:33 +0400 From: "Yaroslav M. Blanter" putevod@mccme.ru Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Bosnia's Top Cultural Institutions Shutting Down To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: fd4d5a6d2d4cf1db823bfb1df349c5ce@mccme.ru Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Sat, 7 Jan 2012 22:13:58 +0100, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
2012/1/7 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
On 7 January 2012 20:12, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina holds 400,000 artifacts. Any National Cultural Institution closing is a disaster.
Yes, it is. So what's the game plan?
I'm not sure. If the WMF goals are to collect/preserve/disseminate educational content, they can start with the holdings in endangered cultural institutions. It is not my work, but some suggestions, from low
to
high involvement:
- blog post exposing the events
- a call to the museums, showing that we are concerned
- offering wikimedia projects to host any materials they want to give
- marathon to create related articles
- organize a "Wiki Invades..." to take photos and notes of the
collections
- wikipedian in residence and put some money to fund some activities
- any other high profile partnership
And read international news related to our long-term goals.
Regards, emijrp
May be checking with WM Serbia (I am not sure they can do anything, but it would be good to know) and leaving a message on Serbian Wikipedia asking for advise/clarification/actions. Everybody can leave this message, but probably the most efficient would be to find someone who speaks Serbian.
Cheers Yaroslav
I might just be a crypto-American chauvinist (and really, that sort of inflammatory message is completely unnecessary on this list), so I apologise for any ignorance on the situation, but would Wikimedia Serbia really be the best organisation to help out here. My understanding is that Bosnia-Serbia relations are still very... delicate... and a Serbian organisation coming in to help out with Bosnian cultural artefacts, no matter how well meaning, might not get the most enthusiastic of receptions.
Cheers, Craig
On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 02:42, Craig Franklin craig@halo-17.net wrote:
I might just be a crypto-American chauvinist (and really, that sort of inflammatory message is completely unnecessary on this list), so I apologise for any ignorance on the situation, but would Wikimedia Serbia really be the best organisation to help out here. My understanding is that Bosnia-Serbia relations are still very... delicate... and a Serbian organisation coming in to help out with Bosnian cultural artefacts, no matter how well meaning, might not get the most enthusiastic of receptions.
The situation is not as bad as you think in the sense of ethnic and countries relations. Besides that, every national institution of Bosnia and Herzegovina belongs to both entities, of which one is Republic Srpska; and three constitutive nations, of which one are Serbs.
However... * Much bigger problems are corruption and obstruction in Bosnia itself. * It's not clear how could Wikimedia Serbia help? There are a lot of Bosnian Wikimedians and it's better to have them organized than to go from Belgrade to Sarajevo on regular basis. * Cf. my argument in previous email: Besides extraordinary obstruction problems in Bosnia, the whole region has highly inefficient managements of cultural institutions; they are usually against knowledge liberation etc. Starting cooperation with them now would mean that we could start with some real work in a couple of years.
Structural help is not Wikimedia's task [yet]. There are a lot of other institutions which could give them money for daily operations or artifacts preservation and not require from them knowledge liberation. In other words, it's presently better for Wikimedia and regional cultural institutions to be separated until new generations of management come. Said so, any articulated action of knowledge liberation should be welcomed; and we should work on them. But, the scale difference between structural help and particular project is huge.
On 8 January 2012 09:09, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Structural help is not Wikimedia's task [yet]. There are a lot of other institutions which could give them money for daily operations or artifacts preservation and not require from them knowledge liberation. In other words, it's presently better for Wikimedia and regional cultural institutions to be separated until new generations of management come. Said so, any articulated action of knowledge liberation should be welcomed; and we should work on them. But, the scale difference between structural help and particular project is huge.
So it sounds like the first thing we (in this case, local Wikipedians) should do is approach them and say "We don't have money, but is there anything else we can positively help with? What's the programme?"
- d.
2012/1/8 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
So it sounds like the first thing we (in this case, local Wikipedians) should do is approach them and say "We don't have money, but is there anything else we can positively help with? What's the programme?"
It's not so simple - you might very well find that there is no programme. While Romania's cultural institutions are far from the desperate situation in Bosnia, they have a tradition of doing just what the bosses are asking and little more. So if the Ministry of Culture is saying "create a long term plan for conserving such or such category of artefacts", they will make and follow such a plan; otherwise, they will just go along as if degradation never happens.
I expect you might find a somewhat similar situation in Bosnia - there is no boss (Ministry of Culture) and no money, so why make plans? The wikimedians willing to help should in this case concentrate on *creating* the links with institutions able to help the Bosnians either financially or with know-how. The Wiki Loves Monuments and other GLAM events showed that we have the contacts and willingness to make that happen.
Anyhow, we need to consider that we've discussed this quite a lot already. Perhaps it's time for someone to take the lead on this? My personal view is that you, David, are a much better candidate than emijrp :)
Strainu
On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 10:23, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 January 2012 09:09, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Structural help is not Wikimedia's task [yet]. There are a lot of other institutions which could give them money for daily operations or artifacts preservation and not require from them knowledge liberation. In other words, it's presently better for Wikimedia and regional cultural institutions to be separated until new generations of management come. Said so, any articulated action of knowledge liberation should be welcomed; and we should work on them. But, the scale difference between structural help and particular project is huge.
So it sounds like the first thing we (in this case, local Wikipedians) should do is approach them and say "We don't have money, but is there anything else we can positively help with? What's the programme?"
I think that they would treat such offer as one problem more. They want money for their salaries and artifacts preservation, not volunteers, who would prove that they could do the job with less money.
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