[Foundation-l] A short report from the meeting

[Milos Rancic]

Brane will translate longer one, also, we will add our comments on Meta.

First of all, I would like to thanks to all of the people who was in
Belgrade and who intended to come here. Special thanks to Nina and
Mathias, who was *two days* on Milano and Frankfurt airports! Also,
Delphine waited on Milano airport for more then one day, Gerard waited
for one day in Vienna, and Oscar, Martin and Florence had, also, a lot
of problems to come. Personally, I realized that there is no sense to
make anything related to Belgrade airport from November to March.

Up to Saturday afternoon everything looked like that conference have
been a totaly disaster, but, thanks to all participants, the
conference was great!

The success of the first day is dedicated to Oscar. Instead of one, he
made three lecturers: instead of Florence he talked about Foundation
and he made two lecturers about interesting things aroud wiki, free
knowledge and Wikipedia.

The second day was with a lot of content: Instead of four lecturers,
we had six. Mathias was talking about German community and Wikimedian
projects, Darko and Roberta were talking about Croatian community and
Wikimedian projects; as a mathematician, Roman made very interesting
graphics as well as he was talking about some funny problems which
Slovenian Wikipedia has (35.000 articles vs. 19.000 categories, a lot
of articles related to military; and around 50% of edits on sl.wiki is
done by only one person and his bot :) ). Slobodan had very
interesting speech about problems of small Macedonian community
(however, their Wikipedia will have 10.000 articles soon; so it is not
*so small*). Oscar was talking again, this time with video beam (it is
very good to have Oscar: as he is a professor, he may talk about lot
of things :) ). At the end, Gerard was talking about improoving wiki
world using OmegaWiki.

Finally, at Saturday evening Martin said to me the secret: how German
Wikipedian community is working without Arbitration Committee and I
think that it is a very good model for dealing with problems. In
general, Serbian Wikipedian community is working similar, but I was
afraid that it is not possible in bigger communities. However, German
community very good deals with POV pushers and nonsenses; I don't know
for any other community which is dealing with that so good (however, I
am not introduced in working of a lot of communities; maybe 10; also,
except a bigger ones, communities becoming famous only when it has
some problems).

So, this is all for now. I have some ideas and some thoughts related
to Wikimedian community and I'll write about it as soon as possible.