[Foundation-l] Bosnia's Top Cultural Institutions > Shutting Down

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 02:42, Craig Franklin <craig at 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.