[Foundation-l] More news from Serbia and Montenegro chapter

Sat Jan 21 01:19:41 UTC 2006

Before Jovana sends (in Monday) our weekly digest about events related
to Wikimedia SCG chapter, I want to say/ask a few things:

- I think that lists Foundation, Wikipedia, Wikinews and email to the
Board are good places for such informations. If someone thinks that
some list(s)/email(s) should be excluded/included, please, tell us
that.

- In the last 7-10 days we had a lot of contacts with media, one
rostrum (I think that our dictionaries made correct translation :)
this is some kind of lecturer with debate after that) as well as our
regular meetings at Sunday with a lot of new people who are interested
in developing Wikipedia (in general, Serbian, but others, too) and
software for conversion (improvement of Zhengzhu's Chinese and Serbian
version and possibility to implement it not only for Serbian version
of MediaWiki, but, also for some others with similar needs).

- Thanks to Dragan Ambrozic, our vice president and professional in
event making, we have a lot contacts with media. I am surprised with
the number of journalists who contacted our PR Jovana and me. In
Friday we had 26 new registered users. I looked relations between
registered users and users with more then 10 edits and when 26 users
register accounts it means that we would have 3 Wikipedians more; if
we continue with such progression, we would have 100 new users per
month, very soon (to compare: the best month before was August 2005
with 26 new users; also, approximation for December 2005 was that we
would have 203 users at all!).

- People outside of the project like our idea very much, many of them
are willing to help in different ways. (Finally, we have the article
about Jimbo ;) ) And I can say that I am very happy because of recent
development: people who are not my close friends are calling me by
phone and they are saying "I heard about Wikipedia in the news!".

- It also should be noted that Wikimedia SCG is the first free
knowledge organization in Serbia and Montenegro. There are no such
organization in Serbia. And in this moment we are covering the hole
space related to free knowledge. (There are some organization which
promote open content, BUT they are doing that only because it is the
new way for getting money from sponsors.)