CEE/Newsletter/December 2017/Contents/Romania report

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Contents

Romania and Moldova report: Establishment of The Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group[edit]

By Gikü

The success of latest projects ran at the Romanian Wikipedia, in particular Wikimedia 1914-18 Europeana Challenge, has inspired a group of experienced Wikimedians from Romania and Moldova to finally organize a user group. The initiative came from Macreanu Iulian, who led the aforementioned Europeana project. He shared his idea with Andrei Stroe — the most active administrator on Romanian Wikipedia —, and Strainu and Gikü — who have experience in organizing multiple online and offline projects, and are regular attendants of regional Wikimedia meetups. All these users are located in Bucharest, Romania, except Gikü who is from Chișinău, Moldova.

The four met in Bucharest in December to plan out their initial steps. One thing was going to happen for sure: the announcement of creating a new user group would be delivered as a Christmas present to the Romanian Wikipedia community. The Romanian Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiquote, and Wikivoyage communities were also notified. After the user group gets approved, the plan is to reach out to the Romanian and Moldovan communities of English, Hungarian, and Russian Wikipedias as well.

A tricolor logo has been designed as the draft logo for the proposed user group. The three colors represent the colors on the flags of Romania and Moldova. As the legend goes, blue, yellow, and red represent the justice, the freedom, and the brotherhood, respectively.

The user group already listed its main objectives for the first one year or two. These include the much needed increase in the number of contributors and in the quality of content, as well as collaborations with various institutions and organizations and fighting the severe gender gap in users (there are currently zero super active users who are known to be women!). The user group initiators believe that a formal user group will greatly improve the credibility of its members, who so far had to rely only on their individual efforts of acquiring funds and partners.

The initiators of Romanian user group will publish news and important trivia in their Facebook page, WMROMD.