Uladzimir Katkouski aka rydel #23

I am from Minsk, Belarus (Grand Duchy of Lithuania), currently living in Prague, Czech Republic.
I joined Wikipedia on July 4, 2004. I am one of the admins of the Belarusian Wikipedia be: .

• My home page: http://www.rydel.net/
• My Belarusian language site: http://www.pravapis.org/
• My online blog at livejournal: http://blog.rydel.net/

Pages that I've written/created/edited:
(more or less in reverse chronological order)

• Carlos Sherman - Spanish-Belarusian translator and writer
• White Russia - trying to deal with the confusion in terminology;

(Russia != Rus (Ruthenia) => Belarus (White Rus) != White Russia)

• Pesniary - a legendary folk/rock band;
• Niamiha - a river in Minsk;
• Kurapaty - a forest near Minsk where communists killed 30,000-100,000 people;
• Veronika Cherkasova - a journalist from an independent newspaper stabbed to death;
• Ivan Shamiakin - the most prolific author of Soviet BSSR;
• Ryhor Reles - a Belarusian writer that wrote in Yiddish;
• Kryvian - a confederation of prehistoric tribes in Belarus;
• Kalvaryja - a Catholic Calvary cemetery in Minsk;
• trasianka - the strange feature of Belarusian language;
• Battle of Orsha - the famous battle when Litvins beat Muscovites;
• Ekaterina Karsten - an Olympic champion;
• Uladzimir Parfianovich - three-times Olympic champion and a Belarusian politician;
• Belavia - the national airlines of Belarus;
• Yulia Nesterenko - the Olympic champion in 100 m sprint;
• Natasha Zvereva - a tennis player;
• Max Mirnyi - a tennis player;

Under construction

• Belarus at the 2004 Summer Olympics
• Vitaly Scherbo
• Miss Belarus

Pages to which I've contributed something:

• Belarusian language
• Belarus
• Ruthenia
• Vilnius
• Belavezhskaya Pushcha
• Alexander Lukashenka
• Olga Korbut
• Orsha

24.09.2004 I just wrote a page Kryvian and then I found that there already exists a page called Krivichs dealing with the same subject matter. Apart from the fact that it uses Russian (not Belarusan) spellings of the geographic names, it is very good and contains a lot of useful information. Now I guess I'll have to make a compilation of the two pages, and make a redirect to one of them. I think Kryvian (or Krivian) is a better word in English, than Krivichs (which is just a transliteration from Russian(sic!)). What do you think?

Oh, by the way, there is exactly the same problem with Radimichs and Dregovichs. I think the articles should be renamed to Radzimians and Drehovians respectively, and we should make redirects from the previously used names to the new ones, and also correct the spellings of some geographic names. Does that sound reasonable? See our discussion at Talk:Krivichs.

18.09.2004. Belarusan Wikipedia is slowly growing. Currently it has 150 articles. And I just wrote a big entry about Greek language there (). I also found an interesting page with stats by language Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics.

13.08.2004. Today I saw that someone started Wikipedia in Belarusan language - http://be.wikipedia.org/ - this is just a skeleton, nothing there. It's good news, but I am fairly pessimistic about it. I don't think there is enough interest and manpower to produce a big enough corpus of texts, let's say, above 10,000 entries.

30.08.2004. As I was working on articles about Ekaterina Karsten and Uladzimir Parfianovich I realized that I don't really understand the difference between the terms rowing/canoeing/kayaking. They all seem to be synonymous, but I have to find out what are the differences. (If anyone knows, please, comment here).

Thanks for the correction of the number of Be. speakers. BTW I copied the figure of 10 millions from en:. --Zeman 21:09, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)