Two years ago, May 25, 2007, Uładzimir Katkoŭski, also known as rydel23, passed away.


Uładzimir was one of the pioneers of Internet in Belarus and in Belarusian. His blog on Livejournal, rydel23 had 600 readers in mid-2005; he was the most popular blogger in Belarus. In late 2005 he managed to create the first popular bilingual (English and Belarusian) standalone blog - br23.net. His blogs still have >500 subscribers, two years after his death and almost three years after the tragic accident.

One of the most famous Belarusian poets, Ryhor Baradulin, whose poems I was reading in school textbooks, wrote a short poem about Uładzimir.

Read more under the cut...

On August 12, 2004, he created Wikipedia in Belarusian on be.wikipedia.org domain (which was overtaken in beginning of 2007, when Uładzimir was in coma). Today our Wikipedia has almost 20000 articles.

When Google, one of the first companies to do so, opened up UI for volunteer translations, Uładzimir has made a lot of effort to translate it - and thanks to him, we can use Google in Belarusian for a lot of years already. Unfortunately, the launch of local google.com.by domain (with Belarusian as default language) was too late for him to see...

He has created pravapis.org, the central resource for everything related to Belarusian language and spelling - including all different versions and scripts. Unfortunately, this website is down now. One of the first versions is still available on Geocities - but not for long, since Geocities are closing soon. Another his site that ceased to exist is Martyrology of Belarus, which served as online memorial and information hub devoted to victims of Stalinism in Belarus.

Tragic road accident happened on June 15, 2006. That was a date when digital Belarus lost the biggest engine. But, the good thing is that his work is being continued by others - Wikipedia grows every day, more and more programs and services offer Belarusian UIs, volunteer team makes sure that new features of Google search are translated in time. I am personally doing what I can to get more search features available for Belarusian UI, and to make other products get this UI as well.

Uładzimir was interested not only in Belarusian things; his well-known avatar has both Belarusian and Albanian greetings. His wife Jonada is Albanian; they both spoke excellent Albanian and Belarusian.

I knew Uładzimir a bit. He was the one who invited me to contribute to TOL, media NGO, thanks to which I have participated in very interesting project, learned some journalism, visited Prague, Almaty and Vilnius, met dozens amazing people.. thanks to whom I have visited barcamps, which opened a whole new world to me. And in the very end I can thank him for being happy now.

We started to communicate over Internet, obviously. We worked together on Wikipedia, read and commented each other's blogs. We spoke on the phone about the TOL project. And when I was coming to Prague to TOL workshop, I planned to finally meet him.. and literally a few days before I came there the accident happened. Then I was still sure we would meet soon..

Huge thanks to the family of Uladzimir. Thanks to them, his livejournal and personal blog are still open and available. Thanks to them, Uladzimir got a great tombstone; that's the only tombstone I know that features online username. They even established Uladzimir Katkouski prize for the best content site in Belarusian.

Rest in peace.

Photos are taken from Wikipedia: here and here.