In 2017 - after almost a decade of professional acitivities in media development for the Berlin-based nonprofit Media in Cooperation and Transition (MiCT) - I got engaged in my first "Wikipedia for Peace" project and have been hooked on ever since. The project was a component of the #DefyHateNow civil society campaign against online hate speech in South Sudan. It was initiated by the Berlin-based NGO r0g agency for open culture and critical transformation and funded by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). My comprehensive edits of the following articles were for this project:
- the veteran politician Joseph Ukel Abango and
- the former slavery hub Deim Zubeir, which is South Sudan's first ever cultural site on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage.
Based on those experiences I conducted a first Wikipedia-training with students and lecturers of the Unversity of Juba who created the article about the
In a second workshop we focused on lower-threshold editing, e.g. in the articles about
In 2018 I designed the concept for an EU-funded Wikipedia project in Sudan by MiCT and in that context created the article about
- the "Greeks in Sudan"
as well as spin-off articles about related subjects like
- the business magnates Angelo Capato and
- Gerasimos Contomichalos, and
- the Greeks in South Sudan.
In addition, I expanded the article about
- the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum.
In 2019 I started expanding the stub article about the Southern Lebanese city of Tyre/Sour, where I lived for two years, and related articles like:
- the historical site and refugee camp of El Buss,
- the historical site and refugee camp of Burj el-Shemali,
- the historical site and refugee camp of Rashidieh,
- the Melkite Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Tyre and
- its Archbishop Michel Abrass,
- the Maronite Catholic Archeparchy of Tyre and
- its retired Archbishop Chucrallah-Nabil El-Hage,
- the historical site of Umm al-Amad
- the Shi'a reformer Sayyid Abdel Hussein Sharafeddine.
I also created the articles about
- the village of Chamaa and its historical castle,
- the Maronite Archbishop of Tyre, Charbel Abdallah ,
- and his native village of Hajjeh ,
- the Pan-Arabist politician Jafar Sharafeddin ,
- his right-wing rival Kazem al-Khalil
- and his daughter, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Maha al-Khalil Chalabi .
All of this editing on Jabal Amel has been without affiliation to any organisation.
At the end of 2019, I conducted a Wikimedia-sprint at Synaps, a Beirut-based socio-political research institution. As an immediate consequence, Synaps created its own Wikimedia Commons account and uploaded photos from a number of Near Eastern and North African countries. And it nudged Synaps to mine Big Data from Wikipedia searches to reveal "both intuitive and unexpected trends" in how its audiences follow the conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and Iraq.[2]
In 2020, as a participant of the International Archives Week joint initiative of Wikimedia Switzerland, Wikimedia Austria and Wikimedia Germany and the Association of Swiss Archivists I created the English and German articles and expanded the French stub one about the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva:
As a follow-up I created the English and German articles about the ICRC library:
Conflict of Interest Disclosure: my beloved wife is an ICRC delegate and started her career in the archives which gives me a romantic affiliation with the subject, but does not mean that my edits are romanticising it!
After the sad news about the passing of my former boss and mentor at the Berlin Information-center for Transatlantic Security (BITS), I expanded the German Wikipedia article about him and translated it into English:
- Otfried Nassauer (1956-2020), peace researcher and peace activist.
In the context of the WikiLovesSwitzerland 2020 writing competition about castles I created the German-language article about the ruins of the Château de Rouelbeau in Meinier and expanded the English-language version:
As a follow-up I created the German-, English- and French-language articles about the ruins of Bâtie-Beauregard at Collex-Bossy:
On the occasion of the International Women's Day 2021 and the Schreibwettbewerb I worked on the WikiGap through Women In Red (WiR) by creating the English- and German-language articles about the Swiss archaeologist and ICRC activist
As follow-ups, I expanded the stub about her fellow pioneering ICRC activist
the stub about Gautier-van Berchem's father, the founder of Arabic epigraphy in the Western world,
In the context of the Schreibabend and as contributions to "Women in Europe contest 2021" of the WikiProject Women in Red, I created the articles about Gautier-van Berchem's and Frick-Cramer's fellow female ICRC pioneers
As a contribution to the 35th Schreibwettbewerb ("Writing Competition") of the German-language Wikipedia I created the article (which won the second prize in the history section) about the novelist and former ICRC vice-president
As a contribution to the "Weekend femmes en politique étrangère" by Wikimedia CH and Foraus in November 2021 (and in German for the following 7th edit-a-thon by Wikimedia CH, Ringier and SRF Swiss Radio and Television to increase the visibility of women on Wikipedia) I created the article about the female ICRC pioneer
References
edit- ^ "Juba Wiki Sprint". r0g agency for open culture and critical transformation. November 9, 2017. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Simon, Alex; Schuler-McCoin, Haley (25 May 2020). "Syria trends: Mining underused data". Synaps.Network. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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