Ken Thomas

Life in the small town of Jodie, West Virginia, revolved around coal mining. Opportunities were scarce and young men like Ken Thomas were expected to get a job in the mines.

He remembers sitting in his 4th grade class, listening to the responses of classmates as their teacher asked them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Most of the girls said housewife, while the boys agreed that they wanted to become coal truck drivers.

Thomas said he wanted to be an astronaut.

When he graduated high school, Thomas worked a short stint mining coal. He liked it so much he soon joined the Army, where he spent four years. After trying a number of professions, including radio broadcasting, he eventually got into construction safety, which he does currently in North Carolina.

“Because of where we were and the low income nature, we had schools that weren’t always great, teachers that weren’t always great,” said Thomas. “We did not have access to resources, libraries, learning opportunities that I think people might have elsewhere.”

The lack of educational opportunities led Thomas to embrace open access to knowledge, and he supports organizations that promote it like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation.

“When I first got involved in the Internet and with Wikipedia, what I kept thinking about was myself when I was 7 or 8 years old and logging on and finding a resource like that, how huge that would have been and how transformative that could have been for me as a child,” he said.

He added, a “free education as a way to break what remains of our class system in the US, or an economic class system.”

For Thomas, Wikipedia is “the most important experiment going on right now.” He also calls it a mirror that reflects, “the best of us and the worst of us. If we can’t make it work, then maybe we’re not worthy of our technology.”

Sachem butterfly, by Ken Thomas

Thomas first began contributing to Wikimedia projects by way of Wikimedia Commons. His passion for photography was cultivated by combining it with his love for, as he describes it, “typical redneck pastimes,” such as fishing, hunting and kayaking, among other activities.

Thomas recalled a particular event that marked a “weird point in [his] evolution” from a casual hobbyist to passionate photographer.

“I was deer hunting one year, saw what I thought was a nice deer, and there was this flinch, do I go for the camera, do I go for the rifle?” he said. “You know, which am I going to do? If he steps out of there, the light’s perfect, and I got the 300 mm lens on… man it would be such a good photo.”

Thomas does sell prints of some of his amazing images through his personal website, including a very nice calendar, but he is committed to giving away his photographs for the public good. While most photos on Commons are licensed Creative Commons Share Alike, which allows re-use so long as the original photographer is credited and derivative works are licensed under the same terms, Thomas donates his photos to the public domain.

“What I have told people in the past is putting a photo on the web is an act of generosity,” he said. Emblazoned on the bottom of his userpage is the simple phrase: Give freely or don’t give.

“I don’t own the bird. I don’t own the light. I don’t own the tree branch that the bird was sitting on,” he said. ”I take these pictures because I want people to see how beautiful these things are. Who am I to charge for that?”

(View more of Ken Thomas’s photos)

Story by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern, and Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager
Reporting by Victor Grigas, Storyteller

A Mongolian Lama, photographed by Hans and Ingrid Bernhard, CC-BY-SA

The lines on this man’s weathered face tell of a lifetime of experiences, but of that time, we are only granted a brief glimpse through this moment captured by Hans and Ingeborg Bernhard. They continue to wonder what he was thinking.

“He passed by us very quickly,” said Hans Bernhard (user:Schnobby). The monk’s movements gave them little time to compose the photograph. “We were afraid he didn’t like to be photographed, but there was no time to ask him.”

The Bernhards took this photo of the stoic monk at the Gandan Monastery in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, as they were traveling from Russia to China in 1981. They used a Nikon F3 on Kodachrome film. They said they hope that the portrait conveys a sense of pride within his weathered features.

“We supposed he was the abbot, but we don’t really know,” said Hans Bernhard. “When I came across the shot I was looking around in the monastery, searching for nice motifs: temples, statues, carpets.”

The Bernhards first started contributing to Wikimedia Commons in January 2009, because they wanted to write an article on German Wikipedia about a famous stained glass painter who was also a colleague and friend of theirs. The article lacked depth and they sought to rectify that by illustrating it with images of the painter’s work. In order to do so they had to first upload pictures onto Commons.

Hans Bernhard started taking pictures 54 years ago, when he was 17. The first pictures he took were of “the moon, landscapes and animals.” He began putting his photography skills to professional use when he began his career as a stained glass painter.

“During my 45 years as a stained glass painter, I had to take photos of old and new stained glass windows,” he said. These windows were photographed not only in workshops but in cathedrals and public buildings as well. His camera of choice was a Linhof 4×5 inch sheet film camera.

“Besides this professional task, I preferred and still like to take photos of astronomical sights and events such as the moon, comets and solar eclipses. In general I’m photographing wherever I stay: on holidays, at concerts or in our garden.”

(View more photos by the Bernhards.)

Story by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern
Reporting by Elaine Mao, Communications Intern 

Aniruddha Kumar is a very active editor on Hindi Wikipedia, making over 8,000 edits in three years. The 27 year-old Wikipedian hails from Paṭnā, Bihar, in East India and is an Assistant Professor at Delhi University, where he studies Hindi Literature. He can speak Hindi, Urdu, English and Sanskrit.

Aniruddha Kumar. Photo by Victor Grigas, CC-BY-SA

Kumar has helped with the development of Hindi Wikipedia, where he devotes much of his time to articles on Hindi literature, music and history. He works as an administrator and is the number seven editor by total contributions.

Impressive as this is, you might be surprised to learn that Kumar is blind.

To contribute to Wikipedia, Kumar uses the open-source software NVDA (Non-visual Desktop Access), developed by NV Access, a non-profit organization based in Australia and “dedicated to the ideal that access to technology should not incur an extra cost for blind and visually impaired users.” He also uses the JAWS screen reader program developed by Freedom Scientific.

Both Jaws and NVDA provide feedback through synthetic speech and Braille. For references and citations, Kumar often uses recorded Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) books.

While he notes some limitations due to blindness, he says the unique and open collaboration on Wikipedia makes that less of an issue than with other sites.

“Wikipedia can be edited and read by anyone, unlike various things which are inaccessible for persons with disabilities,” he said. “We still have image-related problems but we don’t worry about that. We contribute as best we can. If I can’t add images to an article, then another person will.”

Kumar said he sees himself like one of millions of editors. “I’ve seen some more devoted and capable editors. I just do my job and what I like.”

He spends 2-3 hours editing Wikipedia articles on his days off, one hour during work days. If a subject particularly enthralls him, he says he will spend an entire day editing. He appreciates the absence of advertisements on Wikipedia, which saves him a great deal of time he would otherwise spend listening to extraneous jabber. On other websites, he said, he has to continually press the “down arrow on all these things that waste a lot of my time.”

For Kumar, access to free knowledge is necessary for people to live with dignity. “Having access to the combined knowledge of the world strengthens pluralism. It brings hope to growing a better and lovely world, where each works for the benefit of all.”

He said he values the collective nature of Wikipedia, where there is “something for all of us, including me. There is no barrier of nationality, ethnicity, religion, caste or gender. You don’t have to pay for a subscription, or read ads — it’s only about the right to information.”

He participated in the 2011 Wikipedia Fundraiser because he believed donating to Wikipedia was a way to protect the right to access knowledge and promote education.

Wikipedia, he said, is “one of the most beautiful things in the world.”

Story and reporting by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern
Additional reporting by Victor Grigas, Storyteller