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Muscovite Aliona Bogdanova’s path to editing Wikipedia came circuitously through her vegetarian diet, a diet, she said, that was at odds with the way most Russians view nutrition.

“When I was a child, I found out that where meat comes from. I decided that it’s not fair to kill animals to get meat,” she said. Her decision was not viewed favorably. “My family, they wouldn’t let me not eat meat because in Russia, people generally believe that it’s impossible not to eat meat and if you stop eating meat, you die!”

Aliona Bogdonova and her son

When she was 20, Bogdanova researched online how to create a proper vegetarian diet and became a vegetarian. She has, however, met resistance along the way, especially when she started her family.

“When I got pregnant, lots of people asked me questions, how can you possibly carry a child and not eat meat because you’re pregnant and you must eat meat?” said Bogdanova. “So I had a breastfeeding consultant who advised me to eat a little piece of meat at least once a week. I didn’t do it because I would, you know, poison myself.”

Bogdanova said she was able to find useful information in Russian about vegetarianism and animal rights on sites like Wikipedia, but, “there’s in general very little information about breastfeeding in Russia, and that has to do with the Soviet school stopping with how people have thought about this.”

Bogdanova has taken passionately to sharing what she’s learned about health and parenting with people seeking information on Russian Wikipedia.

“I wrote several articles about food, about vegetarianism. I edited some articles about parenting, natural parenting,” she said. “But I remember, my first big article is about marzipan because I’m a fan of marzipan. There was only a few words about it and maybe no article at all, and I just knew what I should write.”

To fill the time while at home during her pregnancy, Bogdanova took up soap making as a hobby. Before long it turned into a business. “When you make soap, eventually you end up making too much and eventually comes a point where…you can’t possibly use so much and you can’t find enough friends who you could give it as a gift,” she said. “I use Wikipedia as a research tool (it has so many useful links) and I share things that I learn from my business on Wikipedia, so that everyone can learn.”

Bogdanova is also translating a book about homeschooling, the Teenage Liberation Handbook, into Russian. It’s her first serious translation effort.

Natural curiosity and research drew her to Wikipedia years ago and she credits her upbringing with keeping her in the community of contributors.

“I can’t, you know, pass by something that I can improve,” she said. “Because I grew up in the family of teachers, I was raised on the idea that talking like an encyclopedia is an important scholarly work, and so when I wrote in Wikipedia, I had the sense that I had contributed to this.”

She added, “Once in a while, I find out that somebody has come across this article that I have created about homeschooling, for example, and then I am really proud.”

Profile by Donna Peterson, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation

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(Lee la versión en español aquí)

When Melisa Parisi began contributing to Wikimedia in 2007, she was only 15. Parisi, a native Argentinean, started by translating articles about the long-running cartoon The Simpsons from English Wikipedia to Spanish Wikipedia.

Melisa Parisi

Her first article was deleted because it didn’t have the correct formatting. That setback didn’t deter Parisi, however, and with the assistance of an even younger Wikipedia editor, she learned the the ins and outs of editing guidelines. “He helped me a lot, I was ready to quit when a sysop deleted my first article, I wanted to quit because it was so frustrating,” said Parisi. “Thanks to his help, I kept going.”

Once she got her footing, she began writing articles about American TV shows. With The Simpsons, she translated roughly 300 articles from English to Spanish, covering the many characters and episodes. “I was interested [in writing about The Simpsons] because we didn’t have a lot of articles about this program,” she said. “There were in the English Wikipedia but not in the Spanish, so I decided to bring them all, and I did — I brought absolutely everything to Spanish Wikipedia.”

As of 2012, she’s written more than 800 articles — including 40 Featured articles — and has made more than 27,000 edits. All that experience has helped her improve her writing and language skills. “Wikipedia helped me a lot because I learned how to write better,” she said. “It helps me in my professional career.”

Being a Wikipedia contributor even helped Parisi get a job. Since she didn’t have any professional experience at the time, she added that she edits Wikipedia to her resume and said that got her the gig. She’s now a professional text editor and translator, and is also pursuing a career as a flight attendant.

After years of contributing her own time and skills, Parisi hopes more young people will also contribute to Wikipedia. To encourage others in her community, she has taught classrooms full of students how to get started editing Wikipedia. With any luck, she’ll create a new generation of editors and contributors for Spanish Wikipedia and beyond.

Parisi is the first to tell anyone that all that’s required to contribute to Wikipedia is the desire to do so. You don’t need to be a genius or an expert on a topic, she said, you just need to have the drive to make a contribution. It helps if you love what you write about, but even the smallest changes in an existing article can make a difference.

“I realized that many people do not participate in Wikipedia because they don’t know they are able to do useful contributions,” she said. “By correcting a comma, an accent or a misspelled word you are improving an article and helping the reader who will consult it.”

Sarah Mitroff, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation

Chanitra Bishop.

Every day, students come to Chanitra Bishop for advice about information — everything from how to find certain articles, to what books will help their research projects. Ms. Bishop certainly has the right pedigree. At Indiana University Bloomington, she’s the Digital Scholarship and Emerging Technologies Librarian at the Herman B Wells Library, which contains more than 4.6 million volumes, including special collections in African Studies, Russian and East European Studies, Uralic and Altaic Studies, East Asian Studies, and West European Studies.

“I wanted to work in the library,” says Ms. Bishop, “because I enjoy working with people, doing research, and helping people find information.”

Ms. Bishop has found that same connection with Wikipedia. In the fall of 2010, she began helping IU Bloomington students who were writing articles for the Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative. That initiative, which evolved into the Wikipedia Education Program, had students write public-policy-oriented articles as a formal classroom assignment. As a Wikipedia Ambassador, Ms. Bishop works not just with students but with professors in the program. One of Ms. Bishop’s first realizations: While every student already read Wikipedia, few students realized they could actually edit and contribute to Wikipedia’s articles. Students also assumed that each Wikipedia article was written in full by just one person.

“When we explain Wikipedia,” says Ms. Bishop about the volunteer instructors, “we usually go in and do an initial talk, and a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I never knew all of that.’ I like to show one of the videos that is about the ‘Edit’ button and how people often just ignore it. Even though it’s there, it’s like it’s not there. I tell them, ‘If you see something that’s inaccurate on Wikipedia, you don’t have to wait for someone else to fix it. You can fix it yourself. You don’t even need an account; all you have to do is click ‘edit.’”

Ms. Bishop also shows students a Wikipedia article’s “History” function, “so they can also see that even though an article today might have several different sections and be may be many pages long, when it first started out, it may have been six sentences. Often it may just start off as a sentence, or a paragraph, and then the community kind of helps build that article. So it doesn’t always just start off with someone just writing all of the information. Just one person kind of gradually can build up to its current state. So a lot of students also are surprised to see the initial, first view of the article.”

From her initial volunteering in 2010, Ms. Bishop is now Wikipedia Regional Ambassador for Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, meaning she works with Wikipedia Education Program classes throughout those three states. Ms. Bishop, who has a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, was raised in Chicago, which is just 120 miles from Bloomington. Being Wikipedia Regional Ambassador means she often connects with students online — while never having to leave Bloomington. Ms. Bishop feels like she’s part of the bigger Wikimedia community of readers, contributors and volunteers.

“The community is what really drives Wikipedia,” says Ms. Bishop, whose Wikipedia user name is “Etlib” — a derivation of “Emerging Technologies Librarian.” “There’s not one person that’s in charge and makes all the decisions about how Wikipedia works. It’s very much community driven and it’s something that anyone can be involved in. Even though anyone can be involved in it, it’s like any other community, so the more you contribute to that community, the more people will believe what you put on there, the more respect you’ll have in that community.”

Jonathan Curiel, Development Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Valerie Juarez, FLOSS Outreach Program for Women Intern

Valerie Juarez joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a full-time intern through the FLOSS Outreach Program for Women, an initiative of the GNOME foundation. With internships available at several organizations, Juarez was immediately intrigued by the bug management/triaging position with Wikimedia, and contacted the project manager: Wikimedia’s Bug Wrangler, Andre Klapper. She received a “very welcoming response” from Klapper, who helped her develop a stellar application for the internship.

As part of the application process, she had to make an initial contribution. Lucky for her (not so much for the bug), Juarez “discovered a bug that blocked UploadWizard when using Internet Explorer”—something she is very proud of.

Juarez, a self-proclaimed “bug wrangler in-training,” applied to the Outreach Program for Women as a way to “shift into a more technical role and to learn new technologies,” she said. Since beginning her internship on January 2, 2013, Juarez has been extremely active, even hosting her first Bug Day on January 29. She explains, “Bug Days are important because it engages the bug management and developer communities, and we work to solve issues, which makes MediaWiki better.” Even though attendance was low, the group was able to triage about 30 reports, and have fun doing it.

She plans to host more Bug Days, triage bug reports, and develop a proposal for streamlining user feedback, such as bug reports, from multiple Wikimedia sources to the correct channels. “Wikimedia has a few feedback channels: Village Pumps for support, Request Tracker for operation issues, OTRS for email responses, and Bugzilla for bug tracking,” Juarez explains. “I will compare and contrast what other open source projects do with what Wikimedia does and make suggestions on changes that could benefit Wikimedia.”

As Juarez sees it, her internship is a win-win for both her and the Foundation. “I think internships like this allow women like me opportunities to grow, gain knowledge, and connect with a community. Organizations benefit by the contributions women provide to the projects themselves and the community.”

Internships like the Outreach Program for Women help reduce the gender imbalance within Wikipedia and the tech industry. She explains, “It’s important to have women participate in MediaWiki, Wikipedia, and open source projects in general because their perspectives are important—and not just women, but men and women of color as well. The absence of these perspectives affects the type of articles that get deleted, promoted, and even created. In MediaWiki and open source in general, a limited perspective can affect which software functionality is added, removed, or even considered.” She adds, “Wikipedia, which is intended for everyone, should not be created by only half of the population.”

Since beginning her internship, Juarez has learned a great deal from her mentors Quim Gil and Andre Klapper, and looks forward to making “meaningful contributions to the community” as she continues. “I hope my project will benefit MediaWiki, Wikimedia, and the community by streamlining the feedback that is received. I also hope to continue to contribute after my internship is complete,” she explains.

Juarez graduated Summa Cum Laude from Lamar University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics in December 2011. In the future she hopes to be “working in a technical position at a job that allows me to positively impact the world socially and technologically. I hope to still be working to attract more people (especially women) to computer science and technology careers.” While busy with her internship, she still finds the time to have a bit of fun in her hometown of Sour Lake, Texas—from playing video games and reading comics such as Batgirl and Wonder Woman to learning to sew a bed for her cat Midnight.

With every day of her internship, Juarez is learning how she can contribute to Wikipedia and Wikimedia and hopes others will join in as well, “I don’t think most people understand that they can contribute and make Wikipedia better. Like me, they don’t think they have anything to offer, but I’m learning that I can help. I hope other people will realize that too.”

Interview and profile by Alice Roberts, Communications Intern

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Walaa Abdel Manaem

Walaa Abdel Manaem had browsed Wikipedia whenever she needed to find information about something, but she’d never contributed until March 2012. Walaa, a native of Giza, Egypt, was enrolled in Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez’s Spanish course at Cairo University. The course was participating in the pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt, and Dr. Abeer asked Walaa and her classmates to translate articles from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia about Latin American authors.

For Walaa, the experience was eye-opening. A master’s student in modern Spanish literature at Cairo University, Walaa found that she loved contributing to Wikipedia. She started by creating an article on Juan José Arreola, a Mexican short story writer, on April 5, 2012. And Walaa was hooked.

“I was very happy to participate in Wikipedia,” Walaa says. “I like studying Spanish and Latin American literature. Dr. Abeer was teaching us the method and the application of the translation of Spanish to Arabic and vice versa, and her specialty is Latin American literature. She told us that there is a little information about the Latin American writers in the Arabic Wikipedia.”

So Walaa set out to change that. Today, she has more than 8,500 edits, with 68 articles created. Her article on Juan José Arreola has reached Good Article status on the Arabic Wikipedia, and her article on The Well of Loneliness, a novel by British writer Radclyffe Hall, is soon to be a Featured Article on the Arabic Wikipedia. And Walaa is steadily climbing in the list of the top 500 editors to the Arabic Wikipedia.

More recently, Walaa has expanded her volunteer work for Wikipedia to include serving as a Campus Ambassador for Dr. Abeer’s class. She’s also helping out other classes doing Spanish and English translations as an Online Ambassador.

“I like working with Dr. Abeer because of her enthusiasm with her students to publish free knowledge,” Walaa says. “This assignment is very good and more suitable to our time, because our generation doesn’t use papers like a more traditional assignment.”

Although Walaa finished her M.A. preliminary year at Cairo University, she intends to keep contributing to the Arabic Wikipedia and expanding the availability of information available, especially in her favorite area, literature.

“My knowledge is published for all the world,” Walaa says about why she likes contributing to the Arabic Wikipedia. “I’m very happy when my work appears in Google as a part of Wikipedia and everyone can use it easily.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

(more…)

Vietnam vet, 28-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Counterintelligence Officer–it’s safe to say that Mike Cline is a not a slouch. The 65-year old resident of Bozeman, Montana retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1996, and although he is busy working in a strategy consulting business, he has found time to be an active Wikipedia contributor, with over 500 articles and 37,000-plus edits.

“Wikipedia is a unique way to volunteer—it’s also a great way to learn how to read, write, solve problems, and collaborate,” he said. “It’s a free engine to practice your communication skills.”

Wikipedia also affords Cline the opportunity to expound on his two greatest passions: the outdoors and fly fishing. Growing up in Pasadena, California, Cline was nestled right up against the San Gabriel Mountains. It was there that he developed a deep love and appreciation of the great outdoors, a subject on Wikipedia that he has contributed to extensively with his writings on the history of fly fishing and Yellowstone, among others.

“Even though I was growing up in a relatively urban environment, hiking in the mountains and fishing or catching snakes was very natural to me,” he explained. “My mother introduced me to fly fishing and I’ve been tying flies since I was 13-years old. Eventually, I started buying books about fly fishing and fly fishermen, and I have a library of about 600 books of fly fishing literature. It’s a wonderful history and the perfect place to write about that is Wikipedia.

Cline explained that it’s not as popular as American football, but it has “a lot of nuance to it. Plus, it’s a wonderful escape, great exercise, and when you’re wading knee-deep trying to catch fish, it’s about as close to nature as you can get!”

Cline spends 25 to 30 days a year in Yellowstone National Park, and he has written extensively on the park’s vegetation, trails and geography. “Writing about Yellowstone in Wikipedia allows you to get into the details, the intimate details, if you will, of exactly how the park was originally explored,” he said.

“I often take the same path that the Langford-Peterson expeditions took across the Gardner River and into Yellowstone for the first time in 1870. Even today, you can stand there and look one way to the north and you see Gardner and Electric Mountain, which wasn’t named in 1870, and you stand and look south to Rescue Creek, and it looks exactly the same as it did in 1870. It’s fascinating because there’s a connection of studying the history, being able to write about it, and actually experiencing it.”

It might seem that Cline’s obsession with the outdoors would run counter to sitting in front of a computer screen typing out articles and making edits. Not so, he said. “When I was in the Air Force, they put a computer on my desk in 1983 and said, ‘Here, use this as a tool.’ I’ve been using computers as a tool ever since. Wikipedia is nothing more than an opportunity to contribute to knowledge of things that I’m interested in, and it’s via the tool of computing.”

For Cline, Wikipedia’s non-profit status is key to its mission, and he feels that being unconstrained by the binds of share price and earning statements is the only way Wikipedia can flourish. “Wikipedia’s not out there trying to build up equity that somebody owns and puts in their pocket as profit, and I think that is very liberating,” he said. “Besides, volunteerism is important in the world, and Wikipedia is a unique way to volunteer 24/7. It’s not only a way to give back, but it’s fun as well.”

Profile by Darrin Fox, Communications Intern
Interview by Victor Grigas, Visual Storyteller

By day, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is a business administrator for a healthcare company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. By night, she studies diverse countries and cultures and posts her discoveries online for the benefit of anyone in the world. You see, Rosie is a prolific Wikipedia editor.

“At heart, I am a cultural anthropologist,” said Rosie, a prolific Wikipedia editor and content contributor who edits as User:Rosiestep. “Once I started college, I wanted to be a cultural anthropologist. I wanted to follow in the steps of Margaret Mead.”

As Rosie entered college, her desire to study cultural anthropology was checked by her father, who wanted her to be “a pharmacist or an accountant, something that a woman who would eventually get married and have children could do part time,” she said. “He was being practical.” Rosie went on to study business, eventually obtaining a Masters degree. Despite her college education, she still couldn’t suppress her desire to pursue her passion as a cultural anthropologist.

Then, several years ago, Rosie’s son Sean edited a Wikipedia article about a town in the Ukraine he was stationed in while working with the Peace Corps. “I’d never thought of actually making a contribution myself. I just figured other people were doing it,” Rosie said, “but when he said that, I thought it was fabulous.”

Later in the same year, Rosie searched Wikipedia for a group of books published by the Book League of America. While the publisher no longer exists, Rosie possessed an impressive collection of the Book League’s texts. She was surprised to find that there was no entry about the company on Wikipedia. It was then that she decided to contribute. “I thought, you know what, Sean edited Wikipedia, I bet I could do that too. Let me see how to do it. And so I tried to figure it out.”

Rosie had no way of knowing that this single contribution would eventually lead her to become the woman ranked with the highest number of Did You Know articles on English Wikipedia and the number four ranked Wikipedian in total (she has 697 DYKs and more than 67,000 edits).

“I edited and edited and edited, thinking you could just kind of keep doing this, just keep looking stuff up and keep writing,” she said.  “At some point, I started thinking wow, I’m building up a body of work here.”

This compulsion to edit is passed down from her grandmother, Paulina Lebl-Albala, the first president of the Yugoslav Association of University-Educated Women. Her grandmother was known for her work editing textbooks for the local university and for the translations she made of the German author Herman Hesse.“I feel this genetic pull to her,” Rosie said. “She edited textbooks, I edit Wikipedia. I feel this sense of connection with her. I think Grandma would be proud of me.”

Rosie finds inspiration in the example of her grandmother who became prolific in an area normally dominated by men. In turn, Rosie hopes that her example will inspire more women to edit Wikipedia. She admitted her shock at the ever-dwindling number of Wikipedia’s female editors. “I’ve read the statistics of how few women edit,” she said. “It needs more women.”

She hopes that other women will develop a similar love and passion for contributing to Wikipedia, that contributing to knowledge overwhelms the discomfort they may feel from the occasionally confrontational remarks made on their talk pages by male editors.

To Rosie, contributing to Wikipedia is important because it means that you are helping others receive what she describes as the “freedom of all knowledge on the planet.”

“I’m hooked.” She said,  “I’m addicted, I love to do this, I’m driven to do this.”

Wikipedia, she said, finally gave her the possibility of fulfilling her childhood aspirations. “Wikipedia has given me an opportunity to be that cultural anthropologist,” she said. “I study very interesting places and interesting people, and write all these articles.”

She continued, “I can’t not do this. I think there is a sense that I want my kids to be proud of me, to know that I am doing something that I think is really important.”

Profile by Zoe Bernard, Communications Intern
Interview by Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager

Before Gayle Karen Young joined the Wikimedia Foundation as the Chief Culture and Talent Officer she thought of Wikipedia as simply an online encyclopedia. “I considered Wikipedia a website and I was only familiar with English Wikipedia, so I thought it was an online reference source and didn’t realize at the time it was a movement,” Gayle said. Now, she understands the way people access and create free knowledge on the internet and the impact that Wikimedians have on that process.

Gayle Karen Young at the Wikimedia Foundation office

“Knowledge is a prerequisite for social change,” explains Gayle. “Access to knowledge has to be a foundation of that. When you look at places in the world where conditions are not there for people to thrive, it usually has to do and starts with a lack of access to information and ideas by a given group or party.” This knowledge disparity and its social justice implications is something that she is passionate about and it was one of the primary attractions for her about working at the Wikimedia Foundation.

At her first Wikimedia Chapters Conference, she realized the global nature of Wikipedia and the impact the movement was having around the world. “I found the first chapters’ meeting utterly fascinating, it’s like a miniature United Nations. You’ve got Wikimedia Bangladesh, Wikimedia India, Germany, and France and seeing all these different individuals and the individuals representing entities coming together to figure out how to function better on behalf of an entire movement, and that was really cool,” she explained. “Wikimania was similarly a joy, in getting to meet contributors and entities beyond the chapters structure who are as key to the movement.”

Gayle is enamored of the passion that Wikipedians demonstrate. “People really care about getting information out there that is good…and that intellectual rigor and generosity are fundamentally based on the best parts of us as human beings,” she said. Although not an editor herself, when she finds the time in her busy schedule, she expects to edit topics related to psychology, philanthropy, and global human rights—three areas she is passionate about.

She also credits the altruistic nature of Wikipedians in maintaining the accuracy of Wikipedia and the minimal amount of vandalism on the site. She goes on to explain, “There have always been, in every age, repositories of knowledge that have been tended over and cared for and supported by small groups of people that really care about that. People fundamentally care about preserving [knowledge] and people are fundamentally motivated by learning.” Whether it’s the Library of Alexandria or the private libraries of ancient Rome, the people behind these repositories of knowledge were passionate about preserving information for future generations; however, Wikipedia is taking this notion one step further and making knowledge available for free to anyone with internet access.

As the Foundation’s Chief Culture and Talent Officer, Gayle works to create a dynamic culture within the organization where people can thrive and make greater contributions. She wears many hats in her role from “ship’s counselor” to working on leadership development and strategy work. She explains, “My job is to tend the environment so that people in the organization can function well.” She works tirelessly to create a positive environment where Foundation employees are free to be themselves and flourish, and recognizes that this work has a long arc, that it takes time and tending year-over-year to sustain that.

When Gayle started at the Foundation, she immediately felt at home and “in some ways I feel like these are my people.” As a big Star Trek fan, she compared the feeling she got watching the movie Galaxy Quest, a spoof on Star Trek, to the people behind the Wikimedia movement, “I remember sitting in the audience and watching a scene in the movie where a bunch of folks are at a space convention and I was like ‘these are my people’ and in a sense I feel like these are my people here.” She finds “the integrity, the commitment, mostly the sheer quirkiness” to be motivation behind the movement, but “there is no wrangling of the quirkiness, my job is to support it.”

Gayle’s background, education in psychology and her training as a Zen Buddhist, help her “meet people where they are,” which she finds useful to her role in understanding where other people are coming from in a given situation. She has always appreciated that there is more than one perspective available and points out that “you can’t take for granted that one viewpoint of the world is right.”

With such a multicultural employee, consultant, and volunteer base, Gayle approaches her job from multiple perspectives. “If I came at it from just a woman’s perspective, or just a Chinese person’s perspective, it doesn’t respect all the things that you carry into a conversation,” she explains. “I need to bring the multiple sides of me and the lenses that those carry to the front to see with.”

It’s this approach that she credits with helping the Foundation make wise decisions about its future. “We need to fundamentally mature as a movement and as an organization without losing the passion and without losing the energy and the commitment to the mission,” she said. “Organizations can be like giant icebergs, leaders are like tug boats, they will have a massive impact in steering this massive thing in the right direction, but you shouldn’t run afoul of it – and culture eats strategy.” As the Foundation grows and matures, it’s Gayle’s role to stretch and support the people behind the movement without steering the iceberg off course.

Interview and profile by Alice Roberts, Communications Intern

Pancratium Zeylanicum flower, indigenous to India and islands in the Indian Ocean.

Muhammad Mahdi Karim is an avid contributor to Wikimedia Commons and his beautiful photographs have been Featured Pictures and Pictures of the Day, regarded as some of the finest images on the database. Karim describes his motivation for contributing to Wikipedia as the opportunity to share a memory with others.

“If I see something that others may never get to see or be in a place that some may never visit, it would be wasteful of me not to preserve these memories and share them with those who wish to experience them but are unable to do so,” he said. “Photographs help preserve these and Wikipedia provides a platform to share them.”

Karim was born in Moshi, Tanzania, a small town near the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Now, he studies computer science full time in Bangalore, India.

Karim discovered Wikipedia years ago when he mistakenly erased the contents of an entry. However, this simple accident led him back to the online encyclopedia. “I was inspired by seeing pictures of nature on Wikipedia, ” he said. Soon, Karim began uploading his own photos to forums.

Not all feedback was positive, however. “I was not very well-versed with photographic techniques, but after criticism from users, I have improved my skills to both my and Wikipedia’s benefit.”

This ability to change and grow through the use of Wikipedia is, as Karim put it, redefining what it means to be an encyclopedia. “It‘s a community of dedicated users who help one another to improve the content and in the process improve themselves. Today, I have in turn taken a few good pictures and helped to preserve a small part of our world. If others can take inspiration from my work to preserve, protect or improve out world, I will take great pleasure in that.”

Karim said that he’ll continue to contribute to Wikipedia, because, “apart from Google, it’s the only other site I can’t live without anymore. I can do without Youtube and Facebook, but take away Wikipedia and you’ve left me stranded.”

(View more of Karim’s images at his user page here.)

Interview and Profile by Zoe Bernard, Communications Intern

Trithemis Annulata

When Benoit Rochon organized his first event for Wikipedia, he didn’t anticipate the arrival of one unwelcome guest. Rochon had organized a Wikimedia Commons photo event on August 28th of 2011 in order to illustrate Wikipedia articles about Montreal. However, it was on this same day that Hurricane Irene hit Montreal.

“Irene,” Rochon laughed, “I’ll remember that name all my life.” Despite the onset of the hurricane, 110 tenacious participants of the anticipated 300 arrived. “People were running in the rain, in the hurricane by car, some by walk, and just to pick up pictures.” Rochon said. “People are courageous, honestly, they were crazy. [M]ost of them never edited [Wikipedia before] and they just show up and a hurricane was there.”

The event resulted in 5700 uploads to the French Wikipedia. And, while Hurricane Irene may have threatened to destroy his event, it did not quash his enthusiasm. In many ways, the event was a success for Rochon, who hopes to expose Wikipedia to more Quebecers.

Rochon explained that he wants “to make French-Canadians shine on the French Wikipedia, because French Wikipedia is for France, or Switzerland, Belgium, and French-Canadians are a little bit forgotten in there. I want French-Canadians [to be] more known.”

“[French Canadians] speak traditional French,” he said. “And we represent 23 percent of the population in Canada.” But, despite representing nearly a quarter of Canada’s population, Rochon said, “[we] are forgotten, a little bit.”

And yet for Rochon, the beauty of Wikipedia is its unique ability to transcend the barriers presented by language.“I feel like I’m doing something great on Wikipedia,” he said. “It’s free to read, it’s free to write, and it’s the world’s knowledge in one website in 250 languages. I mean, tell me another website who is like Wikipedia and this is what people should care about?”

Profile by Zoe Bernard, Communications Intern
Interview by Victor Grigas, Visual Storyteller