A 22° halo over Al Mina site in Tyre/Sour
One of the two domes of Nabi Maashouk in Tyre

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:

Cathédrale du Sacré-Cœur d'Alger (Sacred Heart Cathedral of Algiers), 2016
Pyramid-shaped children's pavilion with star-shaped footprints at the International Fair in Tripoli, 2018 - designed in 1962 by Oscar Niemeyer

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

Starting and finishing stone in the Tyre Hippodrome, the largest and best-preserved Roman hippodrome after the one in Rome
Byzantine mosaic in El Buss

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 Abdul Hussein Mosque of Tyre
The Old Mosque (Sunni) of Tyre

as well as spin-off articles about related subjects like

In addition, I expanded the article about

The ruins of Khan Rabu in Tyre
The ruins of Khan Rabu in Tyre

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:

..unclear to commemorate which event or cause
Crumbling monument in Tyre...

I also created the articles about

Staircase ceiling in the Rashid Diab Arts Centre by the namesake painter and visual artist in Khartoum-Riyadh, Sudan
Staircase of the "Al Manara" lighthouse in Tyre, built on a medieval or even ancient military tower.

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]

Entrance hall of the ICRC logistics center and archives in Satigny, Switzerland
Helipad designed by Oscar Niemeyer in Tripoli, Lebanon, 2018

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:

The ruins of the Festi-fortress in Ligerz, Switzerland
A "Green Man" on the keystone of the cross vault in the chapel of Ligerz

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!

Relief of a bomb at a former shelter from WWII in the Old Town of Geneva
The "head of Apollo" at the Saint Pierre Cathedral in Geneva

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:

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
  1. ^ "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)
  2. ^ 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)


 This user comes from Bochum.
 This user is a former resident interested in Sudan.
 This user is interested in South Sudan.
 This user is a former resident interested in Algeria.
 This user is a former resident interested in Lebanon.
 This user is interested in Palestine.
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Ancient Near East
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This editor wants to close Wikipedia's gender gap.
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