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Submissions/How to adopt a foreign country

From Wikimania 2014 • London, United Kingdom

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 8009
Title of the submission

How to adopt a foreign country

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

work shop

Author of the submission

J. Patrick Fischer

E-mail address

Special:EmailUser/J. Patrick Fischer

Username

J. Patrick Fischer

Country of origin

Germany

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

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Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

There are (more or less) 194 countries in the world today. To write about a little country on the other end of the world is something not many people are doing. The WikiProject East Timor on the German Wikipedia did just that.

Most people write about their country of origin or the country they live in. The global coverage of Wikipedia is heavily biased towards industrialized countries. There are not many people from little third world countries who write about their home country. There are not many people out of industrialized countries who write about a country far away. To find articles about every subject of every country in Wikipedia is not always possible.

I visited East Timor as a tourist in 2002 and fell in love with that country. In 2005 I started writing in the German Wikipedia about East Timor. Doing so proved to be a research challenge at first. But I found several online sources, which helped me to write about geography, people, native animals, politics, history,… . Still, being in Germany and writing about a little country on the other end of the world requires a lot of innovative research techniques.

Today, there are more than 1300 articles about East Timor in the German Wikipedia. East Timor is one of best developed Asian topics in the German Wikipedia. In 2013 the German WikiProject East Timor was awarded the “Zedler” Award by Wikimedia Deutschland. The jury recognized in its decision the broad scope of articles and subjects covered about East Timor, and the coordinating role the project had in acquiring experts and fellow editors.

The workshop on Wikimania should be a meeting of people, who adopted a country to write about it. It would need a little room and some computers with internet access. I want to present the sources I am using and want to compare notes with others. Maybe we can recruit some new authors, who will adopt a foreign country in their Wikipedia to fill the gaps of unbalanced global coverage.

Track
  • WikiCulture & Community
Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)
45 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

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Special requests

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Interested attendees

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  1. --MF-Warburg (talk) 21:09, 29 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. As an oft-travelling virtual tourist who likes to soar lofty over the planet using Google Street View + Wikipedia, this should be an interesting talk. #LaFolleCycliste (talk) 07:00, 31 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  3. --Ziko (talk) 18:38, 31 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  4. OwenBlacker (talk) 17:27, 6 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Nachdem ich inzwischen auch einiges zu meiner neuen Heimat Kalifornien beigetragen habe. --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 06:08, 14 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Islahaddow (talk) 08:35, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Add your username here