Celebrating Ellie

The Wikimedia movement is built on collaboration, so it is a natural place for people who find joy in working with others, supporting them and learning through supporting their peers. Today we Wikicelebrate one such person: Ellie from El Salvador, a passionate Wikipedia trainer, event organizer and someone who finds motivation and joy in seeing others grow. 

Like many now-contributors, Ellie discovered the Wikimedia movement through participating in an outreach activity. It was 2019 and Ellie took part in an Art and Feminism workshop held in the Centro Cultural de España en El Salvador. This event, dedicated to enriching Spanish Language Wikipedia content related to notable women from El Salvador, taught Ellie how to make first steps in the Wikimedia world, create her own user page, look for sources, discuss with other editors,  and (most importantly) add content to Wikipedia. For her, a professional journalist and communicator, this newly discovered wikiworld, focused on sharing information and storytelling, was fascinating from the very first moment. 
She started making her first edits and thanks to Ellie, Spanish Wikipedia gained content about female athletes, like swimmer Aurora Chamorro or long distance runner, Vanessa Veiga. She also engaged in Wikimedia Commons, where you can find her uploads of exhibits from Museo de Artes y Tradiciones Populares de El Salvador, and in Wikidata.

Soon after becoming an editor, Ellie took a deeper dive into the Wikimedia community. In 2021 Karla and Cristina, two wikimedians who have been enriching Wikipedia articles  about El Salvador in Spanish Wikipedia, invited her to support forming a new Wikimedia organization. This organization would not only help them in promoting Wikimedia projects in their country, but would also help their work of growing content about El Salvador in the online encyclopedia. There is still much to tell the world about this Central-American country with its incredibly rich culture,  fascinating history, and tasty cuisine (just take a look at the article about pupusa!) – as wikimedians from El Salvador point out themselves, there is still a significant gap in biographical articles about Salvadorans in Wikipedia. Ellie was encouraged to participate, and thanks to teamwork on May 2021 (which was the day when Spanish Wikipedia celebrated its 20 birthday), Wikimedistas El Salvador was borned.And since then the team gave workshops about Wikipedia  in cultural centers, museums, institutes of social studies and trained librarians, scientists, university students, and the general public on how the platform works. They collaborated with the Olympic Committee of El Salvador, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences and the Cultural Center of Spain in El Salvador.

  

“Maybe I see it as very long term, but the digital gap in El Salvador is still a challenge. I would like Wikimedia projects to be a space with academic information and scientific dissemination, a tool to enhance knowledge about El Salvador and the Latin American region.”, she says when asked about what keeps her going.  Ellie also takes great joy in collaborative work and supporting others: “I am happy editing but I am also happy teaching others how to edit, to know the platforms and the projects with the purpose of enriching the free knowledge. The most beautiful moments are when I finally publish another article, and when some of the people I have trained at a workshop publish their first article and are encouraged to teach others about the project”, she comments. 

Unfortunately not everything is a bed of roses when you’re a newcomer in the movement and Ellie shares that there were challenges in terms of editing efforts., “Like when an article is deleted without warning because some important character or topic in my country is not considered relevant, this is because people do not know the context and history of countries in the region”, Ellie shares her difficulties. “But it is important to be positive and take those difficulties as an incentive to continue learning and releasing knowledge”, she adds. 

One thing she would like to share with other Wikimedians is the importance of always remembering your beginnings: “Although we have a long history as editors, let us not forget that we were once newcomers”, she says “let’s guide the new editors with civility and respect”.

Apart from that, she names three main global challenges for the Wikimedia movement: How not to lose the collaborative spirit, (the we), how not to forget the main purpose of the project (not to lose the essence), and how to adapt to the new generations and technologies that are building their own definition of knowledge (to maintain openness).

Ellie would like the world to know more about Wikipedia, especially that (in her own words) “Wikipedia is a project with digital tools that contribute to human development, universal access to information, knowledge and education. Wikipedia is a space where you can grow and learn in a community, because when you work on the same goal (free knowledge) language barriers and borders do not exist, we all, volunteers, are Wikimedia”.

Thank you for being part of this amazing community of volunteers, Ellie. Today we celebrate your commitment to the Wikimedia movement.