Euro-Med Monitor Launches Second Round Of The WikiRights Project In The West Bank And Gaza

Palestinian Territories – Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor launched the second round of the WikiRights project, in its regional office in the Gaza Strip and An-Najah National University in Nablus, targeting a new batch of young men and women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Launched in Nablus and Gaza, the project targets about 40 young men and women and engages them in an intensive training course in the fields of research and documentation, working mechanisms on Wikipedia to enrich it with human rights content, and tools for adding and modifying content in both Arabic and English.

The first round of the project was launched in 2015, with the aim of enriching Wikipedia, which ranks seventh in the world in terms of the number of visitors, with the narration of victims of violations in historical documentation of contemporary events and crises, and the promotion and development of human rights content in the electronic encyclopedia. The project also aims at training human rights defenders to use the encyclopedia and to modify its articles.

Euro-Med Monitor launched a series of training courses at its regional office in the Gaza Strip and at An-Najah National University in Nablus. The courses targeted university students, graduates and employees of various institutions.

After the course is concluded, the target group will work to enrich the free encyclopedia with dozens of human rights articles that contributes to highlighting the voice of victims and persecuted in areas of events and conflict.

"The aim of training young people to edit and edit Wikipedia content is to give victims a new tool to keep their narrative present on the most used online platforms," said Anas Aljerjawi, Euro-Med Monitor’s Chief Operations Officer.

"At a time we see electronic platforms provide inaccurate or distorted information about the victims of armed conflicts, and present the effects of human rights violations in the language of numbers only without reviewing the stories and details of these victims, it has become imperative to give these victims a voice to speak for themselves," he added.

Wikipedia is one of the most important electronic sources that individuals visit to access various information and statistics.

With the escalation of events and the expansion of armed conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, and after a careful analysis conducted by the Euro-Med Monitor for the human rights content in Wikipedia, the human rights content on the electronic encyclopedia was found weak in both Arabic and English versions.

The official narrative issued by governments dominate the encyclopedia, with an almost complete absence of the narratives of victims of violations in different regions.

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