You learn all your life, and Jirina Kadnerova understands this well.
This 80-year-old former Czech librarian regularly writes articles for the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, after following a course training elderly people as part of a project launched in the Czech Republic in 2013, called “Seniors Write Wikipedia”.
A village south of Prague, a Gothic church, a tourist site… Jirina Kadnerova has been writing for the free encyclopedia since she followed a course training elderly people.
“Of course, I used Wikipedia for many years, because librarians work with it, but I never thought that I would like to contribute to it,” she says.
An approach launched by his grandson
Keen to stay active after retirement, she began attending a senior college, took a position as a bibliographer at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and occasionally worked as a tour guide.
Seven years ago, his grandson asked him to contribute to Wikipedia.
“He told me that I had good expertise, that I wrote quite well and above all that I knew how to find my way in databases and catalogs,” she recalls.
Her first article was about a Gothic church in the small southern town where she is a tour guide.
Since then, she has published some 100 articles, mainly focused on historic sites.
She also edited more than 1,500 existing articles, often adding information about libraries in the Prague area, her hometown.
“They know what they want to write”
The Czech Wikipedia has more than half a million pages and records around 600 regular contributors and thousands of occasional contributors, including an increasing number of seniors.
Jan Mysak, a workshop leader at a senior center in Prague, studying at the University of Chemistry, said the elderly contributors were “a promising group”.
“First of all, they have time.
But they also have life experience (…) and they know what they want to write,” he explained.
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Jirina Kadnerova thus “regularly takes the bus or train” to “visit cities” in her country and subsequently complete the page on the online encyclopedia.
“When I write about something, I want to put my hand on it.
That's what makes me happy.
A friend once told me that I wasn't doing enough for humanity.
This is finally the case,” she summarizes.
The octogenarian does not hesitate to also share her passion: she recently recruited a friend, also a retired librarian, to contribute articles to Wikipedia.