【外交政策 201411】破碎的世界：2014百大思考者 － 记录者

满仓

【中文标题】破碎的世界：2014百大思考者 － 记录者
【原文标题】A World Disrupted: The Leading Global Thinkers of 2014
【登载媒体】外交政策
【原文链接】http://globalthinkers.foreignpolicy.com/




一个好的故事往往需要一个引人入胜的情节和精心刻画的人物，但是讲述故事的方式也能让它变得与众不同。下面这些全球思考者都是讲故事的大师，无论是用推特现场直播一场战争，让边缘化人群用一根电话线报道新闻，还是用1000个最普通的英文单词描述宇宙的性质，甚至在播报重磅消息的时候插入一些幽默。他们是当代的说书艺人，他们告诉人们需要知道的事情，而且经常会使用颇具新意的方式。


舒博兰舒•科德哈里
CGNet Swara创始人，印度

“让印度人民人人手持扩音器。”

二十一世纪之初，BBC制作人舒博兰舒•科德哈里在报道查提斯加邦几十年来毛泽东主义盛行的事件时，发现当地居民缺少足够的技术和文化来提供新闻线索，也缺乏与外界分享信息的途径。他在接受《国家地理》采访时说：“他们想要的并不是共产主义，而是话语权，他们想被别人听到，被别人严肃对待。”

于是他辞去工作，在2010年开办了手机新闻服务CGNet Swara。这个国家有23种语言，不到7％的人有机会接触电脑，但是70％的人都有手机。Swara的故事内容从地方腐败到国家选举无所不包，很多内容被国际主流媒体采纳。实际上，一个有关警察暴力的事件让联合国也进行了相关的报道，并最终导致印度最高法院开启一项调查。

3月，科德哈里击败爱德华•斯诺登，获得“谷歌数码活动奖”。他在颁奖典礼中说：“新闻报道应当成为每个人的日常工作。”


埃琳娜•费兰特
小说家

“创作诚实、匿名的小说。”

我们并没有意大利小说家埃琳娜•费兰特的任何照片。她或者他——这个名字只是一个笔名——从未直接与公众见面。但是费兰特在8月份接受《时尚》杂志采访时说的话“小说可以去除一切伪装”颇具说服性。费兰特最亲密的朋友和家人对她的描述显示，这位小说家的力量来源于更深的层次，而不是光鲜的外表。

费兰特的最新一部小说《离开的人和留下的人》是这个系列的第三部作品，追溯了两个和作者一样生长在意大利那不勒斯的女人的故事。作品中描述了由于环境、教育和家庭的差异所造成的人们之间不可逾越的距离。费兰特在1995年说：“如果有一种方法可以让一个作家有权利通过写作来决定他拥护什么，反对什么，那么他自己又有什么必要抛头露面呢？”如果真有这样一种方法，那么的确不需要了。


哈乔•库卡
导演，苏丹

“记录苏丹人的身份危机。”

那些散布在青尼罗河和努巴山区的流离失所的苏丹人，都是政府与各种反叛组织之间冲突的受害者，他们的生活时而平静时而悲惨。这就是哈乔•库卡在他2014年获奖影片《安东诺夫的律动》中所捕捉到的现实。与传统讲述战争的纪录片不同，库卡所讲述的苏丹人民流离失所的故事，是通过一系列非线性的镜头，其中掺杂着政府的枪声、音乐和舞蹈。

尽管影片主要针对的是不为人知的暴力，但深层次的含义是战争给苏丹人民带来了什么。被苏丹阿拉伯人所主导的政府强行推广千人一面的国家文化，而这里存在着数十个不同的种族。库卡似乎在说，苏丹不仅陷于战乱，而且在面临着身份危机。


迈克尔•刘易斯
作家，加利福尼亚州伯克利

“把华尔街逼入死角。”

迈克尔•刘易斯的《快闪大对决：华尔街的起义》在今年春天登上畅销书榜单，之后，6个政府机构宣布要调查书中描述的问题：金融市场的高频率交易。对于一个作家，这是极为罕见的认可，同时我们看到了刘易斯在当代金融领域中对复杂交易行为的敏锐洞察力。

高频率交易指的是在瞬间买进卖出大量的股票。刘易斯在他的新书中指出，这种行为——在2012年占据了美国股票交易量的一半——让那些对总体经济贡献极小的公司发家致富，同时导致一般投资者损失巨大。刘易斯写道，开放型市场“从本质上已经变成一种盗窃的艺术。”《快闪大对决》是门缝中一只闪亮的眼睛。


克里斯蒂娜•德•米德
摄影师，英国

“捕捉事实的魔法。”

克里斯蒂娜•德•米德曾经是一名摄影记者，而目前，她利用另外一种叙事媒介——图片故事——赢得了广泛的赞誉。她自己设计造型、道具和场景，抓住了叙述一个复杂故事的精髓。《非航员》这个作品为她赢得了2012年的大奖，这是基于一个真实的故事——赞比亚一个短命的航空计划。德•米德把颜色鲜亮、绣有图案的布匹变成太空服，把油桶改造成太空城。她在接受《卫报》的采访时说：“我希望营造一种B级片的效果，给普通的道具赋予魔幻的效果。”

今年，德•米德完成了他的作品《仇恨的所作所为》，用崭新的方式讲述了埃莫斯•图图奥拉1954年的小说《我在幽灵灌木丛里的生活》。故事内容是一个尼日利亚男孩为逃离战乱，在一个隐藏着约鲁巴幽灵的丛林里生活了30年。德•米德选择拉各斯的一个贫民窟马科科，作为她想象中神秘景色的隐喻。她在接受《时代周刊》采访时说：“我终于理解了我所记录的故事，相比于我摄影记者的职业，我现在更能真实地表达自己。”


罗伯托•特罗塔
理论宇宙学家，英国

“把天文学专业术语丢在一边。”

宇宙的起源和未来很难解释清楚。在9月份出版的《宇宙边缘：你所需要知道的一切》一书中，宇宙学家罗伯托•特罗塔只用了1000个最普通的英文单词就把一切解释清楚了。

特罗塔跟随着一个虚拟的女科学家（“女学生”）用一架天文学望远镜（“大眼睛”）探索夜晚的宇宙，宇宙学中所有重大的问题——暗物质、黑暗能量、大爆炸、空间扭曲——都用人人能懂，甚至诗一般的语言呈现出来。特罗塔用这样的语言解释宇宙的扩张和银河的移动：“星星彼此距离越来越远，宇宙空间也变得越来越大。所有这一切都随着时间成长。”

宇宙已经足够神秘了，特罗塔认为，宇宙探索者不应当迷失在术语中。


宾亚瓦格纳•瓦伊纳伊纳
作家，肯尼亚

“为争取非洲大陆人民的LGBT权利而揭开深藏的秘密。”

今年1月，知名的肯尼亚作家宾亚瓦格纳•瓦伊纳伊纳在一篇网络散文《妈妈，我是一个同性恋》中宣布出柜。他在2011年的回忆录《有一天我要写写这件事》被他称为“失落的章节”，瓦伊纳伊纳说他很遗憾没有在母亲去世之前告诉她自己的性取向。这篇散文引起了轩然大波，《奈落比国家日报》称其为“同性恋炸弹”，因为瓦伊纳伊纳加入了一个著名、公开的非洲知名人士同性恋组织。

这篇文章的发表时机并非偶然，它的用意是反对撒哈拉以南非洲地区针对女同性恋、男同性恋、双性恋和跨性别者（LGBT）权利的侵犯行为。乌干达议会近期通过了臭名昭著的反同性恋法案，尼日利亚也把同性关系定义为犯罪。瓦伊纳伊纳在接受《环球邮报》采访时说：“我希望自己这一代人……可以让非洲对自己的言行负责。”这样的变化当然需要时间，但是正如乌干达女同性恋活动人士凡尔•卡兰德在4月份写到，瓦伊纳伊纳“的故事仅仅是一个开始，让这个大陆完全接受LGBT人群依然还有漫长的道路。”


玛丽安•米尔札哈尼
数学家，加利福尼亚帕罗奥图

“探索数学的空间。”

玛丽安•米尔扎哈尼在27岁获得博士学位，她对理论数学的贡献赢得了全世界学者的赞扬。她专门研究抽象曲面、三维空间外物体的形状等课题。她试图测量多孔环形上直线自动封闭的现象，追踪理论撞球通过无限多边形的轨迹。这位伊朗裔的斯坦福大学教授在今年完成了这两项研究，她被授予数学界的最高荣誉菲尔兹奖。

尽管她从事的是一项高度抽象的工作，但是这些成果依然会影响理论数学和理论物理学领域的走向。米尔扎哈尼的办公室里散布着各种研究图形的草图。她在接受《卫报》的采访时说：“最让人兴奋的是猛然顿悟的那一刻。但是更多时间，研究数学对我来说就是一座高山，没有道路，没有尽头。”


约翰•奥利弗
电视节目主持人，纽约

“发明了调查性喜剧。”

自4月份以来，“约翰•奥利弗晚间秀”已经重新改变了由乔恩•斯图尔特和史蒂芬•科拜尔所霸占的讽刺类新闻节目。约翰•奥利弗运用自己的喜剧天赋和团队严谨的调查工作，往往让受访者如坐针毡。他在周日晚间30分钟的节目里首次展示自己的喜剧才能，他问前国家安全局局长基思•亚历山大，为什么美国人要相信安全局，因为如果奥利弗有机会，他也会渎职。

这个节目探索的本质不容置疑。投入足够的人力深入挖掘纳税记录，翻出专家们的旧账，奥利弗借此模糊了讽刺和报道的界限。他的访问对象往往灰头土脸。他曾经贬损泰国严格禁止外界批评皇族家庭的制度，据VICE新闻社获取的一份报告，泰国的军政府因此把奥利弗当作一个威胁，说他“破坏了皇家机构的权威”。尽管如此，奥利弗坚持认为他的节目并不属于新闻报道类：“这是喜剧。首先，它是喜剧。其次，它还是喜剧。”


珍妮弗•埃伯哈特
社会心理学家，加利福尼亚帕罗奥图

“为种族歧视定量。”

珍妮弗•埃伯哈特的研究起初并不那么具有创新性。研究的前提是很多美国人带有偏见地把非裔美国人与犯罪行为联系在一起，早在今年夏天密苏里州弗格森黑人青年迈克尔•布朗被射杀之前，这就是一个被广泛讨论的社会问题。然而，埃伯哈特提出了实验性的证据，她的工作开创性地展示出，种族歧视究竟有多么根深蒂固。

过去几年里，斯坦福大学心理学教授埃伯哈特发现，陪审员更倾向于判处那些看起来“比较黑”——肤色和发质——的被告人有罪，而且判决的结果更加严厉。她还发现，测试对象更愿意把与犯罪相关的图像——比如枪——与黑色面孔联系起来，即使这些面孔只在测试者面前仅仅一闪而过。发现这种根深蒂固的种族偏见，让埃伯哈特在9月份获得了麦克阿瑟天才奖。她已经开始为警察部门提供咨询服务，帮助他们尽量避免那些有害的、潜意识中的、先入为主的印象。


帕德米尼•普拉克什
新闻主播，印度

“黄金时间的第三性节目主持人。”

8月15日，当帕德米尼•普拉克什出现在莲花新闻7点档时，她成为了印度第一位变性电视节目主持人。这一天是印度的独立日，因此它代表这个国家与自身性别歧视的历史告别。

在印度沦为殖民地之前，hijra——这个词表示变性人、双性人和被阉割者——在社会中占有显赫的地位。但是英国的殖民法把他们视为罪犯，让他们游离于主流社会。在她13岁的时候，她的家人与普拉克什断绝了关系，她曾经试图自杀，后来成为一名变性人的活动人士。

4月份，印度最高法院确认了独立于男性和女性的第三性的地位，女同性恋、男同性恋、双性人和变性人（LGBT）的权利有了可喜的进步。很多人估计印度大约有200万人被归入这一性别，其它人会依然选择男性或者女性。在一个同性恋性行为被视为非法的国家，普拉克什的泰米尔语广播得到了高度赞扬，也是LGBT事业的一个重要进步。


肖恩•伊凡思、杰奎琳•玛贝、迈克尔•曼迪博格、理查德•尼佩尔、桃乐斯•霍华德、劳伦•佩塔克
艺术家、图书管理员、维基百科编辑，纽约

“修正维基百科中的性别差异。”

维基百科已经成为人们在匆忙中寻找信息的第一选择。但是据创始人吉米•威尔士提供的信息，截止到2013年，维基词条的编写人中只有13％的女性。

一个自称为“艺术与女权”的组织说，这个统计数据激发他们开展一项名为“edit-a-thon”的运动。在2月份的一个星期天，大约600人登陆维基百科，试图修改网站词条中带有男性偏见的信息。组织者在脸书上写到：“我们要求参与人编辑任何有关艺术、女权、性别研究和LGBTQ的词条。”参与人来自30多座城市，从纽约到阿姆斯特丹和阿德莱德，这些人创作了大约100个新词条，修改了90多个。

第一次集体行动之后，他们又举办了多次类似的行动。10月，“艺术与女权”举办了第一场“培训培训师”座谈会，为有志参与未来编辑活动的志愿者做好准备。主办者在他们自己的维基主页上写到：“改变的工具就在你们手中。”


法拉•贝克
推特现场直播人，加沙地带

“用140个字现场直播‘保刃行动’。”

在今年为期50天的哈马斯与以色列的战争中，法拉•贝克——更多的人知道她的名字是@Farah_Gazan——在推特上的粉丝从800人猛增到20万人。这位16岁的女孩在接受天空电视台采访时说：“我不想让人们觉得我是想出名，我只不过认为这是唯一能够帮助加沙的方法。”

贝克的推特飞速更新，就像落在她身边的以色列炮弹。7月28日，她写到：“他们猛烈轰炸我周围的地区，这是战争打响以来最糟糕的一个晚上。我只是想让你们知道，我随时会在加沙牺牲。”她的文字，配上震撼的照片，让她的粉丝也置身于战争之中。这场战争导致2100名巴勒斯坦人死亡，其中大部分是平民。

“我是当代的安妮•弗兰克。”这是她推特页面的自我介绍。




原文：

Chroniclers

A good story almost always involves an intriguing plot and skillfully drawn characters, but the way a tale is delivered can make it truly exceptional. These Global Thinkers are masters of storytelling forms, whether they are live-tweeting the events of war, empowering marginalized populations to report news through something as simple as a phone call, explaining the nature of the universe in the 1,000 most common words in the English language, or weaving humor into televised coverage of the world’s most pressing issues. They are modern-day raconteurs, telling people what they need to know—and often using groundbreaking platforms to do it.

Shubhranshu Choudhary
Founder, CGNet Swara
|India
For giving rural Indians a megaphone.

In the early 2000s, while covering a decades-long Maoist insurgency in Chhattisgarh state, BBC producer Shubhranshu Choudhary realized that local residents lacked the technology and literacy skills to share news and information with each other, and with the outside world. “It wasn’t communism they wanted but to have a voice, to be heard and taken seriously,” he told National Geographic.

So he left his job and, in 2010, launched the mobile news service CGNet Swara in a country with 23 official languages—and where less than 7 percent of people have access to computers, but 70 percent have cell phones. Covering everything from local corruption to national elections, Swara’s stories have been picked up by major international media. In fact, one account of police violence led to a U.N. report and prompted the Indian Supreme Court to demand an investigation.

In March, Choudhary beat out leaker Edward Snowden for the Google Digital Activism Award. “Journalism,” he said when receiving the award, “needs to become everybody’s business.”

Elena Ferrante
Novelist
|Unknown
For writing honest, anonymous fiction.

There are no known photographs of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. She or he—the name is a pseudonym—has never appeared in public, at least not as such. But when Ferrante says, as the author did via email in an August interview with Vogue, that “in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils,” it’s convincing. Ferrante’s intimate portraits of friendship and family show that literature’s power comes from recesses deeper and more personal than the gloss of fame.

Ferrante’s latest novel, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, is the third in a series tracing a bond between two women who, like the author, grew up in Naples, Italy. It’s a raw study of the distance brought by diverging circumstances of education and family. “Is there a way of safeguarding the right of an author to choose to establish, once and for all, through his writing alone, what of himself should become public?” Ferrante asked in 1995. If there is, perhaps this is it.

Hajooj Kuka
Filmmaker
|Sudan
For documenting Sudan’s identity crisis.

For the displaced in the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountain regions of Sudan—victims of a conflict between the government and various rebel groups—life vacillates between feeling calm and feeling hellish. This is the reality that filmmaker Hajooj Kuka captures in his award-winning 2014 film Beats of the Antonov. Departing from traditional documentary reporting about conflict, Kuka tells the story of Sudan’s internally displaced people through a series of nonlinear vignettes in camps, interspersing footage of government shelling with scenes of music-making and dance.

While the movie is meant to shine a light on the underreported violence, it is fundamentally about what it means to be Sudanese. The government, dominated by Sudanese Arabs, pushes a monolithic brand of national culture in a country with dozens of distinct ethnicities. Sudan, Kuka seems to be saying, is not just at war—it is facing an identity crisis.

Michael Lewis
Writer
|Berkeley, Calif.
For writing Wall Street into a corner.

Within a month of Michael Lewis’s best-selling Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt appearing in bookstores this spring, six governmental bodies announced investigations into the book’s subject: high-frequency trading in financial markets. Such success was yet another reminder of Lewis’s rare ability to pinpoint and illuminate the complex practices that define current finance.

High-frequency traders buy and sell huge volumes of shares in split-second transactions. Lewis’s most recent book argues that the practice—which in 2012 accounted for more than half the volume of shares traded in American stocks—enriches firms that contribute little to the broader economy and, in the process, leaves other investors behind. The open market, Lewis writes, “had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.” Flash Boys is a clear-eyed look through the keyhole.

Cristina De Middel
Photographer
|United Kingdom
For creating magic to capture truth.

Once a photojournalist, Cristina De Middel is now winning plaudits for her work in another storytelling medium: photographic fiction. By fusing documentary photography with her own casting, props, and scenic design, De Middel captures the essence of complex narratives. For her 2012 award-winning series, The Afronauts, based on the true story of Zambia’s short-lived space program, De Middel transmuted vivid, patterned fabric into spacesuits and oil drums into spaceships. “I wanted that B-movie effect, where normal things can be turned into magical things,” she told the Guardian.

This year, De Middel completed This Is What Hatred Did, a retelling of the 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutuola, in which a Nigerian boy flees violence and spends 30 years in the bush among Yoruba spirits. De Middel chose Makoko, a Lagos slum, as her visual metaphor for that mythical landscape. “I’m finally understanding the stories I’m documenting,” she told Time. “My ideas are much more truthful than when I was a photojournalist.”

Roberto Trotta
Theoretical cosmologist
|United Kingdom
For junking astronomy’s jargon.

The origins and destiny of the universe are hard to explain. In The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is, published in September, cosmologist Roberto Trotta takes on the task with only the 1,000 most common English words.

As Trotta follows a fictional female scientist (“student-woman”) through a night of astronomical exploration at an observatory telescope (a “Big-Seer”), the greatest problems in cosmology—dark matter and energy, the Big Bang, the curvature of space—are presented in accessible and sometimes poetic language: “[L]ike Mr. Hubble found long ago,” Trotta writes, explaining the expansion of the universe and the movement of galaxies, “the Star-Crowds are running away from each other, as the space between them gets bigger and bigger. The All-There-Is is growing with time.”

The universe is mysterious enough as it is. Explorers, Trotta believes, shouldn’t have to get lost in jargon.

Binyavanga Wainaina
Author
|Kenya
For revealing a secret to advance LGBT rights in Africa.

This past January, acclaimed Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina came out in an online essay titled “I Am a Homosexual, Mum.” In what he calls a “lost chapter” of his 2011 memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, Wainaina describes missing the chance to share his sexuality with his mother before she died. The essay was a controversial sensation—a “gay bombshell,” according to Nairobi’s Daily Nation—as Wainaina joined a very small group of prominent, openly gay African figures.

The timing of the publication was no accident. It was intended as pushback against violations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights across sub-Saharan Africa. Uganda’s Parliament had recently passed its infamous Anti-Homosexuality Act, and Nigeria had just criminalized same-sex relationships. “I want to be part of a generation of people … who change [Africa] to be accountable to itself,” Wainaina told GlobalPost. Such change will take time, but as Ugandan lesbian activist Val Kalende wrote in April, Wainaina’s “story could be the beginning of what is still a long walk to the acceptance of LGBT people on the continent.”

Maryam Mirzakhani
Mathematician
|Palo Alto, Calif.
For exploring mathematical space.

By the time she completed her doctorate at age 27, Maryam Mirzakhani’s contributions to pure mathematics had earned her the praise of scholars around the world. Among other subjects, Mirzakhani studies abstract surfaces, shapes that exist outside three-dimensional space. Try measuring multi-holed doughnuts on which straight lines can loop back on themselves (but sometimes don’t) or tracking the movement of a theoretical billiard ball through spaces with limitless configurations of edges. The Iranian-born Stanford University professor has done both and this year was awarded the Fields Medal, viewed by many as the highest honor in mathematics.

Although highly abstract, her work could influence the direction of other areas in pure mathematics and theoretical physics. Mirzakhani’s office is scattered with sketches of the shapes she studies. “Of course, the most rewarding part is the ‘aha’ moment,” she told the Guardian. “But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.”

John Oliver
Television host
|New York City
For inventing investigative comedy.

Since April, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver has been rebranding the journalistic satire that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have long dominated. John Oliver uses his comedic gifts and his team’s rigorous reporting to put interview subjects in a pitiless hot seat. His 30-minute, Sunday night slot premiered with the comedian asking former National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander why Americans should trust the agency when Oliver himself would abuse its power if given the chance.

The investigative nature of the program is indisputable. By staffing up with pros to dig through tax records and track down experts, Oliver’s segments blur the line between satire and reporting. His targets have taken note. After he disparaged Thailand’s strict restrictions on critiques of its royal family, the country’s military government identified Oliver as a threat who is “undermining the royal institution,” according to a document obtained by Vice News. Still, Oliver insists his show isn’t journalism: “It’s comedy—it’s comedy first, and it’s comedy second.”

Jennifer Eberhardt
Social psychologist
|Palo Alto, Calif.
For quantifying racial prejudice.

Jennifer Eberhardt’s research may not seem so pioneering at first. Its premise, that many Americans prejudicially associate African-Americans with crime, was part of the country’s sociopolitical conversation long before the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this summer. By bringing experimental evidence to bear on the issue, however, Eberhardt’s work breaks new ground by showing just how deeply entrenched racial biases are.

Over the past few years, Eberhardt, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has found that juries are more likely to find defendants guilty simply if they look “stereotypically black”—based on skin color and hair texture—and to give them harsher sentences. She also has shown that test subjects are more likely to associate images related to crime, such as guns, with black faces than with white ones, even if those subjects see the faces for mere milliseconds. With this in-depth understanding of racial bias, Eberhardt, awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in September, has begun advising police departments about how best to avoid harmful, subconscious perceptions.

Padmini Prakash
News anchor
|India
For bringing third gender to prime time.

When Padmini Prakash read the news for Lotus News’s 7 p.m. broadcast on Aug. 15, she became India’s first transgender TV anchor. The anniversary of India’s independence, the day was fitting for a step away from a history of discrimination.

In precolonial India, some hijras—a term that describes transgender and intersex people as well as eunuchs—held prominent positions in society. But British colonial law criminalized them and pushed them to the margins, where they have largely remained. Prakash’s family disowned her when she was 13, and she attempted suicide before becoming an activist for the transgender community.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights inched forward in April, when India’s Supreme Court recognized the right to identify as a third gender, neither male nor female. Many of India’s estimated 2 million transgender people identify as such, though others choose to be male or female. In a country where gay sex remains illegal, Prakash’s Tamil-language broadcasts, which viewers highly praise, are an important advance for the LGBT cause.

Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg, Richard Knipel, Dorothy Howard, Laurel Ptak
Artists, curators, Wikipedia editors
|New York City
For correcting the Wikipedia gender gap.

Wikipedia is increasingly the first resort for those seeking information in a hurry. But as of 2013, only 13 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors were female, according to the site’s co-founder, Jimmy Wales.

A group that calls itself “ArtAndFeminism” cites that statistic as motivation for an “edit-a-thon” in which, over the course of one Saturday in February, around 600 people attempted to correct some of the site’s male bias. “Attendees are encouraged to edit any entry of interest related to art, feminism, gender studies, and LGBTQ issues,” the organizers wrote on the Facebook page for the event. The effort spanned some 30 cities—from New York to Amsterdam to Adelaide—and its participants created about 100 new articles and modified at least 90.

Since the inaugural gathering, many more editing meet-ups have followed. And in October, ArtAndFeminism held the first of a series of workshops, called “Train the Trainers,” to prepare aspiring activist-editors for future projects. “The tools of change are in your hands,” the organizers wrote on their own Wikipedia page.

Farah Baker
Live-tweeter
|Gaza Strip
For cataloging Operation Protective Edge in 140 characters.

Over the course of this year’s 50-day war between Hamas and Israel, Farah Baker—better known as @Farah_Gazan—extended her global reach from 800 Twitter followers to more than 200,000. “I don’t want [people] to think that I just want to be famous,” the 16-year-old told Sky News. “I see that this is the only way I can help Gaza.”

Baker’s tweets landed at a rapid-fire pace, like the Israeli bombs that pounded her neighborhood. On July 28, she wrote: “They are bombing heavily in my area. This is the worst night in this war. I just want you to know that I might martyr at any moment #Gaza.” Her words, combined with powerful photos, helped place her followers on the scene during the war, which left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, the majority of them civilians.

“I’m the modern Anne Frank,” her Twitter bio read this summer.