My First Wikipedia Article: Vera Lothar

I love Wikipedia. I can't imagine life without Wikipedia. I look up lots of stuff on Wikipedia. I've been using it for years, and I donate annually to Wikimedia Foundation.

But I had never contributed anything to Wikipedia. I felt there is nothing I can write about, and that there is always somebody who can write better than me on any specific subject.

However, recently, while reading a book by Simon Soloveychik, I was deeply moved by the remarkable, yet tragic fate of a talented French pianist Vera Lothar-Shevchenko, who was educated in Paris and Vienna, married a Soviet engineer in Paris and moved to the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Her husband and herself were soon condemned to the Stalinist prison camps, where she spent 13 years.

After she'd been released, she spent years teaching and performing in provincial Siberian cities of Nizhny Tagil, Barnaul and Sverdlovsk, until she was discovered by Soloveychik (then a correspondent for the Komsomolskaya Pravda). She was then invited to move to Novosibirsk, where she lived happily and performed until her death in 1980.

I was surprised to find out that there is very little information about Vera Lothar and no Wikipedia article about her. So I wrote one myself. You can read it here in Russian. I am also planning to write one in English.

Writing a Wikipedia article turned out to be not so easy. Wikipedia uses its own markup language, with many templates, and it takes some time to get familiar with it. Also, the first version of the article was immediately changed by somebody else, which was a little painful at first :) But I got over it, as I realized that Wikipedia is a cooperative endeavour, with many people collaborating on articles and improving their quality all the time!