User:Angelina Souren

I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2011.

Only a small percentage of Wikipedia's editors are women (still only 15% in 2024) and it's well known that this has impacted Wikipedia's content.

Women for example were often described in terms like "former partner of" instead of their own merits and certain professional areas - such as the visual arts - were underrepresented.

I am not very active on Wikipedia. I mostly add (or correct) information to pages about scientists, but also about other things that I happen to run into such as musicians or films. I edit mostly English pages, sometimes French.

(I have a separate account for Dutch pages, but I don't often use it. I found Wikipedia very hard to figure out, initially. I still struggle with some aspects of it.)

I want to be as transparent as possible, which is why I use my own name. It is important that Wikipedia remains as neutral and independent as possible. It's supposed to be like an encyclopedia, after all, not an advertising platform. That said, the need for proper references takes care of that. Finding good references can be so challenging. Movie stars and other celebrities get written about a lot, but notably scientists don't.

I'm currently not in England, by the way.

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BACKGROUND BLURB ABOUT ME

Angelina Souren is an independent critical thinker, researcher, author, (bio)ethics explorer and wildlife advocate with a background in earth & life science.

Among other things, Souren is a former board member of the Environmental Chemistry (and Toxicology) Section of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society and a former associate editor of the US-based Geochemical Society's international newsletter.

She has written for (popular) science publishers, was on the editorial team of the Arcadis publication "Elements" and was a board and committee member for the NIMF foundation for women in science and technology in the Netherlands. NIMF stands for "Netwerk voor Informaticae, Mathematicae en Fysicae".

She has worked at and with the University of South Florida, the University of Southampton, the University of Plymouth, the University of Twente, VU University Amsterdam and several others.

She is one of Portsmouth's eleven graduates of "Taking the Lead", a national pilot for a "community leadership and effective democracy" initiative that was cut short by austerity. Earlier, Souren had briefly been on Portsmouth City Council's Environmental Forum until this this forum was discontinued. Other members included Lib Dem City Councillors Lynne Stagg and Darren Sanders.

Souren is also a former member of the South Hampshire Enterprise Agency business club (until it folded) and of the Amsterdam-American Business Club as well as of Toastmasters of the Hague.

She released the third edition of her book "We need to talk about this" in 2020, which addresses the new eugenics (a bioethics topics), as well as the first edition of "Is cruelty cool?", which explores how hate and cruelty come about through otherisation, usually as a result of inequality. She's also penned some flash fiction and two booklets about the topic of stalking.

Souren spent most of her adult life in Amsterdam, but has also lived in the US. Souren used to work in tourism and hospitality in Amsterdam, but quit her job in her twenties and enrolled as a full-time earth sciences student. She graduated with distinction from VU University Amsterdam, with an additional diploma for chemical oceanography research (REEs in the Southern Ocean), in conjunction with NIOZ, and two certificates from the Netherlands School for Journalism.

In 2004, Souren moved from Amsterdam to Southampton and later to Portsmouth in southern England. She became self-employed in 1997 when she was still based in Amsterdam.

Not considering herself an IT expert by any stretch of the imagination, she does still remember a little bit of programming (Unix, TurboPascal, Basic), which she learned in the 1980s. She has built computers from scratch as well as (large) websites, for which she wrote html in NotePad.

Souren was a member of the Green Party from May 2021 to May 2022. At the end of 2021, she briefly was a volunteer for the NHS in the Covid vaccination effort.