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Was she really a Swiss lesbian automobile racer?
At its best, Wikipedia offers eloquently written articles, pulled together from a variety of sources. At its worst, Wikipedia offers hastily written abstracts from a single source. And, perhaps just as bad, one-to-one translations from the English Wikipedia to less-active language versions. Why just as bad? Because direct translations fail to address topics that might not be important for an English speaking audience, yet are very important for others. Italian translations of books by James Joyce, for example, are important for Italian readers of Wikipedia – while many English speaking Wikipedians couldn’t care less.
Seven years ago, I uploaded a photograph of the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Schwarzenbach was a rich, independent and eccentric writer and journalist, who travelled the world as if she was walking through the woods of rural Switzerland, where she was born. She was an ardent photographer too, who took photos in Afghanistan, Belgian Congo, Eritrea, Georgia, India, Iraq, Russia, the United States and 20 other countries.
Photos of her were then quite hard to find: I had to browse through several books before I found a suitable photograph which also had a suitable copyright status. That photo (right), with Schwarzenbach holding a Rolleiflex Standard 621-Camera, looked like a selfie from around 1938 – at first sight.