Jump to content

User:Angelina Souren

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NOTE, 21 July 2025: I will NOT respond to any further personal attacks from misogynistic Wikipedia editors and I always ignore any pestering from the 10-, 11- and 12-year-old kids here on Wikipedia. By the way, I have previously written about this in The Guardian and I am not the only one. Also, to be banned from voluntarily contributing to Wikipedia as punishment for standing up against misogyny and unethical practices on Wikipedia and the often immensely childish atmosphere here is actually an honour that I would accept with great pleasure.

Heck, let's make this official. I herewith declare that I will no longer contribute to Wikipedia, period.


Angelina Souren, July 2025

You can find my professional background towards the bottom of this page.

Still only a small percentage of Wikipedia's editors are women (only about 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. The atmosphere on Wikipedia remains misogynistic. You can find my professional background toward the bottom of this page.


MY ROLE ON WIKIPEDIA

I've been a feminist since my primary-school days. I observed the world around me and drew my conclusions. I also noticed that people who went their own way had much more fun lives than those who did what everyone else did.

I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2011, but I am not very active on Wikipedia. It happens in waves. I mostly add (or correct) information on 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's rules 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 on Wikipedia. Almost nobody else does which I find regrettable and dishonest. 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. The need for proper references takes care of that to a large degree, but finding good references can be very challenging. I sometimes search the internet in several languages, including Japanese, to find good sources.

To the 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds: Among other things, I have some programming in my background and have built computers from scratch. I have worked with pre-DOS, DOS, Windows, UNIX, LINUX and Macs and god knows what else. I have programmed modems, too.

PROFESSIONAL BLABLABLA

Angelina Souren is or was 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 because of austerity) 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.

After having voted Lib Dem for years, Souren switched allegiance and started voting Green Party. She 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.