Vera de Kok
banner
veradekok.nl
Vera de Kok
@veradekok.nl
The Wikimedia community's
2025 Media Contributor of the Year
https://veradekok.nl
There are also second marriages to the siblings of the first spouse. Used to be more common when the maternal death rate was higher
October 20, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Please don't use a prong collar on this lovely dog.
Prong Collars | RSPCA - RSPCA - rspca.org.uk
Prong collars are a painful and unethical training collar some owners put on their dogs in an attempt to stop them from pulling on the lead.
www.rspca.org.uk
September 29, 2025 at 2:09 AM
Customize your search string in your settings so that " -ai " is always an additional keyword
September 21, 2025 at 9:12 AM
Only added it to the article about gender-flipping just now en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_...
Gender flip - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
September 9, 2025 at 9:06 PM
This article on a German opera became a lot more interesting when I added this 19th Dutch photograph of a performance that had the male love interest played by a woman

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_sch...
September 9, 2025 at 7:19 PM
The article on the Shakespearean character of Feste only got a photo added to it back in 2020 when I was tagged the photos from the "Onze Tooneelspelers" ("Our Stage Actors") from 1899. Articles look so much better with a picture

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feste
September 9, 2025 at 7:07 PM
By matching archival footage to articles you get to unexpected stories. Like how Albert Pomper got to be a professional organ player despite coming from the most humble backgrounds because he got educated at the Amsterdam Institute for the Blind
nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_...
September 9, 2025 at 6:13 PM
You get to explore the world from home by cataloging other people's photos. I got introduced to Kenyan writer Nanjala Nyabola by doing that with those made available by @re-publica.com
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjala...
Photo: Jan Michalko / re:publica (CC BY-SA 2.0)
September 9, 2025 at 5:43 PM
In 2017 I got to contribute the photograph of @naomiaklein.bsky.social to Wikipedia when she visited Amsterdam, how cool is that?
September 9, 2025 at 4:58 PM
When you do things right within the Wikimedia projects, the resulting response is typically deafening silence. Thinks are getting better but compared to the dopamine hit social media can be. I got one "thank you" for finding these silos that look like the default Dutch peanut butter jar
September 9, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Read about how I got to upload 86k+ files to Wikimedia Commons on my blog:
I'm Wikipedia's "Media Contributor of the Year"!
Over 15 years I added 86,000 media files to Wikipedia's media library — 7,500 of them my own photos, videos, illustrations and audio. That work earned me the title Media Contributor of the Year 2025. ...
www.veradekok.nl
September 7, 2025 at 4:23 PM
New and improved: more embedded media, and a whole section added about working with public domain material
September 5, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Delpher, the Dutch newspaper archive, made an website in which you can browse newspaper photos that have been added to Wikipedia. If you browse for politicians you can see many of my finds kbnlwikimedia.github.io/GLAMorousToH...
September 4, 2025 at 7:03 PM
I got really into digging up the new portraits out of public domain material in 2019-2020. This early 20th century parliamentarian is so dapper, finding new things like this is so fun. He's nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egbertu...
September 4, 2025 at 6:46 PM
I build it back in 2018 so I could match names to faces on my phone after I'd uploaded a mass of photos the @re-publica.com conference had published on Flickr. They're the largest new media conference in the German speaking world. Their files are currently being used in just over 1700 locations
September 4, 2025 at 11:40 AM
I've gamified matching photos to individuals described in Wikidata with software I've written myself: the Orator-Matcher can take a list of names and give you an overview of matches. It ranks them by how many language editions of Wikipedia describe them
September 4, 2025 at 11:24 AM
My very best portrait is that of Judit Elek (10 language editions) at the IFFR 2023. It makes me proud to think it will stand as a representation of her through the ages en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_E...
September 4, 2025 at 8:48 AM