InternationalThe Armenian Wikipedia
Published: Thursday January 20, 2011 in Reporter.web.review
Washington - If you have googled an Armenian name lately, there is a decent chance that the number one result for the name came up on Armeniapedia.org.
Even for Kirk Kerkorian, the site comes second only to Wikipedia.
What is this site you've stumbled upon? It's one of the largest Armenian websites in the world, with well over 5,000 pages and a mission to cover everything about Armenia, Armenians, the Diaspora, Karabakh and anything or anyone else with any Armenian angle.
The site is also a wiki, which means visitors can join in the effort and add or edit information, just like on Wikipedia.
This Armenia Encyclopedia's origins go back to the 1990s, when much of the content was on Cilicia.com, one of the first Armenian web site anywhere online that was created by Raffi Kojian.
In 2004, seeing how easy it was to collaboratively work on a wiki website, Kojian started Armeniapedia.org and moved most of the content over to the new wiki. From this starting point the site has continued to grow in both the number of articles and contributors.
According to Kojian, some of the more popular sections of the website include the Armenian Hall of Fame, the cookbook "Adventures in Armenian Cooking", and the sections on tourism, the Armenian language, the Diaspora, history and genocide.
The tourism and genocide sections are in fact two of the most extensive and most developed on the site. Both house texts gathered from various published sources to bring as in-depth as possible a picture of the subject at hand.
The genocide section has hundreds of documented first hand accounts of genocide survivors, and hundreds of newspaper articles from the time of the genocide. You'll also find entire books covering the genocide on the site, along with documents, treaties and photographic evidence.
The tourism provides information on virtually every single possible destination a tourist could hope to visit in Armenia, Karabakh and other parts of historic Armenia. The entire text of the guidebook "Rediscovering Armenia," authored by Brady Kiesling, formerly of the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan and edited by Kojian, is online and free to read, download and edit.
The tourism section even covers Armenian sights in places from Singapore and Calcutta to Romania and France. So if you're traveling anywhere in the world, it doesn't hurt to check and see if there's an Armenian sight there you might be interested in seeing.
Next time you google yourself and find your name come up on Armeniapedia, you know why. And if it doesn't, then you know not to fret.
You can add a page about yourself, which is encouraged. After all, the goal of the site is to have an article about every single Armenian topic in the world, and every single Armenian in the world.
