During the month of October, some students from Norway came to Kosovo, because they had to do a paper that would describe the current situation here and my friend Shqiptar Ibra, who works in the Tourist Agency that was responsible to guide them in Kosovo, told me that one of the first questions that he was asked from them was: How safe are we here?
And that has been one of the main factors that has motivated me and that friend to participate in Wikiacademy II, and write an article about the tourism in Prishtina (we weren’t allowed to write for the whole Kosova). So we wanted to show the real image of Prishtina, like it is an inhabited city from pre historical periods whose ruins can be found near Ulpiana and Harilaq today, even though unfortunately a lot of the them have been destroyed; it has been playing a very important role during World War II, serving as a shelter for Jews; its citizens are known for hospitality, religious tolerance, optimism and young age; its unique and delicious traditional food and some rare characteristics like the only mosque in Europe that has its top built with stone bricks instead of aluminum; Gadime Marble Cave near Prishtina, the Monument of Newborn and a lot more.
In the beginning we saw it as a very easy process, because we had already two books that could serve as a reliable and enough source of information to write about the topic and we thought that we made a good outline before starting the actual writing, but the challenge has been misunderstood by us and, by getting advice from the mentors, we had to change our entire strategy of writing twice, which was not easy at all and sometimes I was thinking to quit at all, but I just asked myself: What’s the worst thing that could happen? and I wasn’t able to find any strong reason to quit, so we kept going.
During the first day of the Wikiacademy Camp, we didn’t write anything useful that could be included in our article besides brainstorming some ideas about our content and what should we do to efficiently accomplish our goal of finishing the task that we started that day, when we had a week ahead the deadline.
We tried checking similar articles written in Wikipedia about tourism of other places and got some very useful hints, even though we didn’t have enough sources of information to write about some sections like the most visited places and the intentions of tourists that have been visiting Prishtina in the past. We focused on what we could write and reference about, did some research and tried to do our best and after a few tiring days, we finally managed to finish our work a few hours before the deadline.
We took the third place in Prishtina and also got a prize about the significant contribution in Wikipedia, and I heard from one of the mentors that we were very close the third place in Kosova. Here you can see the results and the links of articles and photographs that have participated in this contest.
Even though I do care about money, I think I got much more than that, e.g. I learned a lot of things about Prishtina and a lot of new English words, met new people and had some very interesting experiences. And yeah, here is our article.
