Kasper Souren

Kasper Souren is a wiki website owner and developer. He is Dutch. Souren created and runs various websites and does MediaWiki hosting and consulting.

Souren cofounded Hitchwiki in support of his passion for hitchiking. He built Moneyless.org as a website for people who want to live well without money. It includes covrerage of moneyless communities, resources for living moneyless, and tips. Wiki.yt is his MediaWiki site but it appears to be undeveloped.

In 2013, Sauren relaunched Deletionpedia after it had become inactive and unusable. Years earlier, Souren worked with Geekcorps and established the Bambara Wikipedia while working in a mission in Mali in 2005. He also established the Wolof Wikipedia and worked on the Fula Wikipedia.

As a project to help develop the Bambara Wikipedia he offered $1 U.S. per article to people at a community in Bamako. The authors had no internet connections and no Wikipedia usernames. They wrote articles in Microsoft Word and gave the files to Souren who uploaded each article and paid the authors. Souren wrote "I can’t understand 100 percent of what they wrote, but I could estimate that it was right. It is a Wikipedia anyway, so I hope they can correct it." The total expenses of the project amounted to fewer than $100 U.S. but it was met eith some criticism. Ndesanjo Macha, a Wikipedian who speaks Swahili, argued that it's unnecessary to pay editors for their efforts and said he believed he was speaking for everyone in Africa. Noam Cohen of The New York Times wrote "Most of the people who have heard about Mr. Souren’s decision to pay for entries lauded his goal but questioned his tactics, saying that they undercut the Wikipedia spirit, and that, ultimately, a Bambara Wikipedia would work only if there was a voluntary community to support it." The project resulted in the partial translation of the Wikipedia interfaces for the Bambara and Fula Wikipedias and the creation of various articles for those Wikipedias. Souren wrote that after 2005 the Bambara and Fula Wikipedias had "only sparse activity". In December 2007 the Bambara Wikipedia had 142 articles and the Wikipedia in Fula had 28 articles.

Souren edits various sites usung the pseudonym Guaka. According to his profile page, he was an active editor of Wikipedia from 2003 to around 2006 with thousands of edits and created articles on variois topics but decreased his activity because of "Deletionism" (Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia). He states, "Deletionism has been a big reason for me to contribute less to Wikipedia. It's quite frustrating to see work you've done might be deleted if you don't participate in discussions with people who often have a lot of time on their hands are mostly discussing for the sake of discussing."

According to Souren's profile page on Wikipedia, he speaks many languages and has lived / worked in Nijmegen, Den Haag, Paris, Mali, Peru, New Zealand, Italy and Amsterdam. He works as an independent social web consultant, mainly with Drupal, SEO and MediaWiki.

Souren studied mathematics, sonology and artificial intelligence and is a hobby linguist. He has a blog and has posted his cv. He was a presenter at Wikimania 2005 and 2006, when he waa noted in the New York Times.

He started a wiki for CouchSurfing in August 2006 and it morphed in the couchwiki website. He also launched the trashwiki website and Sharwiki

Souren reports interest in "social movements that advocate the elimination of authoritarian institutions" (weblinked to anarchism), Creative Commons, free software, happiness, hitchhiking, hospitality exchange, give-away shops, veganism, and vegetarianism on his Wikipedia profile page. Professionally he does MediaWiki consulting and hosting and sells teak furniture. He also has an online printing shop and sell Electronics for Bitcoin mining. He plays the guitar. He is on BeWelcome, a site for homestays.