User:Nannus

I am a German male living in Cologne, Germany.

My interests include bike riding, African music and African dance, sciences, linguistics, J.S. Bach's Music, to name just a few. I have a degree in Computer Science and I am working as a programmer.

I am currently concentrating on African Music and other aspects of African culture. I don't have much time so my presence here is a bit patchy, with activity bursts during hollidays. However, bit by bit...

What I am doing here...[edit]

Eurocentrism[edit]

I am trying to reduce the amount of eurocentrism in wikipedia. Many pages are writen from a western perspective. Maybe you can help? Example: (referes to the state of the articles on October 19th, 2006) the harp article is about European concert harps and celtic harps (with a little bit of history). The fact that there are harps in other cultures can be found way down in a section entitled "Other harps around the world". This section should be the beginning and the european harps should just be examples among others. What is writen there on African harps is just wrong. Other articles that have this problem include Musical notation, Lyre and so on and so on. An example for a very good, globally balanced article are Writing system and the related List of writing systems. These can be used as models.

I don't have the time to fix all of these articles alone. Please help. For example: The section on Standard western musical notation in the Musical notation article should be moved to a separate article reference from the main article. Many articles (on chineese, japanees, indoneesian, ethiopian ... notation systems are missing, have to be added and referenced from the main article. Most musical instrument articles need the same operation.

Racism[edit]

I am also concerned with problmes of racism. My view to this is that races don't exist.

Racial distinctions do not exist, they are made!

Races are social constructions created with the purpose of exploitation. A race is a group of people discriminated (negatively or positively) by a racist ideology. If that ideology is taken away, the racial distinction disappears. Racist attidudes include assigning a race to yourself and making this part of your definition of your identity. I think that we should stop making racial distinctions at all. Making such distinctions has led to the destruction of the old cultures of the Americas, of Australia and other parts of the world. It has devastaded Africa, damaged Asia and led to the destruction of Europe in World War II. The idea that humans are not equal has been one of the worst destructive forces in history and it remains destructive to this day. This nonsense is still in the heads of many people in one form or another, and you can see the result in the eurocentric or other biases of many articles on Wikipedia.

Ethymology of the name Nannus ;-)[edit]

Nannus is a nickname given to me by one of my uncles when I was a child. The prevailing theory on its origin is that the name - following a practice common among medieval scholars - is a latinised form of the German exclamation "nanu!" which is an expression of surprise (meaning something like "hey!"). With respect to this, the doubling of "n" must be regarded as a misspelling, but it reflects the fact that the preceding vowel "a" is short (in German, a short vowel is indicated by the duplication of the following consonant).