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WikiAfrica   Share Your Knowledge   30,000 contributions by 2012   GLAM  

This page presents a summary of the collaboration between Wikipedia in English and the Africa Centre. The Africa Centre contributes to the project WikiAfrica and it's a GLAM. Since January 2011 the Africa Centre promotes WikiAfrica along with lettera27 Foundation and it contributes to it by involving a number of African institutions and producing contents.

The non-profit organization Africa Centre runs a cultural center and archives in Cape Town, with documentation on contemporary African and pan-African production: contemporary art, literature, poetry, urban studies, radio station, music, performances. Ntone Edjabe, Olu Oguibe and Edgar Pieterse are among its founders.

History of collaboration

Africa Centre contributes to Wikipedia in 2011 and is the main partner of the Wikipedia:WikiAfrica project. [1] It has made available the contents of its site under a CC BY-SA license, it contributes to the production of articles and to the relations with African institutions to facilitate their participation in the Share Your Knowledge subproject and GLAMs projects and it also follows the updating of the WikiAfrica project pages in the English version of Wikipedia. The cultural center has spent a lot of energy to participate and promote the project in the African continent and, thanks to its experience and its motivation to africanize the free encyclopedia and the sister websites, it is definitely the right partner for WikiAfrica. Isla Haddow-Flood, who is Marketing and Communications Manager, has no doubts: <<Africa now has the capacity to catch up and rebalance the information about itself>>.

Uploading contents on Wikimedia Foundation wikis

Those who don't know about Africa first-hand, write almost all the articles on Africa and its subjects; and those who do know about and are experiencing contemporary Africa, are not the ones writing about it.

— Isla Haddow-Flood[2]
Isla Haddow-Flood

The center has coordinated the development of the project pages for WikiAfrica, and is helping with sandboxed drafts and more complete entries for real articles. Isla is leading these operations, with the recognizable user name Islahaddow. Among the other users there are:

Riannedac ​​and Megzmurphy have also transferred to Wikimedia Commons numerous images donated by the Centre, especially using the tool called "Commonist", which is useful for mass uploading.

Content analysis

As it was previously said, while the texts produced by the Africa Centre can be found on the English-speaking Wikipedia, the pictures are available on Commons. Some of the entries are about projects and activities of the center, which are also mentioned in the Italian article:

Among other contributions on pages improved or created from scratch there are general articles such as South African poetry and List of African poets, the profile of the writer and anthropologist Henrique Abranches, as well as those of many artists attending the cultural center of Cape Town. The photographic documentation of their vital activities has just entered Wikimedia Commons, in particular about the Infecting the City festival, the Talking Heads conversations and the Pan African Space Station event (some examples below). Well over half of these files (55.5%) is already used in a few pages, totaling over 68,000 visits between January and July 2012.

The Incubator

The WikiAfrica Incubator logo

Africa Centre has also launched and developed theWikiAfrica Incubator,[3] a breeding ground of entries, clearly about "African" topics, which with some help from the community may be ready for proper publication. To ensure this works, a step by step guide eas created with lots of screenshots, a page that summarizes the main rules, a place to ask for help, another to leave requests for desired articles and then one in which to exchange ideas and suggestions on how to improve those already included. Since the texts are "incubating", a discussion with savvy users about style, tone and contents before the page is actually ready for publication is required. For example, the entry about the International Council of African Museums is probably encyclopedic; a couple of users have already reviewed it and left their advice on how to improve it on its talk page. All you have to do is following their useful suggestions and then moving the page to the correct namespace to get another entry on Wikipedia, yet another one thanks to Africa Centre.

Articles in English

This non-official logo for the project was commissioned by AC.

Other projects

Main activities

References

  1. ^ http://www.africacentre.net/wikiafrica
  2. ^ See below the link to Isla's interview.
  3. ^ The concept of a place in which contents grow slowly is certainly not new to the websites of the Wikimedia Foundation, there is indeed a Wikimedia Incubator for future contents as created by communities of newly requested language projects.

In the press

Versions in other languages
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