Hello Folks!
As we edit English Wikipedia, you will note that the tag Requested photos is quite rampant in most articles that are about people or features in Kenya. As I navigated around categories of requested photographs in Africa, I established that Kenya has the highest number of requested photos as compared to the rest of the African countries. (I stand to be corrected though).
Even if the case is not so, we still have around 500+ requested photos for use in Wikipedia from Kenya. But again most of these photos are of people [1]. For a case in point; Conjestina the famous female boxing champion. Personally, I would not envisage a scenario where I would be attending a boxing match so that I can really get a nice shot of her. But as a Wikipedia contributor I would really like to see here photo up on Wikipedia but how? One thing I believe is that, we can fulfill a great percentage of these requests and this is why?
Recently, after the demise of the late Prof. George Saitoti, I held my horses for a reliable source to broadcast about this on the very hour of his passing. For this case it was the Daily Nation and Capital FM news that did it first from my search. I went to his Wikipedia article and updated it with the appropriate info plus some slight changes on the tense. I tweeted…
”Hey! Someone already update the Saitoti Wikipedia article #KOT”
#KOT is a hash tag for Kenyans On Twitter that is used to address issues concerning Kenya on this social network. The tweet got several retweets and over that some positive PR that Wikipedia is up-to date.
Later on, I was contacted by a journalist from the Nation Media Group as a result of my actions on Wikipedia. He told me that he had an account on Wikipedia but he infrequently edits because he doesn’t know how albeit he fetched my number from my FB profile via my Wikipedia userpage. He got my username from the history of the late Professor George Saitoti article. He interviewed me on the phone for about 45 minutes and I wish to clarify that I spoke in my opinion as a Wikipedia editor and not for the chapter or for the Wikimedia movement. He asked me how and why I did that and in general why I edit Wikipedia.
Having said that, these journalists are a very essential base of photo contributors to us since most of these photos about the people in question have already been taken but in the protection of Journalists of these media houses. Probably what we need to do is to talk to them about CC licenses and the impact that their work would have on Wikipedia. From my interview, he was very jubilant about my deeds. I invited the journalist to come in after giving him an overview of cc licenses and that I need photos to make articles about Kenya and its people on Wikipedia speak more than 1000 words :)
Another thing we can use social media (twitter) to inform people about Wikipedia activities here in Kenya. Read this article [2] about a CNN correspondent who navigated Kenya via twitter and she even organized a meet-up via twitter by using the tag #KOT!
I would like to hear your point of view about this.
regards,
Stephen.
1. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_requested_photographs_in_Kenya
2. 2. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/15/world/africa/kenya-twitter-experiment/index.html
re
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_requested_photographs_in_Kenya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_requested_photographs_of_people_of_Kenya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_requested_photographs_in_Africa
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http%3A%2F%2Ftoolserver.org%2F~para%2Fcgi-bin%2Fkmlexport%3Farticle%3DCategory%3AWikipedia_requested_photographs_in_Kenya%26usecache%3D1
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"Better Late Than Never, But Never Late is Better"
uwanja
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