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AfroCROWD Wikipedia News & Opportunities (September-October 2018) |
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Catch up & connect with AfroCROWD: the initiative to increase awareness of
the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture, and software movements among
potential editors of African descent! |
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AfroCROWD Launches New Wikipedia Tutorial Series on Youtube Channel |
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AfroCROWD has launched a brand new series of Wikipedia tutorials meant to help new and developing users navigate the editing process.
We tailor-made each tutorial just for you. Have you wanted to take that first step as a Wikipedia editor, but was unsure where to start? Have you been to an AfroCROWD edit-a-thon and want to continue working on your skills in between events? Even if you are already a Wikipedia editor brushing up on your skills, these AfroCROWD produced videos should help.
So head to the AfroCROWD Youtube channel today and check them out! |
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AfroCROWD joins the AfroCine Project to Bridge the Content Gap on Historical and Contemporary Afro Cinema, Theatre, and Art
Add your input to the article suggestion list!
Do you have a favorite African or Afro-descended actor or actress who doesn't have a Wikipedia article, is missing a photo or whose Wikipedia article is too short? Get them on the list for the brand new international Wikipedia project on African artists: the Wikipedia AfroCine Project.
Led by Nigerian Wikipedian Sam Oye in partnership with Open West Africa, AfroCROWD and others throughout Africa, and South America, the vision of the project is:
"To bridge the huge content gap and improve on the systemic bias, in respect of the African continent, by getting real African stories and viewpoints into the mainstream. This will be achieved by making: articles, citations, images, videos, and data, about the historical and contemporary African cinema, theatre and arts, to be readily available and easily accessible, both online and offline, and in different languages."
We are now in the early stages and are looking for article suggestions. Please add your article suggestions
here or via the link below.
In the months of October and November, we are hosting AfroCine Months, because you can't fit all of that great Afro Cinema in just one month! During this time we will collectively lead edit-a-thons and encourage you to participate individually at an event or online on your own to add articles about notable African cinema artists or the engineers, producers, set designers and other talents behind the screen.
It will be great, we look forward to this international event.
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Join AfroCROWD at
WikiConference North America in Ohio October 18-21!
WikiConference North America is coming to Columbus Ohio and AfroCROWD will be there!
WikiConference North America is the annual conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The 2018 conference will take place in
Columbus, Ohio on October 18-21. Our main host is the Ohio State University Libraries, and planning is underway by the
WikiConference North America User Group and partners.
Registration opens soon! Click on the information button below for more.
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Congratulations to AfroCROWD LA Organizer Kai Alexis Smith who is joining the Library Staff at MIT! |
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We are pleased to announce that in December, AfroCROWD Los Angeles founding organizer, and experienced librarian, Kai Alexis Smith, will join the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries. Kai will become the newest member of the prestigious university's library of architecture and design.
Currently, Kai is the subject librarian for the College of Environmental Design, Ethnic and Women’s Studies and Foreign Languages at Cal Poly Pomona. She received her Masters in Information and Library Science in May 2013 from Pratt Institute.
Among her many honors, Kai was a
2014 ALA Emerging Leader and the
2013 Art Library Association of North America (ARLIS/NA) Wolfgang Freitag Internship Award winner, which she completed at the National Gallery of Art.
Kai joined AfroCROWD in 2017 as our founding organizer in California, based in the Los Angeles area. She has been at work collaborating with librarians in Southern California and in August held a training the trainer's Wikipedia event in the area.
Congratulations Kai! We are so excited for you and can't wait to get to see you more in the East Coast.
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Top photo: Kai Alexis Smith (second from right) poses with fellow AfroCROWDers at this year's Wikimania in Cape Town, South Africa. She joins the MIT Libraries staff in December. |
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AfroCROWD Partners with one of the Oldest US Black Family Reunions & UNC Asheville for Wikipedia Edit-&-Oral Knowledge-Record-a-thon |
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The first ever
Western North Carolina
Wikipedia Record-and-Edit-a-Thon took place over the Labor Day Weekend Saturday at the
Habitat Tavern & Commons, in
Asheville, North Carolina. Hosted by the Baird Family Reunion (believed by many to be the nation’s oldest black family reunion) during its 121st-anniversary celebration, the event was sponsored by
UNC-Asheville,
AfroCrowd, the Asheville African-American Heritage Commission, and the Color of Asheville.
Participants were able to share the diverse stories of
Western North Carolina, including family history and stories, and other cultural knowledge with the world by bringing artifacts and cultural stories to share and photograph. Volunteers like AfroCROWD Wiki Oral History Project intern Darold Cuba were on hand to teach how to record oral histories and edit Wikipedia. Darold, who coordinated the Ashville event, is a member of the Baird family and is studying oral family histories as a part of Columbia University's Oral History MA Program.
"Wikipedia Record-and-Edit-a-thons are...an effort to write marginalized people into the 6th most used url in the world. By one study, 8.5% of wiki writers are female and only 1% are transgender, with the majority of entries coming from Europe and North America. This is an opportunity to include the individuals and institutions from WNC with a wider experience by gender, race, ethnicity, and more,” says Deborah Miles, the Director of the
UNC Asheville's Center for Diversity Education which was a sponsor for the event
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Photo, top right: Promyss Watley, Darold and Rachel Cuba, all part of the Baird Family Reunion, and hosts of the 1st WNC Wikipedia Record-and-Edit-a-Thon courtesy Ami Worthen. |
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Other Wikimedia Community Happenings |
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Check out this coming event from our friends at the Black Lunch Table:
The Black Lunch Table (BLT) project will host an edit-a-thon focusing on important but underrepresented women visual artists of the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora from 2:30 pm – TBD on Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (135th St and Malcolm X Blvd), New York, NY, 10037. A training session will be held at the beginning, but help is available throughout the event.
Photographer Andrea Cauthen will be taking free portraits for Wikimedia Commons in our Black Lunch Table photo booth!
Please bring your laptop and a friend! The more, the merrier! Snacks provided.
Click here for more information and to sign up. |
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Coming Events from Wikimedia New York City |
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There are some great events happening soon out of our home chapter, Wikimedia New York City. Take a look:
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We look forward to seeing you soon at a coming Wikipedia event! Here are some highlights from recent AfroCROWD gatherings and other events. |
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AfroCROWD & Wikitongues Launch Wiki Afro Record-a-thon Initiative |
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AfroCROWD and Wikitongues joined forces in August with support from Whoseknowledge, faculty of the Columbia University Oral History MA program and the volunteers of Wikimedia NYC, to launch the first-ever Wiki Oral Knowledge Afro Record-a-thon! Held at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, members of the public were invited to share cultural knowledge and artifacts via oral history interviews for the first time.
The Wikipedia edit-a-thon, Wiki Commons training hybrid event, brought together Wikimedia coaches and oral history volunteers to help participants document their stories and was a successful beta launch of the pilot program which began in 2017 with AfroCROWD's work with Columbia University's Oral History Master's Program and graduate student Dian Zi, who worked with us to collect the first set of interviews. The initiative aims to create oral history collections on the Wiki Commons project.
Wikitongues is language preservation. Wikitongues collects video oral histories from each of the world's more than 7,000 language communities, preserving our common cultural heritage and amplifying stories from around the world. We publish our videos under a creative commons license to facilitate free educational use and raise awareness about the vast sum of human experience. We compile word lists, phrasebooks, and dictionaries, a crucial step toward ensuring that every language is well documented, preserving it for future generations. We work to guarantee that students always have access, academics always have data, and activists always have resources to sustain and defend their cultures. Follow our efforts and subscribe on youtube, or like us on facebook and twitter for new language videos every week. You can also join our mailing list and stay up to date.
https://wikitongues.org
Wikimedia NYC is a volunteer-run non-profit that aims to connect the peoples and institutions of the New York metropolitan area with Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and the larger free culture movement. Please join us at our monthly WikiWednesday Salon & Skillshare or one of our many edit-a-thons, where we teach members of the public to contribute to the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, including multi-language Wikipedias, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Check out our public event calendar at
http://bit.ly/WMNYCEvents.
We are thankful for the advisory support of:
Whoseknowledge? is a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet. 3/4 of the online population of the world today comes from the global South – from Asia, from Africa, from Latin America. And nearly half those online are women. Yet most public knowledge online has so far been written by white men from Europe and North America. To address this, we work particularly with women, people of color, LGBTQI communities, indigenous peoples and others from the global South to build and represent more of all of our own knowledge online. Whose Knowledge? is a radical re-imagining and reconstruction of the internet, so that together we build and defend an internet of, for and by all.
https://whoseknowledge.org
The Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts Program: Two graduate students from the program have worked with the AfroCROWD Oral History Initiative, as have faculty advised its trajectory. The Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts Program (Columbia OHMA) is the first program of its kind in the United States: a one-year interdisciplinary MA degree training students in oral history method and theory. Through the creation, archiving and analysis of individual, community and institutional histories, they amplify the critical first-person narratives that constitute memory for generations to come.
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Check out this video of one of our participants discussing the item she brought to talk about for her
oral knowledge clip. |
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Photos, top: Participants at the recent Afro Oral Knowledge Record-a-thon Launch at LaGuardia Community College, Queens, NY. |
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AfroCROWD Participates in Society of American Archivists Conference in Washington, DC |
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AfroCROWD program director, Sherry Antoine and AfroCROWD Wiki Oral History Project intern, Darold Cuba, participated in the recent Society of American Archivists Conference in Washington, DC in August. Antoine and Cuba met with archivists from around the country, including a delegation from MIT, and from Historically Black Colleges and other institutions from around the country. The excursion was part of AfroCROWD's research on the archival process and ways to integrate AfroCROWD's work with Wiki projects and the archivist community. Stay tuned for more on this.
The annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, held in late summer in different cities throughout the country, includes a wide array of informative education sessions, pre-conference workshops, networking opportunities, special events, exhibits, and tours of local repositories.
Learn more about the
Society of American Archivists here. |
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Photo: (L-R) AfroCROWD Program Director, Sherry Antoine and our Oral History Intern and in-coming Columbia Oral History MA grad student, Darold Cuba, at the Society of American Archivists conference in DC in August. |
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AfroCROWD is sponsored by
Wikimedia New York City where our founder, Alice Backer, serves as a vice president. The chapter is made up of a large group of dedicated individuals who are working hard to provide great Wikipedia community-related programs throughout the New York City area and beyond. |
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Join the Global Wikipedia Community today with AfroCROWD! |
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You made it all the way over here! Thanks for reading.
Here is your Wikimedia tip of the day courtesy of the Wikimedia community:
We think you should know about:
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is an online repository of free-use images, sounds, and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
More at:
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If you have editing ideas or are looking to
partner with AfroCROWD for a coming event,
please contact us today:
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AfroCROWD i.e. Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD) is an outreach initiative which seeks to increase awareness of the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture and software movements among potential editors of African descent. Since its launch during Black Wiki History Month in 2015, AfroCROWD has sensitized thousands in its target audience about free culture crowdsourcing and the need to close the multicultural and gender gaps in Wikipedia. AfroCROWD has also held monthly multilingual edit-a-thons in partnership with cultural institutions, galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAM) and many others. AfroCROWD has also worked with professors at educational institutions like New York University, The New School, Icahn Medical School and Columbia University among others. AfroCROWD also organizes events to train future trainers in its target community.
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