Dear Florence
I join in the congratulations for getting to a new round of funding for
Wiki loves Africa photographic competition.
I was an early fan of the idea but I have to confess that my fan status
has markedly cooled over time. I cannot claim to have done a
comprehensive reseach but did some checks here and there.
*So I have the impression that
a) the competition has brought a number of really beautiful photographs
b) the competition has brought lots of images which are not used
anywhere in wikipedia articles (my short checks give me the impression
that could be the case for the vast majority of images produced)*
and*I ask myself if the reason may be that a lot of these mages is
frankly unusable.*
I remember that prize selected image showing some beautiful ladies in
Massai attire knitting under a tree (the year of adornment) which was
selected in some winner category but is unusable for any purpose (unless
you want to document fake stereoptypes...)
There is a lot of nice looking images which I do not know how to use
because of their not clear labelling, unhelpful categories and useless
explanations. It helps me as author nothing to see an image and a text
like "traditional tools of Ghana/Malawi/etc". This is unusable.
I write this not from the point of view of a lover of beauty (my taste
is poor) but just simply from the view of a wikipedia author. I would
love to have some thousand images (not necessarily beautiful) which
just show African villages. We know the criticism about the white spots
on the African maps of knowledge. Villages back home in Germany may have
less than 1000 inhabitants but 3 articles about the village, about its
church and about the sports club. Images are available and people look
for them.
We have put in hours and hours of work doing stubs about Tanzanian wards
and are nearly complete. Most Tanzanian wards are optically pretty
boring villages which often look similar and rarely have remarkable and
distinguishing architecture, sometimes landscape features in the
background. A photographic challenge in my view is to catch (a less
boring?) scene with some signboard that has has the name of the local
school, ward office or church on it to make identifiable. I do not get
them unless I travel myself overland and take pictures. But our users
would love to see them!! And I assume that it may be similar in other
countries.
I do not want to denigrate Wiki loves Africa but i would love to hear
from others how they see the value of the results as they have been so
far. Why do we do it - what do we get from it? How can images about
"play" be useful for closing the white spaces on the African map of
knowledge?
Cheers, Ingo - "Kipala"
Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili user group