Dear Ingo

First, let me state that I would never ignore you, and never ignore such an email sent by a reasonable person. I never saw that email...
I had to go to archive to find it. For my defense, I was travelling that entire week, first in Stockholm, then Geneva. Obviously the email slipped through. I really apology.

This said... I think it is more valuable to raise those issues now than to raise them last December and now is an excellent time to tackle those points. So, in truth, I thank you for launching the discussion.

----> Lots of nice images which are unusable and useless.
This is unfortunately correct. And this year it got worse. Why ? Because previous years, Jacqueline and I spent a huge amount of time going to the images one by one, fixing categories, fixing description, adding countries when countries were missing. And adding some of those images to articles. But year after year, it felt that we were nearly the only ones doing this careful curating job. And it started being very frustrating.
So this year, I decided to do a little experiment. I decided NOT to fix any of those to see what would happen. And I asked Jacqueline to do the same. We voluntarily decided not to add categories, not to fix countries, not to reuse images in Wikipedia articles. So that we would measure the extent to which other would actually pick up the job. Of course, I mentionned it here and there and invited various people to jump in.

I know you love figures. So here are figures

In 2017...

• Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2017 without categories‎ (1 F)
• Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2017 in an unknown country‎ (51 F)
  Images to check ? 0
  

In 2019

• Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2019 without categories‎ (6438 F)
  Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2019 with unknown country‎ (1009 F)
  Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2019 to check‎ (1 C, 7822 F)
  
  Does it need more comment ? This is the extent of what Jacqueline and I did not do.
  Bottom line... if we do not do it... nobody does. This is acted.
  Note that the only thing I did in terms of categorization was to check every single media collected during the drive and tag videos. So there is a video category. This is the only category that has been created this year.
  

----> Lots of nice images which are unusable and useless.
Jacqueline did a very good work in some of the previous years to integrate images in articles, at least in french. I had this very weird notion that we could use Asaf Glamify Tool to actually build on this and easily identify which images used in one language could actually be integrated in another language. After all, if an image is used on article X in French, it is quite possible it can be used on article X in Spanish.
I spend quite a bit of time on this, testing what could be done. I created this page : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2017/Call_to_action
And then I realized that I was not a machine, and that I would not be able to update all those lists in all those languages all by myself.
So what did I do ? I went to various places to ask for help simply to do some tweaks to Asaf tool and create a bot to automate that. I went to Asaf. I went to various channels and 2-3 people indicated interest and then later said they did not have time. I even tried to negociate some dev time at the WMF (no success). I went to fabricator. I asked on village pumps.

Outcome ? Nothing. In a community of hundred thousands. 6 months later, nothing. So, I did it the wiki way. Since no one seems to care, it is probably not a good idea and not one to pursue.

I am not blaming the african communities about this. They are already quite stretched. Help on the above elements could come from anyone, anywhere. But the result is that I have little reason to think that the above will be fixed, except one (1). And you are right that the current approach of WLA is not helping to close the gap in content.

Now, this being said.... there were two goals to Wiki Loves Africa. The first was collecting content. The second was to foster community emergence and building through a global drive they could join without having to create every single piece. Some communities are now very well developped in Africa (thinking of Nigeria, Ghana etc. ) and they have more than enough human power and funding to create from scratch their own programs. They now have big usergroups and soon chapters I guess, as well as staff. And lots of partners. 
However, WLA has still been a help for emerging communities. The easiest way for those tiny communities to actually join it without huge expense of their time and energy is by joining global programs such as Wiki Loves Africa, 1Lib1Ref, Art and Feminism etc.
For those, it probably make sense to keep a WLA of some sort. Probably a different sort of WLA though. Or maybe it is best to stop.

We actually considered stopping it entirely last year. But various people were still supporting, so we did it again. Also thinking that the issue would be revisited during WikiIndaba 2019. But alas WikiIndaba... :((((

At least, if that can reassure you, I will not organize myself a new Wiki Loves Africa next year. If the other organizers follow the same direction, the contest will die by itself and the case will be closed.

The real question at this point is whether Africa wants to have programmatic activity at the continental level. And if it does... which one. I believe there was a committee in charge of such continental organization. That will be for them to move forward.

Again, sorry I missed your email Ingo.

Florence

(1) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:ISA_Tool

Dear fellow Wikimedians, dear Florence,

as the Wiki loves Africa 2019 competition is coming to its close I would like to bring back the question which I raised already in December 2018:

1. Do others share my impression that images from the competition are hardly ever used in wikipedia articles?

2. Do others have the impression that the present approach for Wiki Loves Africa does not help much to close the knowledge gap about Africa?

When I posted in December some participants here voiced interest but wanted to wait for a feedback fom the organizers. Such a feedback I have not seen. So allow me to repeat some lines from my first post:

I was an early fan of the idea of "Wiki Loves Africa" but I have to confess that my fan status has 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 a winner category but is unusable for any purpose (unless you want to document fake stereoptypes - the motive was fake...)

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 and useless.

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.

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

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