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

Yes. I also do share your impressions.

> 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?

Again, yes, I also do have the same impressions. Only difference might be that, to me, I see the current approach of Wiki Loves Africa, probably a symptom of a bigger, likely flawed approach (not entirely flawed) of competitions and projects of the like across africa.

> 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.

I was too. In fact, I was a part of the early days team that helped with the Wiki Loves Africa, and I cannot say I'm excited today about WLA, as I was in the beginning.

A team from the WMF are here in Ghana on a research, and I remember mentioning about Wiki Loves Africa with regards to the impact (in terms of actual usefulness of content generated via such competitions) in relation to its cost (cost across board i.e volunteer time in relation to community building, jury, reporting etc and also cost of funding)

Organizing such events involves a ton of work, funding, volunteers, and effort. Thus, at the end, I believe the impact (again, in terms of actual usefulness of content generated via such competitions) should be worth more than the work involved (depending on who or what metrics used, WLA may be terrifically successful, so...). I can't say that's the case in the recent competitions, imho.

Inko, I think there's a broader (way broader than WLA) conversation that needs to happen about events/competitions geared toward community building and engagement etc happening here in Africa and the true, real, sustainable impactful way forward. A healthy mix of community building and content generation is highly important.

It appears community building now has a bigger share, with relatively less emphasis on content contribution sustainability, quality, usefulness and integration into relevant, related articles on Wikipedia or other WMF project websites.

Sadly, I remember noticing number of tweets and or likes on FB were part of success metrics for a previous Wiki Loves Africa (i.e social media engagement) report.

Again, I see your (and mine too) impressions of the WLA at the moment warrants a discussion of a symptom of a broader misdirection of approach.

> 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?

I agree. I also wouldn't want to denigrate. I personally hope the drawing board could be revisited related to WLA. I had high hopes. I truly did. Can't say I do anymore.

I believe there can be better alternatives, or WLA could be restructured to bring to fore all the goodness of events of the kind - building community and contributing useful content, at a relatively lower cost, with precision targets of sustainable content generation.

ps: I've taken a great deal of time to go through end-of-event reports of WLA on their grant pages for the 3 recently completed ones.

cheers,

rexford

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 5:10 PM Ingo Koll <ikoll@gmx.de> wrote:

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

_______________________________________________
African-Wikimedians mailing list
African-Wikimedians@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/african-wikimedians