Dear all,
Africawide – The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, is today launching the inaugural Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards. Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day, this year’s awards celebrate the contributions of journalists in Africa who prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion in their reporting.
This sounds great, until we come to the following line:
Articles must have been published online and in English between January 1, 2022 and June 23, 2023.
How is this compatible with the idea that we "prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion"? The piece starts with the word "Africawide" ... surely we are aware that about half of Africa is French-speaking?
I can understand that you might want to incentivise journalism in European rather than African languages – simply because such journalism would be more likely to find a volunteer with the time to add the information to Wikipedia, and because of a lack of staff with the language skills required to cover dozens of African languages.
But French, Portuguese and Spanish should be within the WMF's capabilities, all the more so as machine translation these days is good enough to tell even a non-French speaker whether a French article covers an interesting subject.
I hope that next year, journalists writing in other languages will not be completely excluded from consideration for this award. Relying on English will only strengthen some of the existing biases in coverage.
Andreas