Dear Andreas,
I support your message, but I wanted to add that 100 million Africans speak Arabic. And
yes, English is widely known but, even in countries with large populations (Nigeria) less
than 1/5 of the population have it as first language
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_populat…). This is
not the first time these kind of awards are proposed by the WMF acknowledging only English
language and, thus, excluding the majority of the world from it.
I would ask the Foundation to reconsider this kind of decisions that go against our
diversity goal.
Sincerely,
Galder
________________________________
From: Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 4, 2023 1:10 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation launches Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards
on World Press Freedom Day
Dear all,
Yesterday's WMF press
release<https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/05/03/wikimedia-founda…
announced an African journalism award:
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