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_population). 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@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 4, 2023 1:10 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@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 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