This is so close to being a good thing and then it stumbles on the cultural
imperialism of English. It's like they don't understand how this is a slap
in the face of many who know the WMF would never do this in their language.
Had it just left out that part it would have been great. Now it's like it
goes against the entire point of a global movement because those who don't
speak English will always be second class members.
John S.
Den tors 4 maj 2023 kl 13:11 skrev Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com>om>:
Dear all,
Yesterday's WMF press release
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/05/03/wikimedia-foundation-launches-open-the-knowledge-journalism-awards/>
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
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