Bon dia / Hi,
Thank you for pointing this out, Andreas. This is exactly why there are more and more
voices against the mindset of the Wikimedia Foundation and its aims to expand its coverage
beyond what should be the technical maintenance and the legal boundaries of the Wikimedia
projects.
It's in these blatant things where it becomes obvious that, instead of providing more
freedom of action to local chapters and volunteers, the alleged inclusion and diversity
discourse of the WMF becomes too close to the white savior syndrome. "We are giving a
local prize but, please, only in the language we can manage from our headquarters in the
US".
Someone should also give serious explanation of why the Wikipedia logo is included in the
press release as if it was a partnership. Does this award have some kind of approval of
the Wikipedia communities? Has there been a request for comment so that
"Wikipedia" as a project supports this award only for articles in English?
Salutacions/Kind regards,
Xavier Dengra
------- Original Message -------
El dijous, 4 de maig 2023 a les 13:10, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> va
escriure:
Dear all,
Yesterday's [WMF press
release](https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/05/03/wikimedia-foundati…
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