Dear Wikipedian,

As you know, with nearly one-billion people, Africa represents the world's third-largest market after China (1.3-billion) and India (1.1-billion), and is widely recognized as the last frontier for global economic growth. It is also where humanity began. And yet it has the lowest and least informed profile of any region on the Internet. What does appear is often not complete, selective, lacks context and reinforces outdated stereotypes.

Africa deserves a new deal – and especially in Wikipedia.

The Africa Centre in collaboration with Lettera27 would like you to participate in a ground-breaking project that is designed to Africanise Wikipedia by generating and expanding 30,000 articles over two years. The project promotes a new method of acquiring and sharing knowledge that is fully-inclusive, mainstream, intercultural and relevant to contemporary and historic Africa. This initial phase of the project is focused on encouraging external Africa-based, cultural organisations, museums and archives, as well as bloggers and journalists, to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia.

The project will be approached and achieve its goals via the following four activities:

• Create partnerships with organisations that have existing digitised content that is readily accessible; • Motivate the adaptation of a copyleft or Creative Commons approach to intellectual property. • Activate new Wikipedia users and editors in Africa; and • Create training tools and assist with the mentorships required to activate a new team of users and editors of Wikipedia. See more on this at the Africa Incubator [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Incubator]

Click on Get started [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Get_started] or the Project page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Projects] to contribute to WikiAfrica and become a member!

Through WikiAfrica we aim to increase the content of Africa articles by engaging content partners and individual Wikipedians in the project as a way of improving participation to Wikipedia from the African continent.

Thank you

Francis Awinda Wikipedian in Residence (user: Awinda) Skype: Awinda Twitter:AwindaF Email:francisa@africacentre.net Tel:+27793087519 www.africacentre.net