2012/2/10 <francisa@africacentre.net>

Dear Wiki colleagues,

I am excited to invite all members of the South African chapter of Wikimedia to participate in the Wiki Africa project that will expand and increase the contents of Africa information in Wikipedia. Through this invitation we hope to build a strong partnership in promoting African content in Wikipedia.

WikiAfrica is an international collaborative project between Africa Centre and Lettera27 that is designed to Africanize 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. The initial two years are focused on encouraging external Africa-based, cultural organizations, museums and archives, as well as bloggers and journalists, to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia.

These initial two years focus on content related to literature, poetry, art, cinema and other cultural products. WikiAfrica will not exclude anything that falls outside of these categories, but focuses most of its energy in these areas. At the same time, the WikiAfrica project expands the African content that is already available online and improves existing articles by combining sources and promoting the participation of experts. WikiAfrica contributes to the aims of Wikimedia projects online (especially the WikiProject Africa, WikiProject African diaspora and the Africa Portal) and also works externally with texts, quotes, images, audio and video.

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

-Create partnerships with organisations that have existing archives that are readily accessible and that are predisposed to placing this content online;
-Motivate the adaptation of a copyleft or Creative Commons approach to intellectual property.
-Activate new Wikipedia users and editors in Africa through marketing and promotion; and
-Create training tools and establish the mentorships required to activate a new team of users and editors of Wikipedia (wikipedians).

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 Wiki Africa and become a member of Wiki Africa!

Please visit our incubator at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Incubator for a step by step guide on how to start your articles for new authors.

We look forward to working with Wikimedia South Africa in knowledge exchange, participation and contribution to this project.

For any questions don't hesitate to contact me.

Thank you

Francis Awinda
Administrator and content manager Wiki Africa
Email:francisa@africacentre.net
Tel:+27793087519

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