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