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context and reinforces outdated stereotypes.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 â 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