The AfroCreatives WikiProject has just been launched by The Africa Narrative (TAN), a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting African creatives, with funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization that also supports Wikipedia and other open-access knowledge initiatives.
The AfroCreatives WikiProject is the first of several projects and initiatives that TAN will be making public in the upcoming months.
The Africa Narrative, which was originally founded as a research-driven project with the goal of increasing public awareness of Africa, is relaunching as a non-profit with a mission centred on enhancing African creative economy capacity and increasing the global visibility of African cultural soft power.
TAN will have its headquarters in Johannesburg and be run and operated solely by Africans living on the continent.
It has been registered as a tax-exempt non-profit in both the United States and South Africa.
Michelle van Gilder, the founder and interim executive director of TAN, stated that “creatives are increasingly on the front lines of shaping the continent’s image on the global stage as well as drivers of the increasingly important African creative sector, one that is nonetheless greatly underfunded, underdeveloped, and capturing less than 3 percent of the global creative economy.”
To promote African creatives and increase the global visibility of Africa’s extraordinary creative brilliance, TAN has created a dozen programs, including the AfroCreatives WikiProject.
The AfroCreatives Wikiproject was created to encourage and support members of the African creative and cultural sectors as well as African culture aficionados to contribute to and improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the continent’s creative sector.
The film industries of Egypt, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Senegal are the focus of its first initiative, which was launched this month.
AfroCreatives WikiProject +film, a three-week initiative that TAN will commence on July 16 in each of these nations, will encourage both new and seasoned Wikipedia editors to encourage the addition of film-related content to Wikipedia.
For individuals who are new to editing Wikipedia, TAN will offer four online training courses in French, Arabic, and English on the same day.
The training workshops will give attendees the simple and necessary editing skills they need to start making contributions to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a vital worldwide resource and one of the most popular websites in the world, yet just 15% of edits are done from within the African continent, making it an ideal platform for TAN to focus on.
“We are deeply appreciative for the Wikimedia Foundation’s support in helping to spearhead this effort and are extremely bullish on what will be a long-term commitment from TAN to engage creatives and cultural enthusiasts to make a notable impact on growing African-generated content on Wikipedia,” van Gilder said.
The AfroCreatives WikiProject is supported by the Foundation, which also has a Wikimedian in Residence.
For the past six years, Daniel Damoilola Obiokeke has contributed to English and Simple Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata.
He has initiated more than 200 articles on the English Wikipedia and organized a number of Wikimedia campaigns, competitions, and edit-a-thons in Nigeria.
“The Wikimedia Foundation has a larger commitment to making Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects a real reflection of the world’s knowledge, which is shown in our relationship with TAN.
According to Rudolph Ampofo, Senior Regional Partnerships Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation, “With only 1.5 percent of Wikipedia editors coming from the African continent, this partnership presents a necessary opportunity to not only add missing content about African creatives, but also to increase the number of Africans contributing knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.
“Despite having a sizable revenue and production output, Africa’s entertainment and creative industry receives little attention to the largest encyclopedia in the world.
This project is crucial to collaborate on and accomplish more in order to ensure that more African creatives get associated with Wikimedia projects and bridge the systemic prejudice and gap that exist, as the Afrocine Project has already done with its previous effort to bridge this gap.