Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Africa Centre

This page presents a summary of the collaboration between Wikipedia in English and the Africa Centre. The Africa Centre contributes to the project WikiAfrica and it's a GLAM. Since January 2011 the Africa Centre promotes WikiAfrica along with lettera27 Foundation and it contributes to it by involving a number of African institutions and producing contents.

The non-profit organization Africa Centre runs a cultural center and archives in Cape Town, with documentation on contemporary African and pan-African production: contemporary art, literature, poetry, urban studies, radio station, music, performances. Ntone Edjabe, Olu Oguibe and Edgar Pieterse are among its founders.

History of collaboration
Africa Centre contributes to Wikipedia in 2011 and is the main partner of the WikiAfrica project. It has made available the contents of its site under a CC BY-SA license, it contributes to the production of articles and to the relations with African institutions to facilitate their participation in the Share Your Knowledge subproject and GLAMs projects and it also follows the updating of the WikiAfrica project pages in the English version of Wikipedia. The cultural center has spent a lot of energy to participate and promote the project in the African continent and, thanks to its experience and its motivation to africanize the free encyclopedia and the sister websites, it is definitely the right partner for WikiAfrica. Isla Haddow-Flood, who is Marketing and Communications Manager, has no doubts: <>.

Uploading contents on Wikimedia Foundation wikis
"Those who don't know about Africa first-hand, write almost all the articles on Africa and its subjects; and those who do know about and are experiencing contemporary Africa, are not the ones writing about it."

- Isla Haddow-Flood

The center has coordinated the development of the project pages for WikiAfrica, and is helping with sandboxed drafts and more complete entries for real articles. Isla is leading these operations, with the recognizable user name Islahaddow. Among the other users there are: Riannedac ​​and Megzmurphy have also transferred to Wikimedia Commons numerous images donated by the Centre, especially using the tool called "Commonist", which is useful for mass uploading.
 * Riannedac
 * Roanhorse1963
 * Dlungwana
 * Dbiyounganitafrika
 * Stephenwanjau
 * Zari Naima
 * Awinda
 * Megzmurphy
 * Samal2010

Content analysis
As it was previously said, while the texts produced by the Africa Centre can be found on the English-speaking Wikipedia, the pictures are available on Commons. Some of the entries are about projects and activities of the center, which are also mentioned in the Italian article: Among other contributions on pages improved or created from scratch there are general articles such as South African poetry and List of African poets, the profile of the writer and anthropologist Henrique Abranches, as well as those of many artists attending the cultural center of Cape Town. The photographic documentation of their vital activities has just entered Wikimedia Commons, in particular about the Infecting the City festival, the Talking Heads conversations and the Pan African Space Station event (some examples below). Well over half of these files (55.5%) is already used in a few pages, totaling over 68,000 visits between January and July 2012.
 * Badilisha Poetry X-Change (and Badilisha Poetry Radio)
 * Infecting the City
 * Talking Heads
 * WikiAfrica
 * Space for Pan African Research Creation and Knowledge, stub

The Incubator
Africa Centre has also launched and developed theWikiAfrica Incubator, a breeding ground of entries, clearly about "African" topics, which with some help from the community may be ready for proper publication. To ensure this works, a step by step guide eas created with lots of screenshots, a page that summarizes the main rules, a place to ask for help, another to leave requests for desired articles and then one in which to exchange ideas and suggestions on how to improve those already included. Since the texts are "incubating", a discussion with savvy users about style, tone and contents before the page is actually ready for publication is required. For example, the entry about the International Council of African Museums is probably encyclopedic; a couple of users have already reviewed it and left their advice on how to improve it on its talk page. All you have to do is following their useful suggestions and then moving the page to the correct namespace to get another entry on Wikipedia, yet another one thanks to Africa Centre.

Articles in English

 * Category grouping Africa Centre articles, Incubator stubs and other WikiAfrica pages, 165 pages
 * Incubator articles only, 79 pages

Other projects

 * Images donated by AC, 135 items

Main activities

 * it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Maratona 2011 – a marathon to create and widen the entries about Africa that took place (on Wikipedia in Italian) between the 2nd and the 14th June 2011

In the press

 * Isla Haddow-Flood interview with ReConnect Africa

Versions in other languages

 * it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Istituzioni/Africa Centre

Related pages

 * WikiAfrica
 * WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge
 * WikiAfrica pages on en.wiki, stats
 * Incubator's stubs, stats

Links

 * Africa Centre joins WikiAfrica

it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Africa Centre