Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Cinema in Milan

History of collaboration
The collaboration between the Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Cinema in Milan and Wikipedia began in 2010 with the festival supporting the WikiAfrica project and in particular the WikiAfrica/Cinema subproject.

In 2010 the COE (COE - Centro Orientamento Educativo which organizes the event) signed an agreement with the lettera27 Foundation to release its historical multimedia festival's archive and the material for new entries under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. The twenty-year-old history of the festival allows to document a large portion of African film production through its archive, but much of the documentation of the festival is not yet available online; for the latest editions, digital contents are available whilst for the first ones only printed catalogs can be used. Simona Cella, who works for the Festival and is an expert on African cinema, is in charge of the initiative and starts a long process of digitization of catalogs, proceeding to make scans of movie data sheets and biographies of the directors which were featured in the catalogs of the first two editions of the Festival. In 2010 and 2011 the WikiAfrica Cinema project was presented during the Festival and the public was invited to contribute, and in these occasions some interviews with African filmmakers attending the festival are recorded.

In order to produce Wikipedia articles about cinema, a research is made for more primary sources in addition to the festival ones and an image search in the archives of Coe (posters, portraits of directors, set photos). In particular there is a need for legal advice on the images and posters, to clarify when rights are held by the festival and when they are not.

In 2011 the festival joins the "Share Your Knowledge" project (hereinafter referred to as SYK). Simona Cella and Simona Barranca participate in training sessions. Cella asserts that the reason lies in the <>. The festival announced its public commitment to the project through its website and its Facebook page. During an editathon in June 2011 32 new entries on African cinema are created from the documentation of the festival. The festival asks Centro Studi Archeologia Africana and Africa e Mediterraneo to release the documentation of the exhibitions Mami Wata sirena del vodu and Africa Comics-South Africa (exposed at the Festival Center in 2011) under a Creative Commons license, and both institutions provide the authorization.

In February the logo of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) and the notice "The historical media archive on this site is covered by the free license Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike CC-BY-SA. The CC refers only to the textual component and is limited to the contents produced by the Festival and COE" are placed on the homepage of the site http://www.festivalcinemaafricano.org. The license is being questioned on Wikipedia because it can only be found on the homepage and it does not contain metadata; it is required that the festival files an OTRS ticket and the clarity of the license is the subject of a discussion on Wikipedia. In June 2011 the footer of the entire site displays the above mentioned notice.

In May 2012, in addition to the entry about the Festival on it.wiki, presenting its history and structure,those relating to the last 3 editions were created, containing lists of films in competition and winners.

What is so special about this collaboration?
The Festival with more than 20 editions offers a selection of auteur/art films and directors of encyclopedic value.

Content analysis
In order to enhance the festival, an important direction of work is to create entries on Wikipedia that analyze themes, genres and trends, like cinema senegalese, commedia africana, produzione cinematografica indipendente afroamericana, Africa Musicals, Africa Cartoons (Italian titles). According to Simona Cella new partnerships might be established within the project (the Festival and Fondazione ISMU are already partners). She also states that the parameters needed to fully assess the impact of Share Your Knowledge are: She also reminds the utility of:
 * Actual increase in traffic on the festival website
 * Increase in real interaction between the public and festival
 * Increase of information about COE's archive
 * Enlargement of the network of contacts and collaborators
 * Increase of the sale of products by Coe (Festival catalogs, DVDs, books, collections of posters).
 * Increasing moments of debate with the other organizations involved in the project
 * The availability of an intern for creating entries on Wikipedia, and for further discussion of the Wikipedia-world
 * The availability of a tutor that can guide the choice of materials to be covered by the Creative Commons license.

In detail, thanks to the collaboration some important biographies of directors were published, such as Andrea Segre (his movie "Io sono Li" was nominated for the David di Donatello and won seven other international awards including Venice and London); the brothers Daniel and Diego Vega (won awards at Cannes in 2010 for "Octubre"); the French-Senegalese Alain Gomis who won multiple awards, some of which in Locarno. Among the movies we can find winning works in the latest editions of the festival, including "State of Violence" and "The Neighbor" or "Aujourd'hui" (nominated in Berlin) and "Mort à vendre" (presented in Berlin as well, where it won the CICAE Award, and also in Toronto). The latter also has a version on the English Wikipedia (en:Death for Sale); COE published some pages here as well such as the one about the Italian documentary Aicha è tornata. From January to the end of May 2012, the 150 pages that include contents from the festival received about  forty thousand visits, with an average of nearly 8000 hits per month ( warning, unofficial and provisional data. ).

But what is most striking in the case of this Festival is the way in which they managed to "team up" and entice more people to publish contents on the encyclopedia. In addition to Ramatou who is part of Coe, and the people who work for the SYK project like user:Crepi, other people who had previously written little or nothing were involved, like the cinema students involved with the 2012 edit-a-thon, or historical users of the project, intrigued by the initiative (as Esculapio, an Italian sysop who created some entries in 2011).

There are some interesting contributions by User:Valis91, who declared "I sincerely thought it was easier to write on a Wiki, especially sources and links are tricky but hey, after a while you get used to it!" after updating the article of a movie he had seen at the Festival; and others by User:LucaChp who edited also after the edit-a-thon, saying "[...] I improved Paul Thomas Anderson's page, because I like to help Wikipedia." The results of the marathon (held in conjunction with the Festival; 21 entries created, two existing ones improved, 13 editors, of which at least 8 new ones who created an account for the occasion) were then presented at the event ''Ho letto su Wikipedia che è un gran bel film: andiamo a vederlo. Scrivere di cinema su Wikipedia'' held March 25, 2012 at the Casa del Pane in Milan. During the meeting, attended by Filippo Mazzarella, film critic and editor of Il Mereghetti, Iolanda Pensa, scientific director of WikiAfrica and Share Your Knowledge, and Marco Chemello, sysop of the Italian edition of Wikipedia and SYK tutor, two "short films" about SYK were presented and an introduction was given on how to use Wikipedia for the distribution of contents related to the world of cinema. In the slideshow Chemello effectively clarifies the concepts of notability, sources and importance of copyright and illustrates the BY-SA license.

There are still many contents to upload; the "interwiki" needs to be verified and/or added, and it might get tricky - for a movie, for example, sometimes we tend to use the original title, sometimes the translated one; the whole English version of the Festival's website has not been fully exploited. But given the ability to motivate and engage users shown so far by the Festival and Coe, this is certainly a challenge that can be accepted.

Staff and involved collaborators

 * Simona Cella, titolare della borsa di studio e responsabile Festival Center
 * Alessandro Balestra, gestione e aggiornamento sito festival
 * Alessandra Speciale e Annamaria Gallone, direttrici festival
 * Gabriella Rigamonti, responsabile archivio Coe
 * Maria Pia Bramanti, responsabile archivio immagini e sito web
 * Simona Barranca, Servizio Civile
 * Laura Notaro, responsabile traduzioni
 * Emanuela Pursumal, responsabile servizio scuole
 * Prasanth Cattaneo, responsabile comunicazione
 * Michela Facchinetti, responsabile Spazio Università
 * Partner Africa e Mediterraneo
 * Partner Centro Studi Archeologia Africana

Main activities

 * it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/2011 edit-a-thon about Africa.
 * it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/2012 edit-a-thon about African cinema.

Articles on it.wiki

 * it:categoria:WikiAfrica/Festival di Milano, 156 articles

Articles on en.wiki

 * en:Category:WikiAfrica/African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival, 8 articles.

In the press

 * Scrivere di cinema su Wikipedia (Fondazione lettera27)
 * Cinemafrica joins WikiAfrica and Share Your Knowledge
 * "Scrivere di cinema su Wikipedia" slideshow
 * The Festival in the international GLAM - Outreach newsletter

Related articles

 * it:Festival del cinema africano, d'Asia e America Latina di Milano
 * it:Festival del cinema africano, d'Asia e America Latina di Milano 2012
 * it:Festival del cinema africano, d'Asia e America Latina di Milano 2011
 * it:Festival del cinema africano, d'Asia e America Latina di Milano 2010

Italian version
it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Istituzioni/Festival del cinema africano, d'Asia e America Latina di Milano

Links

 * Website of the Festival
 * Share Your Knowledge on Lettera27's website