Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Africultures and AfricaFilms.tv

Among the various subprojects of WikiAfrica, one of them was specifically tailored to improve the coverage of the cinematographic industry in the continent. After telling about the experiences of the Festivals in Milan, Verona and Tarifa/Cordoba, it's time to unveil the contributions of Africultures and AfricaFilms.tv.

The institutions
Africultures is a French magazine with offices in Les Pilles and Paris dedicated to African cultures; founded in 1997, it is directed by an association bearing the same name, and it is published by L'Harmattan. Each number (released every 3 or 4 months) consists of about 250 pages, it offers critical reviews and a focus on a recent topic of literature, cinema, theater, music, dance, art or photography and is fully available on the official website.

AfricaFilms.tv is a video on demand site, offering content about Africa and the African diaspora and allowing to download legally affordable films, documentaries, animation and sitcoms from all over the world. Its goal is the dissemination of African audiovisual content and the creation of income for producers, directors and those working in television and film productions in the continent.

History of the collaboration
Both sites put the BY-SA license at the bottom of some pages on their websites and the license was chosen so that dozens of articles about films, movie personalities and artists could make it to the French Wikipedia; texts were imported mainly by the WikiAfrica project tutor Michele Casanova since May 2012, or used to improve the existing entries. Michele's work has been on several occasions assisted by the French user fr:Utilisateur:Ji-Elle, which had already collaborated with the project on Wikimedia Commons. Since Africultures is also a partner of the AfricaFilms.tv project, here their contributions will be evaluated separately.

Content analysis
Among Africultures articles are fr:Le Sixième Doigt, fr:Caramel (film, 2005), fr:Le Jardin secret des Bushmen (which the community improved greatly), fr:Une mort de style colonial (Patrice Lumumba), fr:Vol de nuit vers la mort : la fin violente de Dag Hammarskjøld. The importance of other films is underlined by their presence in several languages, such as fr:Abusuan, fr:Rue Princesse (film) and fr:L'Herbe sauvage (in Italian) as well as the profiles of artists from Cameroon fr:Joseph-Francis Sumégné and fr:Hervé Yamguen. The latter also has an article on en.wiki, just like the Ivorian filmmaker fr:Henri Duparc (réalisateur) and his movie fr:Bal Poussière. The 38 items which were examined received over seventeen thousand visits between May and December 2012.

Among AfricaFilms' pages instead fr:Les Grandes Illusions, fr:The Battle for Johannesburg, fr:Sida Lakari and fr:M'pangiami are noticeable, but overall fr:Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961, the award-winning story in pictures of a painful episode in French history which saw the bloody repression of a protest by Algerian people in Paris in 1961. However, probably the best-known titles are the South African fr:Bunny Chow and the Belgian/Congolese fr:Kafka au Congo, which have corresponding entries on the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Wikipedia. The 43 entries in the category got over fifteen thousand visits between May and December 2012.

Articles on the French Wikipedia

 * fr:Catégorie:WikiAfrica/Africultures, 43 articles in all
 * fr:Catégorie:WikiAfrica/Africafilms, 79 articles in all

Italian version

 * it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Istituzioni/Africultures e AfricaFilms.tv

Related pages

 * Africultures
 * Africafilms.tv
 * WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge
 * Cordoba festival case study
 * Milan festival case study
 * Verona festival case study

Links

 * Africultures official site
 * AfricaFilms official site