Wikipedia talk:WikiAfrica/birth of a movement

WikiProject Africa
Why don't you join WikiProject Africa instead of starting a new project? That project seems to be fairly inactive and could use some new members to reactivate it. This seems to be duplication of effort. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:06, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi Martin. Thanks for posting your thoughts on the WikiAfrica talk page. I wanted to clarify a few things. WikiAfrica has different goals to the WikiProject Africa, in that our project focuses on getting external Africa-based, cultural organisations, museums and archives, as well as bloggers and journalists, to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia. To do this, we have to make it easier for them to enter the Wikisphere. WikiAfrica has now been active since 2007 and, with our organisation on board, is gaining more momentum. We will obviously work in conjunction with other Africa-based projects inside Wikipedia, but we cannot be that project. Islahaddow (talk) 11:56, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

What is WikiAfrica?
What exactly is this? It is not a WikiProject, but it has a "Project page". It certainly isn't an article. What it appears to be is a promotion of a probably thoroughly admirable project of co-operation between two non-profit organisations, one in South Africa and one in Italy. However admirable and worthwhile the aims of that project, I don't believe WikiPedia is the place to publicise it, as I think is made quite clear at WP:SOAP. I'm happy to be wrong here; what do others think? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:55, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
 * WikiAfrica is a group of editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. Our group focus on a specific topic area (Africa) and a specific kind of task (incrementing the number of African institutions contributing to Wikipedia with images and texts in cc by-sa and incrementing the number of editors interested in Africa, living in Africa and having information/knowledge about Africa). WikiAfrica is not a place to write encyclopedia articles directly, but a resource to help coordinate and organize the writing and editing of those articles. WikiAfrica writes advice for editors, use bots to track what is happening at articles of interest to the group, and create handy lists of tools and templates their members commonly use (which is the templates you were referring to). There is no advocacy, propaganda or recruitment of any kind (commercial, political, religious, sports-related, or otherwise), no opinion pieces, scandal mongering, self-promotion and advertising. lettera27 and the Africa Centre are non profit institutions and they are active in this project because they support access to knowledge, knowledge sharing, education and literacy; the Africa Centre has a specific focus on the pan-African network. WikiAfrica is a wikiproject which contributes to WIkipedia, not to lettera27 nor to the Africa Centre. --Iopensa (talk) 10:00, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

RfC questions

 * Is this a WikiProject or not?
 * Yes. A group of editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia is the definition of a WikiProject.


 * Is a "group of editors that want to work together as a team", but not participate in the existing WikiProject for this topic, in accordance with Wikipedia principles and guidelines?
 * WikiAfrica is linked to all the other relevant WikiProjects. more specifically Africa and GLAM.


 * Is the way in which this team is working in accordance with those guidelines?
 * The Wikipedia principles and guidelines are respected. Over 50 people are checking it constantly since 2006.

I'm not in any way questioning either the value of the contributions or the good faith of the editors, only the methods used. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:01, 25 November 2011 (UTC)
 * It has been answered. --Iopensa (talk) 23:08, 25 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Seems like the effort would be more productive as a part of WikiProject Africa. This looks like a duplication of effort, which may lessen both entities' effectiveness.--Miniapolis (talk) 00:24, 26 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I think that the discussion is simply underestimating the importance of GLAM within WikiAfrica, as a result of a limited knowledge of the project itself and of its history. WikiAfrica is in fact a primary promoter, incubator and "collector" of GLAM projects, also before GLAM officially started. WikiAfrica has created - in many years of good work - a network of many cultural nonprofit Institutions, bigger and smaller. Every institution - being stimulated directly by WikiAfrica and its initiatives - is enriching Wikipedia with many contents, in many languages, in many ways. So WikiAfrica - as said - is a GLAM project, non only a wikiproject about Africa. But it's also a project running in "real (or physical) life" outside Wikipedia, with meetings and initiatives between members of Institutions and wikipedians and scholars and members of Wikimedia Chapters. So it's very hard to say "it's a duplicate of wikiproject Africa", because it's not, simply. So it has at least 3 main aspects: 1) GLAM 2) African topics 3) Wikimedia "Outreach". Maybe in the future we will have more pages on these 3 aspects, splitted on different Wikimedia sites and projects, but it's important to respect its unicity and its peculiar characteristics. So it may be not simply "merged" to other general wikiprojects - if we want it continue to work and make results. --Marcok (talk) 13:27, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Indigenous Languages
Good day, I'd like to invite anybody interested to Wikimedia Indigenous Languages (WIL), an international body for the coordination and cooperation of projects to develop Wikimedia projects in small and under-represented languages, which directly concern a lot of languages in Africa. WIL's role is to be a platform to share best practices and lessons learned as well as discussing challenges around the World in developing small languages Wikimedia projects, primarly Wikipedia, and offering support to people working towards this goal. If you are interested, please join us on the Meta page (simply search WIL on Meta), you can also use languages mailing list to share your suggestions and ideas with others participants of Wikimedia Indigenous Languages. Thanks, Amqui (talk) 05:07, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Mention of WikiAfrica
Here. --Elitre (talk) 11:31, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedians in Residence wanted in Cameroon and South Africa
WikiAfrica is seeking Wikipedians in Residence! One to work in Cameroon and one in South Africa. Please visit their blog to learn more. SarahStierch (talk) 18:48, 9 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I just shared the news in the Afrophone Wikis mailing list, here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/afrophonewikis/message/669 --Waldir talk 17:25, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Xhosa Wikipedia proposed for closure
See the notice on xh.wikipedia.org. πr2 (t • c) 23:58, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Nomination of Hassane Amraoui for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Hassane Amraoui is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Hassane Amraoui until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. EuroCarGT 04:05, 13 August 2013 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Calise (talk • contribs)

Grading articles that relate to the Arts of Africa
Hello! Over the past several months, I've created and edited about 40 articles that relate to the Arts of Africa. I have added them to WikiProject Africa and any other relevant WikiProjects. However, most of the new articles have not received a grade and the edited articles still retain their Stub-status, even though I believe my edits have advanced them to at least Start quality. I know that I can change the grades myself, but ideally another expert on African art and culture would review the articles objectively and with fresh eyes. Is there any way for me to mark these articles for review, or should I go ahead and change the grade myself? Many thanks in advance for your help! Alexandrathom (talk) 14:12, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Copyrights of images from Dualarts website
Over a half of images downloaded from Doualart website and uploaded to commons were not uploaded by the photographers and are not associated with valid OTRS tickets. We do not want to lose those images, but in the present form they do not current requirements. Please help resolve this issue. See Commons:Commons:OTRS/Noticeboard for current discussion on the subject. --Jarekt (talk) 17:53, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * thanks for the message. Doual'art images are not downloaded from their website, they come from doual'art archive. The permission provided by doual'art art is on their images (staff and images they have authorizations for), not only the images on their website. I furthermore commented on the discussion on commons. Thanks. --Iopensa (talk) 20:15, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * You are right. I reread OTRS messages and there seem to be several tickets merged into one. One tickets says that it is for text and does not cover images which are not released under CC, while the other ticket claims images are under CC. Quite confusing, but valid. I will try to clean up on commons in such a way as not to confuse the next admin that looks at this. Sorry for the false alarm. --Jarekt (talk) 13:17, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
 * thank you for the work and do not hesitate to let me know if I can be of any help. --Iopensa (talk) 16:01, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Invitation to User Study
Would you be interested in participating in a user study? We are a team at University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within a Wikipedia community. We are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visualization tool. All you need to do is to prepare for your laptop/desktop, web camera, and speaker for video communication with Google Hangout. We will provide you with a Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 17:21, 7 February 2014 (UTC).

WikiProject South Africa/Wikipedia Primary School is up and running!
Hi all, just in case you had missed the announcements elsewhere, this research project focuses on the South Africa primary school curriculum: the involved teams have selected a list of 100+ relevant articles which will undergo review (or creation) by Wikipedians, scholars/experts, or journals. We thought that involving the Wikipedia community was the obvious first step in the process, which is going to last for the next couple of years, so please take a look now at the project page to learn how to support the project. The next deadline for article review is March 15! Thanks a lot for what you will do. --Elitre (WPS) (talk) 09:50, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Updates to this page
User:Anthere tells me she can update this page soon with current information, as activities are still ongoing. --Elitre (talk) 16:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Will do that asap. Anthere (talk)
 * Ok. I had a good look. Lot's outdated here. It needs a very big clean-up. I need to check with a few people how we are going to orient that. Anthere (talk) 00:44, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Stubs/Abel Tilahun and many others
Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Stubs/Abel Tilahun, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Stubs/Abel Tilahun. Also see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Stubs/Aaron Banda.

Please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Stubs/Abel Tilahun and the other pages nominated during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the pages; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. — Gorthian (talk) 01:44, 19 June 2016 (UTC)