By Hannah Dadzie
Open Foundation West Africa, an educational NGO, has advocated for the need to promote African content online for the global community.
Speaking to GBCNEWS as part of the commemoration of African Union Day, the Communication Officer of the Foundation, Eugene Masiku said Africa is a continent filled with incredible people, fascinating culture, and captivating stories that ought to be documented on the internet, especially Wikipedia for the future generation.
He lamented that only about five percent of the content on English Wikipedia is about Africa currently, the reason why Open Foundation West Africa seeks to bridge the content gap on the web, by organizing a content drive campaign, a writing contest called Africa Wiki Challenge specifically to achieve this goal.
“What we try to do is to encourage people to contribute on Wikipedia and try and bridge the gap on Wikipedia because we have noticed that the content on Wikipedia about Africa is less as compared to other continents. So we have been doing this particular campaign for about two years now and fortunately this year, the African Union reached out to us, saying they wanted to collaborate with us and that is what we are doing because they realized that we are trying to promote African contents on Wikipedia,” Mr Masiku stated.
Mr. Masiku said the Africa Wiki Challenge, now called the African Day Campaign has over the past two years collated over four thousand articles about Africa, contributed by participants all over the world, including countries like Ghana, Nigeria, U.K, Canada, Russia, Rwanda, USA among others.
“Initially, the name of the campaign was African wiki challenge but because of the partnership AU has with us, we were encouraged to rename it the Africa Day Campaign with regards to the AU Day. This year, the AU Day theme is called the Africa Free Continental Trade. We are encouraging people to write content on Wikipedia in line with the AU theme. We are entreating people to write about businesses in Africa, jobs in Africa, employment opportunities in Africa, and trade activities in Africa, with regards to the Africa Day campaign. But generally, as an organization, we are encouraging people to write about anything at all.” He noted
The campaign has been recognized by the African Union and the Africa Knowledge Initiative as a great way of projecting the continent on the web.
In line with the African Union Day theme that seeks to document Africa’s stories to increase the visibility of stories around Africa’s free trade, the African Knowledge Initiative seeks to leverage Wikimedia tools and platforms to breed innovative solutions to bridging the content gap on global digital knowledge networks.
This initiative will be implemented through Open Foundation West Africa’s annual writing contest themed ’The African Continental Free Trade’.
On Thursday, May 18, 2023. The Africa Day Campaign was officially launched globally and it hosted over 50 people from various countries across the world.
The launch was graced by speakers from the Africa Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, Peter Sewornoo, the Senior Advisor to the Secretary-General and Ceslause Ogbonnaya, the Wikimedian-In-Residence for the Africa Knowledge Initiative project.
Mr. Masiku called for a collaborative effort to create and improve content about Africa in relation to the campaign theme on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms.
“I know a lot of people don’t know that they can even contribute on Wikipedia so there might be opportunities that are unheard of. You might never know what might suit somebody’s needs so this is the reason why we are even encouraging people to contribute on Wikipedia because information is key and if we don’t document it in a book, we can document it online.” He added
According to Mr. Masiku, there are two ways to participate in this contest, that is either applying as a participant or as an organizer. He asked individuals who want to contest to register and also sign up by signing on to the Africa Day Writing Contest Campaign Dashboard. They are also to visit the campaign meta page and learn more about how to participate in the contest. The writing contest which started from May 20, ends on June 20, 2023.
