Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Enriching Africa’s Material Historiography on Wikipedia (ID: 23751492)
Applicant details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Koredeswikis
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main proposal
[edit]- 1. State the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Enriching Africa’s Material Historiography on Wikipedia
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2026-04-15 - 2026-09-13
- 4. What is your tech project about, and how do you plan to build the product?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Project goal and problem you solve
- Product strategy or project roadmap
- Technical approach (infrastructure, tech stack, key tools and services)
- Integrations or dependencies (if any)
Project goal
The project’s goal is to increase the depth of popular African history discourse. Articles that are both deep and broad on topics in African history, including the various cultures, languages, groups, are notoriously lacking. Much discourse on social media can be inaccurate or sensational, often reflecting a lack of basic research such as a Wikipedia search.
There are gaps to be filled in foundational research and archeology, but still much low-hanging fruit to be bridged in online primary sources. Our project will bridge the work of archeologists and researchers in more publically accessible sources like Wikipedia. Reliable and accessible sources for African history are crucial in engendering a better culture of public discourse, as well as in improving the collective self image.
Specifically, we’ll focus on visual references for diverse cultures, via African artifacts in museum’s digital collections; as well as textual references from foundational cosmographic texts that detail African worldviews.
Product Strategy
Our approach to solving this problem is to expand the reference information in Wikipedia pages for specific African cultures. The specific approach is in two phases, distinctly for visual and textual references:
- On the visual front, utilizing online Museum archives of images of artifacts from across the continent, to show the craft and techniques that make up the material heritage of these cultures; and
- On the textual front, in leveraging specific texts from researchers on the “cosmology” of various cultures — encapsulations of their scientific, metaphysical, philosophical and sociological understandings — from established and grounded scholars, for example Fu Kiah who wrote on the Bantu Kongo cosmology.
The effort will focus on the 1st phase, given the availability of curated references from museums, which are licensed for educational purposes. The 2nd phase will be approached provisionally – oriented around the symbolic forms recognized in the artifacts, and how they reflect cosmological understandings in related textual references. Through this all, we’ll describe and publicly document the decisions, sources gleaned for information, and hermeneutics for examining the research.
Technical Approach
Focused on the 1st phase of the project, the technical approach, can be summarized as follows:
- Identify and build a centralized index collections of African artifacts in global museums
- Using NodeJS and React to build an API and interface (hosted on Netlify) for exploring indexed artifacts
- Formalizing a generic mapping of diverse museum’s API schemas during an offline indexing phase
- Use a Postgres database (hosted on Supabase) to store the indexed artifacts
- Support comparative analysis of these by generating visual and textual embeddings, surfacing emergent patterns
- Use word2vec-based open source embedding models (provided by LangChain) to generate and query by textual/semantic similarity
- Use visual embedding techniques, including perceptual hashing, to generate and query by visual similarity
Provisionally, the 2nd phase will involve engagement with researchers on specific physical and metaphysical themes of material heritage, starting with archetypal stories, and narratives of socio-technical development.
Integrations
This design is based on integrations with museum APIs, and will depend on hosting services for static sites, lightweight API servers and relational databases.
- 5. What is the expected impact of your project, and how will you measure success?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Milestones and progress tracking
- Project impact and success metrics
Timelines and Impact for each phase of the project
Phase 1:
Timeline:
- Identify a shortlist of museums with online-accessible collections of artifacts
- Timeline: 2 weeks
- Partners: (indirectly) Museums with collections. Contact digital departments to inform of usage that fits within the licensing
- Timeline: 1 weeks
- Timeline: 2 weeks
- Timeline: 3 weeks
- Partners: Existing Wikipedia editors, to support and uphold standards
Impact:
- Enrich dozens of Wikipedia pages with high-quality images of artifacts, including provenance
- Impact thousands of readers in Africa and the diaspora with accessible and well-trusted visual artifacts of their cultures
Phase 2: Timeline:
- Reflect on phase 1, in terms of common artifact types in a material sense, as well as common symbolic forms (e.g. Ikenga from Igbo culture, Adinkra stamps from Akan)
- Timeline: 2 weeks
- Shortlist 5 case-studies of artifacts to explore more deeply
- Timeline: 1 week
- Reach out to researchers who’ve published in these areas
- Partners: Researchers like Prof. Akin Ogundiran, who have published on Yoruba culture and archaeology
- Timeline: 2 weeks
- Draft sections on cosmological and/or archaeological knowledge represented by these artifacts
- Timeline: 4 weeks
Impact:
- Further contextualize Africa’s physical heritage through metaphysical hermeneutics
- Connect with researchers and link their work back to the public
- 6. Who is your target audience, and how have you confirmed there is demand for this project? How did you engage with the Wikimedia community?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Project demand and target audience description
- Links to interaction(s) with Wikimedia community
- Evidence from community consultation such as the [Community Wishlist]
The audience for this project is the broad African disapora of > 1bn people. More specifically, the online audiences for content about African history can be seen on sites like Twitter/X where popular accounts like @AfricanWorldH (African World History) and @MelaninExtracts have 10s of thousands of followersWith regards to interactions with the Wikipedia community. Reached out to African Wikipedia Alliance, through Code for Africa. See discussion here: [1]
- 7. How will your team predict and manage potential user security and privacy risks, and what risks do you currently see?
Include the following points in your answer:
- The level of in-house or consulted security and privacy expertise you will have available to you during delivery of this project
- How your development, testing, and deployment processes mitigate the introduction of unnecessary security or privacy risks
Korede is an experienced mid-level software engineer, with ample knowledge of security as a fullstack and backend developer. The project development includes thorough end-to-end testing of core functionality, protection against SQL injection in queries, secure secrets storage, and avoids collecting user input (excluding voluntary mailing list signup). Code history and deployments are managed through Github actions and Netlify, and can be rolled back to previous versions very easily.
- 8. Who is on your team, and what is your experience?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Your experience as a developer, relevant past projects
- Wikimedia SUL (developer), Gerrit, Github, Gitlab or other relevant public account handles
- Other team members, their roles and expertise
Korede:
- 9. How will the project be maintained long-term?
Include the long-term maintenance plan with maintainer(s) in your answer. If you expect the long-term maintenance to incur expenses, please list those and the plan for long-term expense coverage. Korede Aderele will continue to maintain this project long-term, handling the ongoing baseline costs out-of-pocket. These baseline costs related to this project hosting are recorded in the budget as "Equipment and tools", and they account for 12 months of these and associated costs. The project website itself includes a donation link for potential supports. The contributions to Wikipedia will be a one-time thing, but documentation will be shared to encourage community members and browsers on the site to expand on these
- 10. Under what license will your code be released, and how will you ensure the product is well documented?
Include the following points in your answer:
- Code license and compatibility with Wikimedia projects
- Documentation plan
The code license is to-be-determined, but will likely be open sourced under the MIT license. The documentation of this project will live in the Github Readme file, as well as in help dialogs, changelogs and release posts on the site itself and my project blog
- 11. Will your project depend on or contribute to third-party tools or services?
The project depends on Netlify, Supabase, Github, LangChain, Express.js, React and miscellaneous small dependencie
- 12. Is there anything else you’d like to share about your project? (optional)
The core of the project has recently been released now as: [6] Check out the launch post here! [7]
Budget
[edit]- 13. Upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
- 14. and 15. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
4500 USD
- 16. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
4500 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
[edit]Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).
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