Talk:Workshop ECAS Basel 2017 - Literature and sources about African cities and open access

Suggestions about topics

Florence Devouard has created and updated the page about African cities on WikiAfrica. Here are some suggestions she made:
Suggestions for the number of cities to focus on

• We have about 120 capitals in Africa. We can stick to 120 cities
• Or we can add "country subdivisions capitals". It will be at least 1000, ugh. That would be quite unreasonable.
• Or we can put our 120 capitals + a few cities of our favorite countries (the ones we want to work in).

Quality

• there is a huge discrepency of quality of pages related to cities
• at the bottom of the page about African cities on WikiAfrica, there is a list of "favorite" cities, some of which are already of good quality (+++) and would benefit from a review and more sources, whilst others are tiny with hardly any reasonable data. That list could propose a variety of input from scholars.
• Generally... in most "lists of cities of xxx", the number one missing informations is coordinates. The number 2 is recent census data.
• Kenya large cities are fairly good articles compared to all others.
• Lots of capital cities are very poor articles
• Slightly smaller cities (2nd or 3rd biggest) very often like climate data.

--iopensa (talk) 12:07, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Schedule of the day

we have been informed that

• there will be a public lecture in the evening - still to be confirmed the timing. Usually it should be 6:15pm but it might be as late as 7pm.
• the registration desk opens on Wednesday from 12am or so well into the evening, so that as many people as possible can register before the Thursday morning onslaught.

--iopensa (talk) 08:30, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Suggestions about scholars we would like to address

• people who can dig out structured data such as "climate", "geographical coords", "census data", "list of cities in a country", "elected representative", "geographical data such as surface, rivers, urban, elevation" from databases/sources
• ideally, wikidata-able people to integrate the structured data in the infobox via wikidata rather than "in the infobox itself". Nice to have but not mandatory
• historian to complete or review historical description
• someone with a nice overview of a city (such as those I listed as very weak article) so that s-he can provide an overview of the "key features of a city" (even if they do not go into much details)
• good writers who can review and improve the best articles (even if they do not have very strong expertise in the city)
• a sourcing wizard to fix current "references missing"
• some people with cultural expertise who can flesh the articles with contemporary info (not too biased) about culture. Most articles are very "academic" in their content (because mostly written by europeans and americans I guess). Giving those articles a more contemporary content would be a good way to make them more interesting perhaps (refering to museums, main religious buildings, notable people in the city, current trends, local food delicacies etc.)

Probably no need to look into details about northern cities (except for reviewers). I would not put too much energy either in South Africa (already rather very well covered compared to all the other cities). thanks flo. --iopensa (talk) 11:15, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Documentation for the workshop

All the documentation collected for the workshop is here https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5WO5186FLxjV0hteENqNk13U3c --iopensa (talk) 12:17, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Using this sentence for the references and including the texts in the discussion page

Recommendation collected during the ECAS workshop Workshop ECAS Basel 2017 - Literature and sources about African cities and open access. --iopensa (talk) 13:58, 28 June 2017 (UTC)