WikiIndaba conference 2019/Submissions/Are You Editing Your History Or Are They Editing It For You
 | This is an Open submission for WikiIndaba conference 2019 that has not yet been reviewed by the members of the Program Committee. |
- Submission no. 005
- Title of the submission
Are You Editing Your History Or Are They Editing It For You?: Wikipedia Cultural Diversitory Observatory (WCDO) Insights On African Wikipedias
- Type of submission (lecture, panel, tutorial/workshop, roundtable discussion, lightning talk, birds of a feather discussion)
Lecture / Workshop
- Author of the submission
Marc Miquel
- Language of presentation
English
- E-mail address
marcmiquel
gmail.com
- Username
marcmiquel
- Country of origin
Catalonia
- Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
Amical Wikimedia (Catalan Community) / Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory
- Personal homepage or blog
- Abstract (up to 300 words to describe your proposal)
The content of each language edition of Wikipedia is usually skewed toward the cultural and geographic context associated with its own language. Every Wikipedia contains a group of articles about their history, places, local celebrities, politics, among others, this tends to be take a considerable extent that may go from ten percent to more than half the Wikipedia. However, this is not the case for African Wikipedias, as these langages do not contain the minimal amount of articles about their own cultural context.
This lack of self-representation has deep implications at educational and political level, as readers cannot read about their own context in their own point of view and Wikipedia cannot be used in its full potential to educate the population, or even cohesionate society. At the same time, this puts it more difficult to the rest of Wikipedias, which despite being alerted on the needs to cover African geographical content in past events such as Wikimania 2018, they cannot import and learn from their Wikipedias - whose editors are undenniably the ones with more access to the sources and can write about their context with more knowledge.
In this half presentation half workshop, I will discuss the previously mentioned aspects and introduce the specific topics in which the gaps in African Wikipedias are more urgent to be filled. By using Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory, I will show the evolution of the geographical gap and show how by raising awareness and providing solutions it is possible to set effective strategies and integrate them in article creation contests or edidathons to build content that deserves being created.
- What will attendees take away from this session?
- Awareness on the implications of building cultural context content for every Wikipedia, especially the African case.
- Specific lists of top priority articles for each language edition that should be in every other language editions.
- Monitoring of the Geographic gaps in Africa - before Wikimania 2018 and after, in order to assess its impact and productivity.
- Article lists with specific groups of articles about Africa written in other Wikipedias than African languages.
- Theme of presentation
-
- Wikimedia Research
- Project content.
- Outreach and education
- For workshops and discussions, what level is the intended audience?
Intermediate
- Length of session (if other than 25 minutes, specify how long)
25 minutes (40 minutes or 15 are also an option, I can adapt to the program needs).
- Will you attend WikiIndaba if your submission is not accepted?
Probably not, I want to disseminate research and engage communities into filling the gaps.
- Slides or further information (optional)
Not yet.
- Special requests
- Is this Submission a Draft or Final?
Final.
Interested attendees[edit]
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