Wiki Loves South African Libraries Campaign

About the campaign

Wiki Loves South African Libraries aims at bridging the gap that exists about Libraries on Wikipedia with a focus on South African Libraries. The campaign is intended to bring together libraries, librarians, library students creating visibility for libraries and their services, allowing South African libraries to tell their stories, and that of their communities through Wikipedia and its various sister projects.

The mission of libraries and Wikimedia are natural matches. Libraries are spaces and places for citizen engagement, preservation of cultural heritage and the sharing of open information, along with the traditional role of maintaining collections of print and digital media, while Wikipedia's mission is to empower and engage people to collaboratively collect and develop open education content and share it.

Objective of the campaign

There is inadequate content about the various types of Libraries in South Africa on Wikipedia and the existing list of Libraries in South Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_South_Africa does not reflect all the public, academic, national, private, research libraries in South Africa. Very few South African libraries have articles on Wikipedia or are mentioned in articles about their towns or villages.

This campaign will

• help improve the visibility of libraries in South Africa, by adding content to Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
• Enlarge the group of South African librarians working on Wikimedia projects
• It will enable South African Librarians to become content creators on Wikipedia other than being retrievers, disseminators, and verifiers of information on Wikipedia and wikidata, learning how to edit and adding this content.
• Librarians will be exposed to the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool to promote free knowledge, and open access to information about their libraries and activities.
• It will introduce Librarians to the different Wikimedia projects that they can adapt and adopt in their libraries.
• Promote the use of OER among Librarians and their patrons.
• Increase Librarians participation to Wikipedia apart from adding references to Wikipedia articles during 1lib1ref campaigns.

How to contribute

Wikipedia

• Add libraries to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_South_Africa List of Libraries in South Africa. A good source here is the South African Libraries Directory.
• Add content about local libraries in articles about a South African town or village
• Update an article about a South African library
• Create a stub article about a South African library in one of the South African languages
• Translate an article about a South African library into one of the South African languages

Wikimedia Commons

Add a photograph of the exterior or interior of your library to Wikimedia Commons which could be used to illustrate an article, bearing in mind the current South African Copyright Act with the lack of Freedom of Panorama

Wikidata

Add data such as statistics, dates, and locations to Wikidata so that this information can be centralised and used in other Wikimedia projects.

Duration of the Campaign

The campaign runs from South African Library Week 2024 (18 - 24 March 2024) until South African Librarians' Day 2024 (10 July 2024)

https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/WikimediaZA/Wiki_Loves_South_African_Libraries_(Officially_from_March_2024)

Training

Training will be offered, initially online, during April and May 2024.

Project Facilitators/Champions

• IngridThomson
• Lise-Marie Hattingh (Wikidata)
• Gerald Louw
• Jeff Nyoka
• Zandile Nyathi
• Itumeleng Mpofu
• Fatima Darries PL(SA)
• Jeremiah Pietersen