Wikimedia Commons

Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2024/Results and best practices

< Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2024

This page exists as the sole and full report for Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2024. It is being updated as the project rolls out and might not be final, as yet.

Contained herein, is a description of how Wiki Loves Africa 2023 was organised, the outcomes, and some of the important lessons discovered.

See also


Summary

edit

Wiki Loves Africa - the 10th edition - was held from 1st March until 30th April 2024 with the theme Africa Creates. This year's contest also marks the 10th anniverseray of the international photo contest and an opportunity for the international team to reflect on the journey so far; highlighting impact stories, learnings, and most importantly appreciating notable participants and local organizers from over the years.

For the first time in the history of the contest, we held an opening ceremony where past winners, organizers, jury members, participants and movement stakeholders were invited to celebrate WLA in its 10th iteration. The online event had Maryana Iskander as special guest and was a huge success. Click here to see event page and watch the recording.

In 2024, XX communities from XX countries officially took part in preparing XX events and creating local awareness around the contest. As usual, the media competition - France, Madeira and Réunion, as long as the images represented African-related material or content.

Main links

https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikilovesafrica.lists.wikimedia.org/

Organizers, credits, and collaboration

edit

Wiki Loves Africa is organized by Wiki in Africa, in collaboration with over 30 African based UserGroups, wikimedia communities and individuals. Most groups are funded by Wikimedia Foundation either through their own Annual Plan Grant (for example : m:Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana) or through small (rapid) grants which are usually applied months prior to the contest (see category here - 27 requests in 2024).

In 2024, activities will be essentially coordinated through a global mailing list, direct emails, an active telegram channel, a couple of other channels for small focus activities, the new Wikimedia event tool and a multilingual portal on meta.

More about organizers and roles

Roles of WIA and UserGroups

edit

Wiki Loves Africa is organized in collaboration with several African based UserGroups and wiki communities in this loosely stitched together process:

In 2024, concerted effort was put into organizing trainings, improving offcie hours and supporting new teams and individuals thus creating an archive of trainings, improving and enriching the contest YouTube channels and opportunities for collaborations. We also tried to shift from the norm and organized a succesful official launch event to celebrate the 10th year anniversary of the contest.There were several trainings and facilitation sessions made possible by our partners outside Africa.

For the full list of local groups an d individuals organinzing activities for WLA in 2024, click to view the 2024 participating communities

Most groups are recurrent participants, though the level of involvement varies depending on the size of each group as well as the experience and availability of its members. Groups are invited to only participate at the level of their own capabilities, to avoid putting undue pressure on the organizers that would exhaust them. Most groups receive funding from WMF, though there were issues of some countries unable receive funding due to the status of the country relationship with the United States. Also, some large usergroups, like Wikimedia Nigeria, were able to give out micro-grants to enable members of the communities organize more locally to encourage diversity and improve equitable access to prospective participants.

A special feature this year was the introduction of linguistic ambassadors (WLA English, French, Arabic ambassadors) to help bridge the gap between the international team and the local organizing communities and prospective participants. The success of this idea still needs to be critically examined. As usual, attention was given to creating communication materials as well as meeting/training sessions in multiple languages to aid non-native English speakers in participating fully in the precontact, contest and post contest stages. We however, met difficulties to get translation in Portuguese though, resulting in poor engagement from the Lusophone Africa communities.


2024 Partners and Community Organisers


Organisers

   

Funded through a Community Grant from the
 


Community Organising Partners

           
           
           
           


Community Organising Partners without logos
Planning Wikimedia Community User Group Burundi • Central African Republic Volunteer Group • Ethiopian Wikimedia Volunteer Group • Wiki For Senior Citizens Network (Nigeria) • WikiZimbabwe Volunteer Group


Credits

Credits

edit

Wiki Loves Africa at a project level is run by a small team. Being our 10th year, the competition team is well versed in the process of putting the competition together, but we must acknowledge that it is not possible to do this without the help of key people from within the community and we are endlessly grateful for their help in doing so.

For the first time since the contest was established, we introduced linguistic ambassadors into Wiki loves Africa with the aim of bridging the gap between local communities, organizers and the international organizing team as well as providing general project support including translations and communication. The languages include: English, French and Arabic. A call was made for portuguese but there were no respondents despite an application deadline extension.

As with last year, some hands-on help came from within the African community, due in part to easier communications via the telegram channel, targeted organisational support, webinars, various training sessions etc. We would like to thank the Wikimedia community across Africa (and beyond). This is as much their competition as it is ours and is intended as a platform for them to help build and sustain the growth of their communities through a celebration of local culture and experiences.

There are key people that provide continual assistance in the set-up of the competition on, and communication across the Wikimedia projects, this is no small task - thanks to

  • Hillary, 2024 WLA English ambassador who was literally everywhere and super efficient at representing his linguistic community while being a local organizer himself.
  • Romaine, for setting up the site-notice banner and all uploading categories structure since inception
  • Adoscam, for his work on adding categories to images, renaming images, and identifying/proposing images for quality/feature status
  • Geoffrey Kateregga, for always being available at short requests to help out with trainings and related tasks.

There was assistance with translation and communications from many people. Over 30 people also volunteered to help do the first jury round to provide the first selection from over 14000 images (see first review team).

And last, in no way the least, the indefatigable work of the International Jury.

From the Wiki in Africa team, the main actors of the WLA project are

  • Wilson,facilitator
  • Anthere, co-lead
  • Isla Haddow-Flood, co-lead
  • Nonny, admin
  • Rachel, for social media work


Performance

Performance Table

edit

Implementation

edit

Jury Process

edit

Winners

edit

Key specials

edit

Communications

edit

Impact

edit

2025 Theme Matters

edit

Lessons and comments

edit
Retrieved from "https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2024/Results_and_best_practices&oldid=888232624"