Wikipedia’s Call for African Content Starts with Community | Daily Maverick

"Wikimania, the annual gathering for the Wikimedia community that runs Wikipedia, will kick off in Cape Town this week -- and it’s no accident its happening now, in Africa, for the first time in history. As Former US President Barack Obama said during his speech at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg yesterday, progress has bypassed far too many parts of the globe and far too many communities that need progress the most. As the world’s largest crowd-sourced, public resource project, Wikimania hopes to examine some of the factors that have held much of Africa back from contributing more widely to Wikipedia.  Its an entity that thrives on the efforts of individuals who come together to share knowledge. Currently, close to 200,000 active contributors create articles on a variety of subjects every month. But a lot of that content serves people who already have established sources of knowledge. This is not the case in Africa and other parts of the world, like Asia or Latin America. The Wikimedia community recently adopted a new and ambitious strategy that aims to bring content and knowledge equity to everyone, democratising access to content and ironing out the gaps and inherent bias in knowledge that are currently the sum of the contributors’ parts...."