Cape Town, 29th November 2016 – Music and dance are the very beat of this vibrant continent. It is therefore fitting that for the third Wiki Loves Africa media competition, the focus will be on Music and Dance.
Wiki Loves Africa (www.wikilovesafrica.net) encourages participants to contribute media – photographs, video or sound files – to illustrate a theme chosen by Wikipedia volunteers across Africa. The theme changes each year to cover a universal, visually rich and culturally specific topic (for example, markets, rites of passage, festivals, public art, cuisine, natural history, urbanity, daily life, notable persons, etc). For 2016, the Wikipedia community chose Music and Dance. In a further celebration of music from across Africa, the project is asking musicians to donate a track to the Wiki Loves Africa Playlist.
Over the last two years, the contest has been very photographically biased. Dance and music are not only very visual, but also perfect for video and sound. This year we are expecting more videos and sound files to be submitted. Since 2014, the contest has seen the contribution of 13,624 photographs to Wikimedia Commons for potential use on Wikipedia. In the first year, under the theme Cuisine, 873 people contributed 6,116 photographs. Cultural fashion and adornment was the theme for the next year, 2015, which saw 722 people contribute over 7,500 photographs.
The competition runs from the 1st December 2016 to the 31st January 2017 and entries are welcome from anywhere on the continent and beyond. Specific actions, including training, photowalks and upload events, are held in focus countries by national organisers. This year, the ten focus countries are Algeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. All entries to Wiki Loves Africa will be directly uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (the digital repository of the Wikimedia projects) with the intention of being used to illustrate relevant existing articles or as a basis to begin new articles on Wikipedia and other project websites of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The teams will also be working with existing photographic groups to encourage their members to use their photographic skills, learn about licensing and contributing media to Wikipedia, and win prizes.
The main prizes for the competition are:
1st Prize: US$600
2nd Prize: US$400
3rd Prize: US$200
Community Prize: US$200
The Awesome Prize: US$400
In addition, each winner will also receive a year’s subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan, and a portable power pack. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes will be selected by a jury of international Wikipedians and professional photographers. The Community Prize is chosen by the Wikipedia Community from the Jury’s short list. The Awesome Prize will be awarded for outstanding media contribution to the project, and will be chosen by the two organisers.
For the Wiki Loves Africa Playlist, the teams will partner with music and cultural organisations like Music in Africa (www.musicinafrica.net) and Goethe-Instituts (www.goethe-institut.de) in each focus country to encourage the contribution of photographs, sound files and videos to Wikipedia during the competition. Musicians will be encouraged to release an example of their work under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence to be part of the Wiki Loves Africa Playlist.
Wiki Loves Africa is activated by the Wikimedia community that created Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, and built the free media archive Wikimedia Commons. The competition was conceptualised by Florence Devouard and Isla Haddow-Flood as a fun and engaging way to rebalance the lack of visual representations and relevant content that exists about Africa on Wikipedia. The competition is supported by Ynternet.org. It is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and local partners in individual countries. The images donated are available for use on the internet and beyond, under the Creative Commons license CC BY SA 4.0.
French: Florence Devouard
Cell: +33 645 60 62 77
Email: fdevouard @ anthere.org NOTES FOR THE EDITOR:
The Competition Rules:
Images submitted to the Wiki Loves Africa contest may win prizes! There are a few rules to respect for the images to be eligible.
Rule 1: All photos must be taken by the person submitting them. They can be either self-uploaded or uploaded during a registered mass upload session.
Rule 2: Upload can only be done in December 2016 and January 2017. But you can enter media that was taken at any time, even historical photographs (as long as you own the copyright on these photographs).
Rule 3: Images must be free of watermarks or embedded signatures to be eligible. All entries will automatically be submitted under a free licence such as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA 4.0) (or in the public domain). Read more about the cc-by-sa license here.
Rule 4: All eligible pictures will be categorised under Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2016, this will be automatically assigned during the upload process.
Rule 5: Participants should enable e-mail on Wikimedia Commons so they can be contacted should their image be chosen for a prize.
Local Organising Teams
To see what’s going locally and to contact the teams, please click here.
4 steps to enter Wiki Loves Africa
Entering Wiki Loves Africa Music and Dance is easy! Follow these 4 steps:
Step 1: Take some photos.
Step 2: Select the best.
Step 3: Create an account on Commons to take part. Register here.
WikiAfrica is an international movement that takes place on the African continent and beyond. It encourages individuals, interested groups and organisations to create, expand and enhance online content about Africa. This involves motivating for the representation of the continent’s contemporary realities and history, its peoples and its innovations on the world’s most used encyclopaedia, Wikipedia.
In its various guises and hosted at several institutions (including Lettera27, Africa Centre, Ynternet.org, Short Story Day Africa and Wikimedia CH), the WikiAfrica movement has consistently instigated and led multi-faceted innovative projects. These projects have activated communities and driven content onto Wikipedia. Examples include Share Your Knowledge, #OpenAfrica training Courses and Toolkits, Kumusha Bus (in Ethiopia and Ghana), WikiEntrepreneur (in Ethiopia and Malawi), Kumusha Takes Wiki (Cote d’Ivoire and Uganda) and Wiki Loves Africa.
Over 2016/17 it is working on Wiki Loves Women (in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut), WikiPack Africa, WikiFundi and the WikiChallenge African Schools (funded by the Orange Foundation), Wikipedia Primary (funded by SUPSI) and Wiki Loves Africa.
Ynternet.org Foundation was created in 1998 on the invitation of Swiss Confederation to facilitate, identify and promote new learning culture within digital environments. In 2006 it changed its status from association to foundation, as an independent body within civil society. Based in the university campus of Battelle (Geneva, Switzerland), it is serving public interest in multilateral projects and private-public partnership. 60-80 contributors each year, including experts, social entrepreneurs and volunteers, are contributing to Ynternet.org mission of promoting responsible behaviours in digital environment. Ynternet.org has been successfully audited for its activities (2013 – 2015), at European level, both as coordinator and partner on two separate EU projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is the nonprofit charitable organisation that is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, a top-ten internet property.
