Global Shapers: Share Your Narrative Writing Competition

Global Shapers Durban Hub Writing Contest

Background

Wikipedia is the 5 the biggest website in the world with millions of unique daily visitors to consume its free content. It is an online encyclopaedia that generates its content through volunteers that constantly edits and create new articles about different types of subjects. However, Wikipedia content is not representative of all the people that reads it. There’s more content about the U.S and Europe than African content. There’s also a dearth about content that represents women, especially African women. This means that there’s not a lot of Africans who contributes on the site. Most people don’t even know that they can add content in their mother tongue. Objectives

This project aims to:

increase African content on Wikipedia by focusing on themes that celebrate the African heritage as well as notable Africans who may not have coverage on Wikipedia.address the shortage of African languages on Wikipedia by translating articles about African topics already available on the English Wikipedia to small language Wikipedias. increase the number of active Wikipedians, especially African females who will continue to edit after the project comes to an end. Create awareness about the dearth of African content on Wikipedia.

Approach

The event will be run in three phases with phase one and phase 2 being edit-a-thon where WikimediaZA will provide facilitation support to teach participants how to create and edit Wikipedia. This will be then followed by a writing competition where participants will write an article based on an African topic their choice. Prizes will be awarded to winners who’s articles have satisfy the following criterion: Articles has Infobox Articles links to other Wikipedia articles Article has References Article has sub-headings Article is categorized.

Timelines

1st editathon to introduce participants to Wikipedia was held on 14 November 2020 2nd editathon to introduce the competition: Date still to be determined.

Budget

Prizes to be determined based on budget on line item UKZN editathon ( but they’ll not be in cash) Share your narrative edit-workshop

Topics

Intellectual Property Registered from KwaZulu Natal
Ingonyama Trust Board Land Ownership
Architecture - traditional
Culture
Indigenous Games
Geography
Rivers
Heritage Sites
Traditional Health & Medicine
Lifestyles & Social Issues
Literature
Folklore
Philosophy & Religion
Science
Marine Sciences
Matriarchy in culture
Stokvels