Wikimedia Fellowships/Proposals/Documenting Diverse African Cultures

This will be a project that will be collecting facts and comparing written material from African cultures for the aim of validating already existing information about the specific cultures and creating new content that is not already covered. Africa is the most diverse content in terms of vast cultures, traditions, beliefs and historical settlements.

Product, goals, and metrics

This project hopes to achieve bigger and accurate article base from Africa that has been generated by Africans who actually have experienced the cultures or who are able to follow and track the cultures through elders and community leaders. This will basically involve forming groups from different communities in the local institutions, recruiting them to carry out research and create articles based on their findings. This can be done as a meta project and reviewed before eventually going public on Wikipedia.

This will mean an increased growth rate of content from Africa which is needing at the moment and also promote usability in Africa - Lack of articles from Africa can directly account for the low number of readers from Africa. Africa's internet usage is growing at an alarming rate and the mobile phone has moved from being a phone to being an intelligent source of information. This means we have more people who are willing to write and also a bigger need for African content on Wikipedia.

The project would use social media to create awareness of the project while creating competitions and incentive based participation by the users. It would also seek to partner with local corporates to facilitate some of the operations by creating themed campaigns for each corporate involved and their industries. For example, a mobile operator which already sells data can carry campaigns with the project and offer lesser costs of data for each participant or even offer free data after a specific number of contributions. In return, we offer branding in events and our recruitment strategies. Different industries would participate differently.

Logistics

This would work best as a type two (Wikimedia Foundation Fellowship) due to the large expected content and the fact that the research should be on the ground. This would be a long term project, anywhere between 8 months and 18 Months. We could take it in phases or recruit fellows in major African regions.

Fellow(s) responsible for this proposal

This would be myself, David Mugo and Abbas Mahmood as leads as well as other active members of the Kenya's upcoming chapter. The proposal is a vision of myself and Abbas. We would require a grant to execute the initial mandates of the proposal.

Endorsements

This section is for endorsements by Wikimedia volunteers. Please note that this is not a debate, vote, or poll, but is rather a space for volunteers to describe in detail why they think a fellowship project is of value. If you have concerns or questions rather than an endorsement to make, please use the proposal Talk page. Endorsements by volunteers willing to work in collaboration with a fellowship recipient on a project are highly encouraged.