 I think we are live now. Great. So hello, hello, everyone. My name is Sam, and I'm here to talk about the learnings from the AtomSim project, a bit of background about me. Like I said, I'm Sam, and I'm from Nigeria. I joined the Wikimedia movement in 2011. And it was a co-founder of the Wikimedia Nigeria user group, and the project lead of the AtomSim project right now. And I'm also working with the Wikimedia Foundation in movement strategy and governance. So I will be sharing my screen now. So this will be a panel for the first half of this panel. I'll be talking about the AtomSim project, what it is about, and what we have achieved over the years, and what organizing this event. Those who will be joining me in my panels are Winnie Cabinte, Antoni M. Tabangu, Alaphia Bami, Oladji Kupo, and Kamelea Bovan. A bit of a backdrop of why we have an AtomSim project or something called the AtomSim project. It's important to note and be aware that in the African continent, there's a content gap and there's a participation gap. This, we can say, the grassroots of this problem is awareness. People don't know about the existence of Wikipedia or the Wikimedia movement. And even those who know do not know that they can actually edit contents. They don't know that they can contribute contents. They don't know that they can contribute the code that a platform uses. They don't know that they can contribute the sum of knowledge that the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia is. So due to this lack of RNS, when you look at this graph showing the Wikipedia edits on Wikipedia, you can see that there's a content, especially when it concerns the African continent. You see here that a lot of people from a lot of edits come from the Western world, which is North America, Europe, and then followed by Latin America, Asia, and then Africa is basically just at the bottom of it, which is a good reflection of the awareness problem that I was talking about. So when people do not know that Wikipedia exists, of course, they don't edit Wikipedia. They don't contribute contents. So this is now at least the next problem, which is now the content gap. When we have this lack of participation, which is the participation gap, then we do have a situation whereby the number of people or the number of biographies or the number of content from the continent is very, very underrepresented. We can see from this graph where people born in Africa, biographies from Africa are so very, very just a tiny fraction of what you get from just three countries in Europe. Meanwhile, the entire continent of Africa has like 54 countries, where he has a very sad representation of the continent on Wikipedia. Over the years, this problem is getting attention, both from volunteers from the continent and volunteers from outside the continent who are trying to fix this gap. And as you can see from this transitional map, which shows how the content gap has been improving over the years from 2014 to 2017. So one of such projects that I've been trying to fix this gap is the Afrosim project. The Afrosim project in summary is a multi-country and multi-president Wiki project. So which ones on the content gap on Wikipedia was to make sure that we have good representation of African countries and people from Africa on Wikipedia. And this includes also the Caribbean and even the diaspora. We realized that a good way to achieve this, a good way to make this happen is to focus on a subject area which is a popular subject. So pop culture comes to mind is a good way, is one of the best way to make people know about Wikipedia because people are generally interested in films. The film industry on the continent is one of the largest, and people generally love entertainment on the continent. So it's a good point to bring people into the Wikipedia movement and then they can transition into other subjects even we all continue contributing to our films and entertainment. Some of the projects that the Afrosim project has undertaken is the Month of African Cinema Global Editor Fund, which is one of our biggest and most popular projects because it brings in one of the, it brings in the best or the largest amount of impact. The Month of African Cinema is basically an annual contest which invites with the millions from all across the world to write articles and to write content, to upload content about African film, about African art, just that to get people to have fun for two months every year and just represent or try to fix content gap in the process. We've also organized awareness campaigns where we partner with people from other parts of the, other communities within the continent or we partnered with the Wikipedia Foundation to promote the open movements, to promote the Wikimedia movements just to get people to know their existence and to know about the fact that they exist. We've also done a project called the Outline Knowledge whereby we tried to, this was in collaboration with Qwiks whereby we created content offline so people can access them offline, people who don't have access to internet. This is very useful in the continent where the internet penetration is still quite low although rapidly increasing. We've also done photo events whereby community members film festivals, kind of film events, film awards and then they take pictures of key subjects or key people that can be used to illustrate Wikimedia articles or to illustrate Wikimedia content. This is an example of an event about Africa which happened in Tanzania. It's an editor ton which gathered Wikimedia to write articles about African films and subjects that, next is to share some of the results from the contest, the Month of African Cinema Contest. We can see that there's been some sort of exponential growth over the years. In 2018, the first contest that we organized was brought in about 500 articles and then the next one that happened in 2019 brought out 1,000 articles and then in 2020, which is the last one brought in over 3,000 articles and consistent growth due to people or volunteers being interested in this drive, in this mission to reach this content gap and also Wikimedians that are just interested in editing Wikipedia and solving real issues in the process. Here are the language impacts that we've had. We have 24 languages that were contributed to in total. Some of these have been repetitive over the years. In 2018, we had eight languages that were contributed to and in 2019, we had also eight languages and in 2020, the last version, we had 19 that were contributed to. So we've been able to impact all these languages while carrying out this content, while organizing this contest. So the content gap that we've been able to bridge is not just on English Wikipedia or in English language, but also in other languages across the world, including African languages as well. And also with in-person events, which is also an aspect of the contest is also a good representation of impacts that we've been able to make. So over the three years, we've been able to organize in-person events across the continent and beyond. So from 2018 to 2020, we've been able to achieve 19 events. So yeah, thanks to the participation of Wikimedians from across the continent, because this is just not the work of one person, it's not just the work of Project E or anyone, it's the work of every Wikimedian who volunteered and helped to organize these activities and helped to make sure that we get people to participate and also those who volunteered to actually write these articles. So over the three years, we've input 5,000 articles across Wikipedia and also over 25 languages that have been contributed to and over 20% event have been organized. Also, events have happened in over 10 countries, which is mostly African countries or also some parts of the West. And it's important to also know that these are just tracking created articles. Over the years, there are also people who participated just by improving existing articles, which this, when we're tracking on into thousands, but here we are focusing just on articles that were created from scratch through the Afro-Stan initiator. Before I end and transition into asking the organizers questions, I would try to enjoy everyone watching this and everyone listening to join us. You can also participate in this project. To continue to impact Wikipedia, also reach the knowledge gap that exists within the multimedia movement is to get people like you to also volunteer to participate in the Afro-Stan project. So you can join us. How? Well, some of the ways that you can join have been outlined indirectly before now, but just to reiterate again, the ways through which you can join is through first editor tons and workshops. So here if you feel like you are a community leader or community organizer and you want to organize a small editing fund or a workshop within your community, you can reach out to me with support through ways that you can make it happen. And if you need assistance when it comes to things like skill acquisition or things like that, we can offer that. And also we can connect you to the appropriate department within the Wikipedia Foundation who can help with any sources or any guidance that you may need. Also, education project is a good way to also participate. You can start a community in your school if you are a teacher or even a student and try to gather people to participate in the Afro-Stan project and in turn get them into the Wikipedia movement. Also, to participate, this is film, this is art. It's a good way to partner with government institutions or even non-profit institutions who might be able to give their content to or release their content or the CC license that can be used to illustrate or Wikipedia projects. And finally, you can also join the writing and photo contest that we organize every year. This contest is open to everyone who wants to be local. So just reach out and indicate that you would like to organize a photo contest or a writing contest in your local community or in your country. And then we can plan it and make it happen. These are good ways to join and make sure that we continue to create content that really sheet the African content gap on Wikipedia and on the Wikipedia movement. Yeah, so thank you. Now that I've presented a summary about the things that we've achieved, I would like to bring in my panelists who are joining from different parts of the continent and will be sharing their thoughts and their experiences on how they've been able to organize the Wikipedia projects in there. Hi everybody, I'm Kamelya Boban from Wikipedia User Group. Hi everyone, I am Alafiyah Bami, I'm from Nigeria, nice to meet you and nice to see you. Okay, hope you can hear me. Great, so like I said, okay, there seem to be a lot of questions that are coming in but before we get into the question, I will be asking the panelists their participation. I'm not sure I understand. About their participation in the Afrosim projects in their communities and some learnings that has happened. So first to speak, I'll be calling on Winnie Kaminte who is an organized from Tanzania. Before she, sorry, my mind was on Anthony, but yeah, she's from Kenya, sorry about that. She's from Kenya, she's been able to organize Afrosim events in our community last year and she would be telling us some of the things that influenced how successful the project was in Kenya, because also this project is actually one of the first projects that sort of started out the Kenyan community because before now, the Kenyan community was very present within Nigeria and the Afrosim project, the ones of African cinema was a good way for Winnie to sort of bring in Kenyans to contribute to Nigeria. So she'll be telling us what she did that made it successful and who she is before telling us a strategy. Winnie. Hi Sam, thank you and hi everybody. Thank you for joining Wikimedia 2021. My name is Winnie Kaminte from Nairobi, Kenya. I'm a journalist by profession and Wikimedia editor and community organizer. So as far as the Afrosim project goes, I had the opportunity to organize an editor phone in Kenya last year and we managed to bring together about 20 editors, most of them, actually 80% of them were actually natives they were and we also had about 50% of them newcomers in the movement. So I was keen on striking that balance because we recognize as far as cinema goes, especially I understand it's an issue within the community, the African content at large, but also particularly when you look at the coverage of that industry in our country, the women there are hardly presented. Actually, most of the top film producers in our country are women, but if you look at their names, they are nowhere to be seen. So I was keen on bringing more female editors because female editors are more likely to write about fellow women and as we saw that was the case and one of the successful pages we created, we managed to create seven new pages, articles and out of this, one of the most prominent ones for me which I would consider successful is for a lady called Merica Vera. Her stage name is Mama Kayai and she's actually the mother of the film and TV industry in Kenya. So to create her biography and to see that years down the line, I saw her on screen when I was only, I think, less than 10 years old and now in my early, okay I won't say my age now, but to see that I'm actually the person who created her digital footprints that are going to be read by generations to come, that was quite huge. And one of the things that also gave our project success, I would say, was also tapping into existing youth networks in our country in a way that we could get contributors who are keen on the free knowledge and who are also eager to learn. And that has helped us when it comes to like retention, which I understand has been a major challenge in the movement. Once an editor passes, then it becomes hard to retain the same volunteers. So yeah, those are some of the successes we've had and presently the articles we created during the campaign period that was in October last year. To date they have 399K views. So you can see that's quite significant. So I'll leave it at there some before I take up the time for all the other panelists. Thank you, Winnie. Those are really good things to hear because I'm particularly very excited about when you say that makes you feel good that you are the one that created a footprint for an icon or someone very popular, which is actually something that sort of drive me as well in the Wikimedia movement even before this because it gives me great joy when I read news articles or when I read publications in general, and then I see that something was quoted from Wikipedia and it's actually something that I have put there. So it's something that is always very exciting and makes you feel really fulfilled that people are actually reading what you're putting out there. You're actually making a change because like you said, thousands and thousands of people are reading these articles. So it's a really, really great way to, it's a really great motivation. I will be moving on to Alafiyah Bani now who is from Nigeria and Alafiyah Bani organized the event last year as well and through their community, they were able to create like 200 articles. So I want you to tell us Alafiyah Bani, how did you make that happen and what are some of the challenges that you encountered and how did you, how did you make it happen first and what are the major challenges that you encountered while organizing that event? Alafiyah. Hi, everyone. I am Alafiyah Bani, I'm from Nigeria and previously led Wikimedia communities at the University of Elarion, the Elarion Media Hub. During the Afro-Sin Contest, I think what helped us in making it a success, we had over 800 articles as against, we created over 800 articles as against 200 some mentioned. So what made us succeed, except the line of communication within the leaders of the contest and the participants, we had this active water group where we were constantly communicating, where we were constantly answering questions from the participants from the newbies and there was this rapport that was effective. So that level of engagement, that level of communication within us made us succeed. Also, we had challenges and the challenges was the training sessions. We had to train people virtually and that was difficult because of the terrible internet connectivity in Nigeria. So the training sessions, we had difficulty in not meeting people, not being able to engage people at their free time, trying to meet up with people personally, some individuals having character issues and thereabouts and some people trying to game the system where they contribute. So I feel what the major challenge was just the poor internet connectivity we had in that period in Nigeria. Thank you. Thank you, Alaphia. I actually thought, I didn't say 200, I said like two to 300, but great, that massive. Thank you very much for your work. That was good numbers. I would also be moving on to Chamelea now, but I want to comment on what Alaphia Bami said around the internet connectivity and things like that. I feel like during the pandemic, it was very hard to organize events because a lot of people were dealing with a lot of things. A lot of people were facing issues around the consequences and the impact of the pandemic. And as you said, there's no chance for people that was locked down everywhere. It's virtual. So I want to ask Chamelea how that impacted or that influenced the organization on Italian Wikipedia because Chamelea Boban is from Italy and she's been able to organize contests in Italian Wikipedia in our community. So last year was very challenging one and I want to ask her what happened of that with the pandemic and also what do you think we should do? Are there ways that you feel like the contest can innovate to cater for situations like this? Or also in general, even without a pandemic, are there ways that you feel like the contest should innovate or move forward and try to make things better, especially for organizers and people that are trying to get in and make something happen within their communities? Chamelea. Yes, I hope you can hear me because I have headphones not properly working. So with the Donne user group is supporting Autoconus since 2018 was our first edition of this contest. We organized this contest the year after in 2019 and in 2020. Our best result was in 2019 where we wrote or improved for the Autoconus in Italian Wikipedia. So the challenges, the challenges are a lot. I can say that first of all we need to involve the community. We need to find a better way to involve the community at Wikipedia. And I can note, I noticed that we didn't involve, we didn't have new editors for example, which is something that was missed. So we need to improve this, engaging people to participate. Another idea could be those to involve, to have a partnership. I don't know, I am thinking good association from people, from the African countries here in Italy to train them and to help them participate. We also have the challenge of the duration. And maybe for the Italian with community it's too much in general. The biggest contest is that are doing for two months are big challenges because people need to be focused on this contest for so much time. And another thing I noticed is that the Italian applicants are disappointed to receiving the money as prizes. So sometimes someone is not very happy to see this kind of gratification. So maybe giving some gadget instead of money could be a better idea because they are thinking that we are destroying the Wikipedia spirit of being a volunteer. So we need to see this. So this is what I saw, what I understand, what I noticed about this contest. And this year maybe if not two months but one for sure we will organize. So we are supporting this project. We are focused on content gaps and especially women and LGBT class communities. Those are really good points. There was need to involve more African communities which I feel like it will be a good way to sort of key into the spirit of the contest since it focuses on African movie industry. So it is probably a good way to draw in African Wikipedia that are leaving this evening. But regardless, it doesn't matter who is contributing the contest as long as we are able to get African content available in as many languages as possible. That is also appreciated. It doesn't matter. Also that you mentioned about, there has been a lot of discussions about that with the logistics attached to giving out gifts and sending out gadgets and things like that. It can get very, very awkward. It can get very stressful and impossible. Even though we are giving gift cards currently, it is still very, very stressful because not everyone can even receive that. It is the easiest way to reward people. It is one of those big issues that we are having Now I will be moving into Anthony asking where do you think the direction of the contest should go from here? When it comes to support for the communities from the core team to the local communities, what kind of support do you think would be better needed or just in your opinion, what direction do you feel the contest should head towards going forward? It might be in terms of support. It might be in terms of the organization in general. Things like that. Try to say that in five minutes so that we can answer the Q&A section. Yeah, the Q&A section that we have. Thank you Anthony. Right. Thank you so much Sam. Can you confirm if you can hear me? Nice. Thank you. Okay. So my name is Anthony Mtawangu and I'm a co-founder of Fujimedia Community User Group Tanzania and I have been in Fujimedia since 2016. Okay, so I did organize a processing project back in 2019 and some of the achievements come from that people love this project because most of the people they love watching films, watching movies and maybe listening to music and all sorts of things that are related to our processing project. So when they find that there is a project that they can actually contribute to it or add it to what they know, they feel like, okay, this is a good thing. So that's the one. Then the second thing is the support we get from WMOF, things like internet and different mechanized and prizes they do encourage and inspire people to participate. So back to your question, like, okay, where should we be heading right now? You know, in Africa, we do lack reliable sources to use for writing Fujimedia articles. The same goes to AfroCity projects. We do have a lot of people that are prominent and notable in many ways but if you find for the reliable sources to use them to write the articles, it's not there. So all you can find are like blogs or some sources that are not used before writing Fujimedia articles. So what I'm thinking is that we should be focusing on expanding our collaboration and the partnership with the film or cinema authorities or institutions in our local communities or countries so that we can work together to produce or to have access to the reliable sources for writing more articles or contents about AfroCity projects. Then I'm looking towards recruiting more editors, volunteers and partnering with other communities so that we can have like a collaboration and solving some potential problems or some challenges that affect us as Africans. So that's what I'm thinking and also I think like if we do partner with the local institutions or NGOs or any organizations that they support this it will be better because we can have more resources for funding or helping our volunteers to be contributing to internet because we do care on what on how we are represented on internet. Then the last thing is that people should also increase their volunteering heart as we've shown on the statistics that there is a big gap between the contents that are coming from Africa compared to the other statistics that people around the world are contributing about themselves. So we can't bridge this gap by depending on others to do for us so we have to work hard to volunteer for advocating on how our African continent and its stories are actually narrated on internet. So that's what I'm thinking. Back to you Sam. Thank you very much Anthony. Those are good points. I like your points about getting more collaboration because yes like you said referencing and sourcing is one of the most difficult aspect of writing African content on Wikipedia because the Wikipedia policies are sort of centered around what the Western idea of notability is which doesn't necessarily fit into the African context. So we do have a situation whereby people are obviously notable where you can actually find a way to justify their notability based on Wikipedia policy. So yeah, that's a big problem and it's because more importantly I feel like partnerships with media companies would probably be more prominent because media companies are the big media companies are the ones that are considered notable and perhaps having some sort of collaboration in such media organizations to focus more on covering that type of content focus more on covering subjects about Africa because some can be very neocolonia if I can say that in a way that even though they are not trying to fix the gap about the continent they are reporting about things that don't matter or things that are being covered by they are already being covered by everyone else if you understand. So yeah, so it's probably a good thing to collaborate to sort of guide the shift in how things are done along the way. Another important talent that I want to probably mention probably the local organizers won't know but one of the biggest issues as someone in the courting that I would say is judging articles because in comparison to mostly other contests whereby you just count you count the articles and then you give the price to the highest creator we are trying to ensure a qualitative contest whereby we are measuring not just the creation but also and also the quality in terms of referencing and things like that. So for us to have a kind of good way to judge these articles we need to remember from different languages which for last year was 19 languages so it was a very difficult thing to do but well it happened and it also led to some very good learnings that we had to put in check going forward to make sure that before we are actually making the cognitions available to different languages we are able to have a way to actually make sure that there are resources to assess these articles and to make sure that we don't get into a quagmire while trying to like judge these articles so we have 5 minutes left so before we go I would be going through some of the questions that we have received and hopefully we are able to finish it before stream yard cuts everything away because I've been seeing that happening in the previous sessions so we have our first question here and he or she or they are saying that can we see the slides separately the file well yes we will because after this conference I will be submitting the slides that I have presented and they would be uploaded in common so I believe if you come back to the program page maybe after the conference is over it will be linked somewhere and then you can download it and check it out and do whatever you want with it the next question is cinema actors film in Africa is this reality I'm not sure I really understand this question but I believe what this person is trying to ask is about the statistics on the size of content from Africa about Africa in comparison to Europe and how we can reduce that gap well how you can reduce it it's not straightforward it's probably something one person would do probably not something we can achieve in five years or less so but with coercive thoughts coming in and trying to get involved we are able to fix this gap as soon as possible and close it as soon as possible as we can see in the latter graph which shows how some of those coverage about geotag articles on digital data have been improved over the years so this is something that is happening because people are dedicating themselves to bridging bridging those gaps so you can get involved you can invite people to projects and it can also be other projects as well that are focused on bridging content about the African continent so pretty easy get involved invite people to get involved and also welcome people to get involved when you see new people that are trying to join the communion with me or trying to be part of a project or start up something be supportive and let them do it all of this contributes into having improving the representation in the long term how many countries did you implement activities also do you have any idea of this improvement brought from all of this in the graph in the graph I shared that we've been able to reach out to over 10 countries so far within the African continent so we've also had events in the UK and the US but outside of and also we had support from other events but they have like a team that helped organize events in Hebrew but outside of the US and the UK we've not really had other events in other parts of the world all of the 10 events that we've had happened within the continent so do I have an idea of this improvement brought from certain African from certain African country from African region or not I believe this is asking if the country's submissions that we have from Africa yes it is that I can say for sure most of it because we do have people from other parts of the world that are contributing from my estimation around 70% are within Africa are people contributing from different countries in Africa so that's a good one and also we also want to extend beyond Africa as well because we want content to be available in other languages beyond just African languages because we want systemic bias content gaps to be fixed across board so we are almost out of time I'm trying not to get caught off so I'm going to end here thank you so much to the panel members in this call you guys have been awesome I totally appreciate you being here we had a very fruitful conversation thank you guys bye guys bye