Submissions/AfroCROWD

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 2006

Title of the submission

AfroCROWD: From Black Twitter to Black Wikipedia?

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Aliceba (talk) 13:41, 16 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

E-mail address

alice AT afrocrowd DOT org

Username

aliceba

Country of origin

Haiti via USA

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

AfroCROWD

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

I am the founder of Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD), a new initiative which seeks to increase the number of people of African Descent who actively partake in the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture and software movements including individuals who self-identify as African, African-American, Afrolatino, Biracial, Black, Black-American, Caribbean, Garifuna, Haitian or West Indian.

I will be talking about my efforts to increase 1) exposure to Wikipedia of the target population and 2) the visibility and active participation of U.S. Afrodescendants within the community of Wikipedians and Wikimedians. I will be tackling the following questions: Why is this initiative important? What are the empirical experiences that led to it? What was the methodology used in its first 6 months to attract, train and retain Afrodescendants? That methodology includes the segmented targeting of all its subgroups including the showcasing of the resources and potential available in Wikipedia for native languages spoken by each subgroup. I will be exploring one of the positives of this type of outreach: it allowed us to identify the absence on Wikipedia of the endangered Garifuna language spoken by the Garinagu descendants of Africans and pre-Colombian Arawak/Taino/ Karib aboriginals and to create an incubator for that language.

I will also discuss challenges such as 1) perceptions within the target group that crowdsourcing might be "work without pay" and 2) the impact of systemic injustice on involvement in Wikipedia by Afrodescendants, including issues with the notability and objectivity criteria in the context of such injustice, frequent accounts by Afrodescendants of deletion of their articles, the existence of black alternatives to Wikipedia created because of alleged bias in the Wikipedia article retention process and in its articles. Also, what is the effect of systemic devaluation of non-Western languages spoken by these groups on their editing Wikipedia in these languages?

Lastly, what best practices can be derived from lessons learned during the six months?

Track: Wikiculture and Community

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes including Q&A

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

www.afrocrowd.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/AfroCrowd

Special requests

Interested attendees

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Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:16, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
KrystleChung (talk) 20:09, 1 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Ocaasi (talk) 16:32, 2 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
GeorgeLouis (talk) 21:42, 14 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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