How to improve diversity and representativeness on Wikipedia? While the collaborative encyclopedia lacks articles on African and Afro-descendant personalities, collectives and communities are formed by volunteers to recruit contributors determined to change things.
Pseudonyms appear one after the other on the black background of the video conference. Yvonne Gonzalez and Gala Mayi-Miranda are the only ones shown in front of the camera, their backgrounds hidden by photos of African women. This Tuesday night, the collective “Blackening Wikipedia” meet at Zoom for its weekly meeting.
The two women launched this initiative 12 years ago to “fill in the absence of references, articles and information about the culture and personalities of the African and Afro-descended diaspora on Wikipedia”. Today, a dozen of them join to advance the improvement of the article dedicated to the Black Panther Party, this American political organization that is militant to “Black Power”. The review of the article on Jo Güstin, a writer of Cameroonian origin, is also on the program.
Anonymous, transparent, horizontal and egalitarian, the meeting follows the old regulations of the free internet, including Wikipedia is one of the small ones. We divide the work, we discuss, we organize ourselves. The idea came from Yvonne Gonzalez, an Afro-Cuban resident of Switzerland. “Tired of seeing Wikipedia dedicated to dead white men?” Join us”, trumpets from the collective on Facebook.
Only 1.5% of Wikipedia contributors in Africa
The changes and improvements to be made to the articles are ranked in order of priority: urgency is given to the biographies of black women that are least represented in the common encyclopedia. In French Wikipedia there is actuallythree times more articlesconcerning France alone than for all African countries. Mirror Statistics: In 2019, nearly 70% of Wikipedia contributors lived in Europe and North America,against only 1.5% in Africa.
A situation that Georges Fodouop also decided to fight for. The Cameroonian co-founder of the Wikimedian community in Cameroon. “It is often difficult to get information about Cameroonian personalities,” explains the volunteer. Artists, deputies, mayors … There is nothing on the Internet, not a trace. Wikipedia Cameroon has given itself the mission to fill this void. “
Who wants to talk about us better than us?
Since 2017, about forty members of the Cameroonian community have been recognized by Wikimedia Foundation as an official user group. Consisting of contributors spread across Cameroon, including the English-speaking area, the collective is 70% women. We owe him, for example, the biography of the Cameroonian artist and director. Pascale Obolo or the musician’s Coco Mbassi, as well as the publication of many photos. Their propensity for the local language, which is not yet on the agenda, is thought of as “long-term,” according to Georges Fodouop.
“I have been organizing workshops and training since 2013,” he continues. Who wants to speak better about our local language, about our habits and customs, about our traditions than us? In the same perspective, 40 women in Benin participated in Wikipedia training in contributions between November 2020 and February 2021. Communities come together. develops and structures itself in several French-speaking African countries, Côte d’Ivoire is at the forefront. Latin America has also joined the movement.
► Also to listen:The Sansides feminize Wikipedia
Diversify contributors to diversify content
Initiatives encouraged by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia France, the association that oversees the French-speaking version of the online encyclopedia. 20% of the donations received each year are thus reserved for the financing of projects related to “diversity”. “We are based on the principle that content diversification involves the diversification of contributors,” explains Adélaïde Calais, who is responsible for diversity and francophony. In short, we believe that Cameroonians are best placed to talk about Cameroonians. “
The young woman thus works to develop “transparent and horizontal collaborations with collegial function” between all the “Wikipedia structures” of Francophonie. To continue to respond to the somewhat crazy ambitions of this encyclopedia, which aims to be “free, collective, online, universal, multilingual, and which everyone can improve.”
.
