Bisharat.net
<dzo@bisharat.net>

Thanks to all for the positive feedback on the idea to actively involve
students in correcting and adding Africa-related content on the Wikipedia.
It
doesn't surprise me to learn that someone - Richard Bradshaw in this case
(and
perhaps others?) - has already done something like this. As is so often
the case, a latecomer who figures something out and talks it up gets the
credit even though others may have thought about and even acted on it
earlier. At this point if we need a name, perhaps something explanatory
(if perhaps annoying) like "AfriWiki initiative" would be best indicated.

What would make this an initiative worth naming is the possibility to
gather information on what is being done. If more professors and
instructors do use this Wikipedia idea for Africa-related content, then it
would be very
interesting to hear about their approaches and how it goes, so as to
learn
from successes and pitfalls - and also to encourage others less
familiar/comfortable with the Wikipedia concept (or working on the
internet). This would require some central place (webpage) to post such
info, and probably someone to coordinate (somewhat like a viritual
syllabus repository?).

Given that not everyone will write something up on their experience, use
of some sort of "alert" system might be a complementary way of
facilitating this by keeping track of changes. It is possible to have an
RSS feed of the
newest Wikipedia pages, but I don't know how easy it would be to do
something
for all Africa related updates (which might get unwieldy). I'd note in
this
context that Wikipedia has a "watch" system (see
http://alevin.com/weblog/archives/001477.html ) so maybe there would be a
way to borrow from that in a way that works for this initiative?

Returning to the original idea, let me add in closing that one of the
inspirations for this set of ideas was a letter some months ago from a
then-recent Geekcorps volunteer in Mali, Kaspar Souren, who had worked
with his Malian counterparts on ways to encourage drafting of Bamana
(Bambara)
language content for the Bamana Wikipedia. The context is a little
different, but they also worked with some students at the University of
Mali, though not
with profs. or Bamana language classes as far as I understand.

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