Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2024/Results and best practices

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This page exists as the sole and full report for Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2024. It is being updated as the project rolls out and might not be final, as yet.

Contained herein, is a description of how Wiki Loves Africa 2023 was organised, the outcomes, and some of the important lessons discovered.

See also

Summary

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Wiki Loves Africa - the 10th edition - was held from 1st March until 30th April 2024 with the theme Africa Creates. This year's contest also marks the 10th anniverseray of the international photo contest and an opportunity for the international team to reflect on the journey so far; highlighting impact stories, learnings, and most importantly appreciating notable participants and local organizers from over the years.

For the first time in the history of the contest, we held an opening ceremony where past winners, organizers, jury members, participants and movement stakeholders were invited to celebrate WLA in its 10th iteration. The online event had Maryana Iskander as special guest and was a huge success. Click here to see event page and watch the recording.

In 2024, 32 communities from 46 countries officially took part in preparing XX events and creating local awareness around the contest. As usual, the media competition - France, Madeira and Réunion, as long as the images represented African-related material or content.

Main links

https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikilovesafrica.lists.wikimedia.org/

Organizers, credits, and collaboration

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Wiki Loves Africa is organized by Wiki in Africa, in collaboration with over 30 African based UserGroups, wikimedia communities and individuals. Most groups are funded by Wikimedia Foundation either through their own Annual Plan Grant (for example : m:Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana) or through small (rapid) grants which are usually applied months prior to the contest (see category here - 27 requests in 2024).

In 2024, activities will be essentially coordinated through a global mailing list, direct emails, an active telegram channel, a couple of other channels for small focus activities, the new Wikimedia event tool and a multilingual portal on meta.

More about organizers and roles

Roles of WIA and UserGroups

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Wiki Loves Africa is organized in collaboration with several African based UserGroups and wiki communities in this loosely stitched together process:

In 2024, concerted effort was put into organizing trainings, improving offcie hours and supporting new teams and individuals thus creating an archive of trainings, improving and enriching the contest YouTube channels and opportunities for collaborations. We also tried to shift from the norm and organized a succesful official launch event to celebrate the 10th year anniversary of the contest.There were several trainings and facilitation sessions made possible by our partners outside Africa.

For the full list of local groups an d individuals organinzing activities for WLA in 2024, click to view the 2024 participating communities

Most groups are recurrent participants, though the level of involvement varies depending on the size of each group as well as the experience and availability of its members. Groups are invited to only participate at the level of their own capabilities, to avoid putting undue pressure on the organizers that would exhaust them. Most groups receive funding from WMF, though there were issues of some countries unable receive funding due to the status of the country relationship with the United States. Also, some large usergroups, like Wikimedia Nigeria, were able to give out micro-grants to enable members of the communities organize more locally to encourage diversity and improve equitable access to prospective participants.

A special feature this year was the introduction of linguistic ambassadors (WLA English, French, Arabic ambassadors) to help bridge the gap between the international team and the local organizing communities and prospective participants. The success of this idea still needs to be critically examined. As usual, attention was given to creating communication materials as well as meeting/training sessions in multiple languages to aid non-native English speakers in participating fully in the precontact, contest and post contest stages. We however, met difficulties to get translation in Portuguese though, resulting in poor engagement from the Lusophone Africa communities.


2024 Partners and Community Organisers


Organisers

Funded through a Community Grant from the


Community Organising Partners

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Madagascar


Community Organising Partners without logos
Planning Wikimedia Community User Group Burundi • Central African Republic Volunteer Group • Ethiopian Wikimedia Volunteer Group • Wiki For Senior Citizens Network (Nigeria) • WikiZimbabwe Volunteer Group


Credits

Credits

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Wiki Loves Africa at a project level is run by a small team. Being our 10th year, the competition team is well versed in the process of putting the competition together, but we must acknowledge that it is not possible to do this without the help of key people from within the community and we are endlessly grateful for their help in doing so.

For the first time since the contest was established, we introduced linguistic ambassadors into Wiki loves Africa with the aim of bridging the gap between local communities, organizers and the international organizing team as well as providing general project support including translations and communication. The languages include: English, French and Arabic. A call was made for portuguese but there were no respondents despite an application deadline extension.

As with last year, some hands-on help came from within the African community, due in part to easier communications via the telegram channel, targeted organisational support, webinars, various training sessions etc. We would like to thank the Wikimedia community across Africa (and beyond). This is as much their competition as it is ours and is intended as a platform for them to help build and sustain the growth of their communities through a celebration of local culture and experiences.

There are key people that provide continual assistance in the set-up of the competition on, and communication across the Wikimedia projects, this is no small task - thanks to

  • Hillary, 2024 WLA English ambassador who was literally everywhere and super efficient at representing his linguistic community while being a local organizer himself.
  • Romaine, for setting up the site-notice banner and all uploading categories structure since inception
  • Adoscam, for his work on adding categories to images, renaming images, and identifying/proposing images for quality/feature status
  • Geoffrey Kateregga, for always being available at short requests to help out with trainings and related tasks.

There was assistance with translation and communications from many people. Over 30 people also volunteered to help do the first jury round to provide the first selection from over 14000 images (see first review team).

And last, in no way the least, the indefatigable work of the International Jury.

From the Wiki in Africa team, the main actors of the WLA project are

  • Wilson,facilitator
  • Anthere, co-lead
  • Isla Haddow-Flood, co-lead
  • Nonny, admin
  • Rachel, for social media work


Performance

Performance Table

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Implementation

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New and improved elements

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WLA is in its 10th iteration, it is expected that the international organizing team have, by now, improved greatly on the process of putting together all the elements of the competition. However, every year presents a new opportunity to challenge the previous processes and operations. Here is a list of new and improved elements for the year 2024

Organization of global participation
  • Most local organizing communities did a « similar » branded country page. See for example Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2024 in Nigeria
  • Participating communities including links to their grants and information such as lead person, and competition pages.
  • A very detailed energy table has been developed showing participating communities performance against resources allocated and comments on community activity as it concerns WLA. This document is not public, but we are happy to consider requests for access
Promotional materials and web elements

Translations were done by Ceslause into French.

  • Wiki Loves Africa 2024 Africa Creates in French
    Wiki Loves Africa 2024 Africa Creates in French
  • Wiki Loves Africa 2024 Africa Creates in French
    Wiki Loves Africa 2024 Africa Creates in French
  • Wiki Loves Africa 2024 Africa Creates
    Wiki Loves Africa 2024 Africa Creates

Ambassador roles

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For Wiki Loves Africa 2024, a pivotal strategy was the introduction of linguistic ambassadors for the English, French and Arabic communities. The ambassadors served as liaisons between the international team and their respective linguistic communities, providing vital support to local campaign organizers towards achieving a successful Wiki Loves Africa campaign.

Trainings

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There were office hour sessions which all held before contest proper and was facilitated by the 2024 WLA ambassadors. We successfully planned and executed 10 training sessions:

Image categorizing and tagging

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  • Anthere, Wilson, and a couple other volunteers worked on fixing uploaded images into the right general categories and also tagging the correct country codes. Some communities continued uploading after the official close of the contest and this led to many of the images getting lost and not considered for the international prizes. We are working to fix this discrepancy by meeting with the concerned communities. Check here for more information.

Images value

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It is very important to the contest organizers to make sure that Wiki Loves Africa pictures are of

  • the best quality possible
  • recognized for their quality
  • reused in the other wikimedia projects

Some efforts were made in the 2024 iteration in that direction:

  1. Online training webinars were proposed, in particular on the image clean-up process, in English and French (both of which didn't get a lot of attendance)
  2. More professional photographers were encouraged to join the contest through direct invites via emails and social media messages.
  3. Efforts were made to thoroughly work on ALL the images collected to make sure they were properly described, categorized etc. The coordination of that effort was done on Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2024/Images checking, using multiples queries to identify problematic cases.

Jury Process

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Winners

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National selection with prizes may be seen here: National Winners. The following participating communities offered prizes to winners of the local contests:

  1. Nigeria
  2. Igbo Community
  3. Ghana
  4. Botswana
  5. Burundi
  6. Cameroon
  7. Congo Brazzavile
  8. Kenya
  9. Niger
  10. Tyap Wikimedians
  11. Fulfude Wikimedians
  12. Rwanda
  13. Senegal
  14. Togo
  15. Uganda
  16. Madagascar
  17. Zimbabwe
  18. Zambia

The International Prize Categories consisted

Photography:

  • 1st Prize : USD 1,000 - Won by User:Fawzi Demmane (Algeria) with L'artisan graveur
  • Joint 2nd Prize : USD 900 - Won by Doaa Adel2023 (Egypt) with Drying moonflowers
  • Joint 2nd Prize : USD 900 - Won byUser:Germain92 (Rwanda) with Harvesting Tea
  • 3rd Prize : USD 8,000 - Won by Negonasr (Egypt) with “MN004“ Molten metal craft

Media (Video, Audio, Graphics, Photo Essays):

  • Wiki Loves Africa video prize - Narrative: USD 1,000 - Won by User:Saalyha Eeman (Nigeria) with Ahmadu Bello University Zaria Students works for Africa create
  • Wiki Loves Africa video prize - Reportage : USD 1000 - Won by Green Wilfred Somoni (Nigeria) with The Master Carver and a Message - A Documentary by Green Wilfred Somoni
  • Wiki Loves Africa video prize - Clip : USD 200 - Won by Charlesyaobrou225 (Cote d'Ivoire) with Africa-creates-realisateur-charles-yao-brou-from-wiki-loves-africa-cote-divoire-fan-club

Key specials

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Communications

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Impact

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2025 Theme Matters

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Lessons and comments

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  1. Suggestion to have regional international prizes
  2. Plan for trainings on Sound engineering to improve quality of audio submissions
  3. Inviting Jury members to WAH episodes on WLA to give insight into the Jury process
  4. There is increased need for linguistic support especially with Arabic communities. The Ambassador program didnt exactly solve this challenge
  5. Florence suggested Jury member for 2025 - Fabrizio

Videos

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  1. Create a list of open source music for video submissions to avoid repititive use of sound by participants.
  2. Organize a video editing training to improve the quality of video submitters of 2024 in particular
  3. Explain somewhere what are the differences and expectations with regards to video categories : narrative, reportage, clip
  4. Jury indicated that adding captions to videos will improve quality and comprehension. To emphasize with future contests.
  5. Relook at video uploads for 2025 with a view to improving description, upload, sorting process.
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