Grants:Project/Rapid/The AfroCine Project/2020 Months of African Cinema Global Contest - International Prizes
hotmail.com• ebenmlay.tzgmail.com• therealayokunlegmail.com
Please see the sample Contest application before drafting your application.
Project Overview edit
The AfroCine Project is a multi-country and multi-faceted project which aims to encourage the contribution of digital content that relates to the historical and contemporary cinema, theatre, and arts sectors of several African countries, the Caribbean and the diaspora to Wikimedia projects.
The vision of this project is to bridge the huge African content gap and improve on the systemic bias that is present in the existing content. This is being achieved by making: articles, citations, images, videos, and data, about the historical and contemporary African cinema, theatre and arts, to be readily available and easily accessible, both online and offline, and in different languages.
One of the main activities carried out on this project is the “Months of African Cinema” Wikipedia contest. This is a major annual writing contest which we started in 2018, shortly after the establishment of this project. The contest happens in October and November of every year, and through this contest, about 2,000 Wikipedia articles on African film and arts, have been created in about 10 different languages. Furthermore, about 500 relevant images have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, which are available for illustrations on Wikipedia articles. We aim to continue on this upward trajectory in this year’s edition.
Project Goal edit
Choose one or more of the following goals. You can add or delete goals as needed.
- Improve on the low amount of coverage of Africa on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, by getting a good number of quality Wikipedia articles and appreciating the most dedicated participants using a good rewarding system.
- Improve on the low level of participation to Wikimedia projects from Africa, using pop culture as a good draw for more editors from the continent to develop interest in this movement and participate in it.
- Significantly boost the quality of participation through the introduction of gifts for winners.
- Ensure trust in the contest, through better coordinated jury system and prize management.
Project Plan edit
Activities edit
Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing? What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?:
- Finalizing decisions on appropriate prizes for winners of the contest.
- Ensuring adequate communication of prizes and contest rules with signed up contest participants. This would be done manually as well as using the mass messaging tool.
- Issuing Certificates of Participation to all contest participants.
- Sorting out different categories of prizes planned for this contest, which are as follows:
- Overall winner (1st, 2nd, 3rd places) - The users that achieve the highest quality of contributions overall. This would be determined using a point-based jury system, which factors in the size of articles created and the quality of citations.
- Language Winners - Users that achieve the highest quality of contributions for each African language. There would be a minimum contribution expected to qualify for this prize (To be decided before the contest). Local language wikis whose local affiliates are already giving out prizes for language contributors would not qualify for this category of prizes.
- Diversity winner - The user who creates the most articles for the most countries.
- Gender-gap filler - The user who creates the highest number of articles about women.
- Page Improver - The user who has made the most efforts at improving articles. We intend to use a hashtag to track the amount of contributions.
1. How will you deliver the Prizes?
- After jury provides the list of winners, the winners would be identified and contacted, to inform them. Administrative information about each of them would be gathered, in order to track and send the gifts over to them. Furthermore, participation certificates would be collated and sent to all contest participants.
2. How will you let people know about the contest?
- We will inform existing members of the movement through the different mailing lists available. Contest information would also be shared on different Wikimedia social media and chat platforms, as well as our official pages.
3. How will you judge the contest and award prizes?
- We will have a jury, that will judge articles submitted based on criteria set out to ensure quality submissions. The scoring system for the winners would be as follows:
- One point (1.0) would be awarded for every new Wikipedia article in any language and Wikidata item.
- One point (1.0) would be awarded for every 2000 bytes in the Wikipedia article.
- Half a point (0.5) for every quality source used in the Wikipedia article.
- This scoring criteria maybe reviewed before the contest starts, if any further improvement opportunities are spotted.
5. Is there anything else you want to tell us about this project?
- For more information on Afrocine Project - Check out our meta page
- To review the metrics and activities carried out for Months of African Cinema in 2018 and 2019 - Checkout our summary page
- To review progress on the organization of the contest for this year so far - checkout our meta coordination page
- English Wikipedia Contest landing page - en:w:Wikipedia:WikiProject AfroCine/Months of African Cinema
Impact edit
How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more: All goals would be considered achieved when:
- The jury is able to successfully assess entries and unanimously decide the international winners for each prize category of the contest.
- All international winners have been successfully contacted and received their deserved gifts.
- The introduction of prizes lead to even higher quality articles for this year.
Resources edit
What resources do you have? Include information on who is organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).
- Human resources:
- Sam/User:Jamie Tubers - The lead of the AfroCine project; would actively coordinate and oversee every aspect of this contest.
- Ayo/User:HandsomeBoy: Would be in-charge of online facilitation during the contest, monitoring all our wikipages across all languages and also managing the social media campaigns.
- User:Ebenezer Mlay: Community Liaison for the AfroCine Project; would design a lot of our communications with the community, as well as with the public.
- ....and several leaders from across the continent to champion local activities during the contest; we currently have seven (7) countries signed up to participate this year.
What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount.
- Funding of the budget ($2,000)
Budget edit
- Prizes - $1,600 (these would all be given in the form of gift cards).
- Overall Winner (1st, 2nd, 3rd places) - $500, $200, $100
- Language Winners - $500 (this is the total budgeted for this category and would be shared equally amongst the language winners, up to $100 each).
- Country Diversity Winner - $100
- Gender-gap filler - $100
- Page Improver - $100
- Gift to the Jury Coordinator - $200
- Administrative cost - $200 (shipping, bank fees, FX fluctuation, etc)
- Total - $2,000
Endorsements edit
Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!
Support Sports, academics and entertainment are three content areas that I think African communities would highly benefit from a more coordinated approach such as this and this addresses the entertainment aspect. AfroCine has proven over the years that it has come to stay, I believe with funds we will even do better. Definitely there will be new editors being introduced to Wikipedia as a result of this project, and a number of good-standing discouraged editors will definitely return to editing from this. I completely endorse this as it is the right step in the right direction.HandsomeBoy (talk) 21:16, 1 September 2020 (UTC)- Support This project has a lot of potentials and I support it. I am looking forward to outstanding results.--Ebenezer Mlay (talk) 19:51, 2 September 2020 (EAT)
