WikiIndaba conference 2018/Program/Using festivals as a tool for telling the story of Africa

ID: African_Festivals	Using festivals as a tool for telling the story of Africa
Speakers: Joy Agyepong (Open Foundation West Africa, Ghana)		Time block: friday-afternoon	Start: 13:30
		Location: Great room	Duration: 7 min.
Description : Festivals are an expressive way to celebrate glorious heritage, culture and traditions. They are meant to rejoice special moments and emotions in our lives with our loved ones. They play an important role to add structure to our social lives, and connect us with our families and backgrounds. For this reason Aristotle describes human beings as a “social animal”, because by our nature we build capacity to learn language, familiarize with cultures, enquire and think, play and work through social interaction with our fellow beings. This makes festivals a crucial part of the human race, irrespective of the location of its inhabitants, because festivals are the way of that group of people, folklore and tales from their ancestors are passed on and cultural heritage and history is preserved. From Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Yam and Fire festivals of Nigeria and Ghana to the various carnivals in Brazil and St Patrick’s Day originally from Ireland, and many other festivals abound across the globe. Albeit the importance of festivals, its coverage on Wikipedia is limited to stubs, many uncovered and many others with lack of photos or videos to further tell the story or enrich the experience of the reader or the seeker of such knowledge. Through this campaign we hope to improve the audiovisual contents of such subjects which will in turn inspire improvement of such articles from stubs, creation of entirely new articles or related photo documentary or essays about such festivals.			Themes: Sister Projects
			Tags: Festivals, African heritage, Wikimedia projects
			Notes: #WikiIndaba18_African_Festivals