A WikiAfrica State of Mind
Adama Sanneh, Co-Founder and CEO at Moleskine Foundation, introducing the WikiAfrica Education program.
We had an intuition over ten years ago about a new and upcoming project called Wikipedia. We saw it had the potential to build a decentralized repository of knowledge as the world’s first online encyclopaedia that is kept alive and updated, living and breathing with us.
The intuition and fascination around this possibility produced a vision of working in an interconnected world that has a variety of sources of knowledge, in multiple languages. It was something we believed could be a potential game-changer, a unique resource to help build our collective future.
It was important to us for the knowledge and histories that are normally overlooked in western culture to be present, highlighted and emphasized in order for Wikipedia to be effective and fulfil its potential. That’s how WikiAfrica started. The idea that unless all the knowledge centres of the marginalised world had the chance to truly showcase their history and their languages, and were able to both access and produce their own knowledge on this platform, then this potentially incredible asset would not fulfil its mandate. The global knowledge repository would be incomplete.
It made sense to focus first on Africa. It is, by far, the least present continent online. It then became our intention to think with different African cultural organisations about how to boost knowledge production online from those less represented areas. For many years we used different strategies; some were successful, others less so. But we knew it would be a process. Things shifted when we met with the Constitution Hill Trust (CHT) in South Africa. We learnt that in order to achieve our goal we needed to partner with an institution like CHT and together leverage the power of culture to inspire the production of valuable content.
We needed to partner with an organisation that had a mandate aligned with our mission, but which also had created compelling content that clarified the urgency and importance of knowledge and culture being represented to the world, showcasing the history of people and communities that are normally inactive on Wikipedia, or who see it as foreign and distant. Wikipedia was the best tool to achieve our goal, and that of the CHT, which sought an innovative method to share the content it produced on the South African Constitution. It’s through these encounters, and the numerous conversations and exchanges, we realised the centrality and importance of the interaction between knowledge, creativity and activism. Constitution Hill as a heritage site has been the place where this intuition could take form. The site is an incredible source of inspiration, because symbolically it’sthe heart of South Africa. The expression of a new nation’s aspirations.
It is the place where the elements of knowledge, creativity, and multilingualism have created the basis of a world-class Constitution which formed this new nation 24 years ago. Constitution Hill strongly represents the transformative power of these three elements when ignited in the right way, and allowed us to draw immense motivation and insight. We saw that in CHT’s hands, WikiAfrica Education could become something more with the added richness of their work. The program became a simple but powerful tool to contribute to making the history of the Constitution and Constitution Hill more accessible online.
As a foundation we are excited and delighted to have just began this journey together with the CHT, which allowed us to implement and also give tangible form to the definition of “access to knowledge” embraced by the Moleskine Foundation at its inception. Access to knowledge does not solely denote a material infrastructure allowing people to reach information, or the availability of data in a physical sense. Rather, it also signifies the cognitive, emotional and intellectual capacity to leverage the tools at one’s disposal. It suggests to us an attitude regarding knowledge-seeking, knowledge-production and the deployment of this knowledge.
Through this partnership and collaboration with CHT, we hope to find new ways to jointly increase the quality, quantity, and accessibility of knowledge about Africa online, and ultimately inspire a new generation of creative thinkers who can create positive impact in their local communities. We have the opportunity here to convene the infrastructure, attitudes, and content for young people from underserved areas to represent themselves online and begin to conserve and archive new knowledge in their languages. We can achieve this by leveraging technology, thereby making vital historical information about their communities, country, culture, or identity more visible in their own language. This also goes further to creating a dialogue for the rest of the world around the theme of exclusion. If you are a young person living in an area where the library is either incomplete or non-existent, and without any other physical access to knowledge, you effectively have no access to knowledge about your surroundings, yourself, and the wider world.
We are trying to do something about that. On Wikipedia, the content on Africa is outnumbered by that on the city of Paris. Or better still, by articles about fictional locations such as Middle Earth and Discworld. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution draws ever closer, and society spends more time ‘online’ for both work and leisure, it becomes ever more important that stronger, intentional effort is spent on redressing the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Africa online. This ‘representation gap’ is compounded by the fact that Africa, when compared to other geographies, has very few Wikipedia volunteer editors who drive content creation on the platform, and on the internet in general.
Knowledge should not be exclusive. We have seen that technology,culture and activism can be instrumental to correcting this. In this edition of Folios, you won’t hear only see how we are going about tackling this with the improved WikiAfrica Education programme. You will hear from members of the Constitution Hill community describe their role in the endeavour, recount how our united efforts in Johannesburg took shape, and what points of alignment we share to achieve the programme aims. You will see how the large scale ‘edit-a-thon’ events we implemented at Constitution Hill — called ‘AfroCuration’ — practically brought our aims to life by utilising activism, knowledge and culture as tools to attract and inspire the youth, and empowering them with a digital tool and skills to use it, in order to become knowledge producers. You will hear from participants, who were at the event, describe their experiences and talk about what it meant to them. You will hear from some of the living legends who were active in the struggle for freedom in South Africa, who were present for the AfroCuration events bringing the knowledge alive for the students.
You will also find some contextual information on Wikipedia’s contentand usage, to help make sense of the landscape we are working in. The title of this publication, We the People, is the first sentence of the preamble of the South African Constitution. Beyond the historical value of these three worlds, the title encapsulate the idea of collectiveness, unity and shared responsibility needed to create the preconditions for a more just, equal and creative collective future.
I hope you enjoy this edition of Folios, and that you will be inspired by the powerful stories we collected along this journey.
Adama Sanneh graduated in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation from the University of Milan, he worked for several years in East Africa on rural development and humanitarian emergency programs. He obtained a Master in Public Management (MPM) from the Bocconi School of Management and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Geneva.
After graduating he worked as a management and strategy consultant for various public and not-for-profit organizations among which the United Nations, in education, social entrepreneurship and innovation.
As Program Director of the lettera27 foundation he was committed to promoting and advocating a more profound understanding of the African continent, focusing on the role that art and culture can play in social change. Today he continues as a CEO of the Moleksine Foundation.
This article was originally published in March 2020 in Folios n.2 “We, The People”, the Moleskine Foundation cultural publication.
