June 05, 2012
African cinema develops on Wikipedia: African Film Festival of Cordoba case study registers 1.270 dossiers visited 200.000 times in less than 3 months
After a year from Share Your Knowledge project launching, lettera27 is happy to start telling the experiences of more than 50 institutions taking part into the project and the results gained on Wikipedia. After 2011 pilot training, tutor Marco Chemello has helped the institutions through the various working phases and tutor Michele Casanova has uploaded the contents on the online encyclopaedia. Now everything is developing in the way Share Your Knowledge has planned: new articles born from released contents give life to the debate on relationship between African knowledge and Wikipedia and spur new users to collaborate, enriching already existing articles or creating new ones. The case study of FCAT - African Film Festival of Cordoba, lettera27 partner, is an example of this development.

FCAT is a festival held each year in the Spanish town, it is organized by the no-profit association Al Tarab, promoting African culture in Spanish language countries and in Africa, through cultural cooperation and cinema. In Seville Al Tarab manages an archive with about 700 “African” articles, subtitled in Spanish. The festival website includes documents about various editions and archived films dossiers history. The website is multilingual: the materials are in English, French and Spanish. FCAT started a collaboration with Wikipedia in 2010 for WikiAfrica and the next year with Share Your Knowledge: with the adoption of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license on the website, the documentation has been uploaded on Wikipedia in Spanish, English and French. Released materials are useful to create new articles and enrich existing ones with pieces of information about African cinema and, in particular, about films. Last months data tell us that these contents are given much attention: from March to half May 2012, 1.270 created or improved articles have been looked up by more than 200.000 users!

FCAT contents have been precious to spread the knowledge of important films that were not included till now. Such as Black Venus, which has won the Equal Opportunities Price at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, or Djibril Diop Mambéty filmography, one of the continent most visionary film directors, or Come un uomo sulla terra, a documentary by Andrea Segre, Riccardo Biadene and Dagmawi Yimer.

The festival experience has been told by Erica Litrenta in the case study published on Wikipedia. Step by step it describes the creation of some of the most meaningful articles plus the visit statistics, the problems arisen from this collaboration within the online community and what we still need to do. In the case study you will find out the difficulties, but also the success of a multilingual collaboration that enriches Wikipedia contents and that will further develop in the future. Michele Casanova, who has uploaded the festival contents on Wikipedia, has received a barnstar, a symbolic small medal that Wikipedians use as award for those who have given their contribution with particular interesting contents.