The Project Working to Expand Knowledge of Africa

What the WikiAfrica Education is Currently Working On

Moleskine Foundation WikiAfrica

Bethany Scott, Staff Writer

WikiAfrica is an initiative founded by the Moleskine Foundation in 2006. This initiative was founded with the “principal aim of increasing the quantity, quality, and access to information about the African continent online.” The nonprofit works to educate not only African students but also the world.

WikiAfrica Education strives to empower Africans to write and edit Wikipedia articles about their countries and cultures. There is barely any information about the African continent and African cultures on the internet so by doing this, more information about the Africa and its people can be shared online.

Good News Network

The nonprofit’s way of spreading information about Africa through the internet includes “WikiAfrica Education introduc[ing], train[ing], and support[ing] teachers as they incorporate the Wikipedia article-writing programme into their curricula.” WikiAfrica leads students to write and edit these articles, which makes the information more authentic.

Not only does WikiAfrica focus on educating the internet about African culture but also the different languages there are. With this focus, students are now able to “write those articles in their own languages, meaning isiZulu, isiXhosa, Tshivenda, etc.” according to the Good News Network.

“[T]he city of Paris has more information contained in Wikipedia than the entire African continent,” states the Good News Network. Because of this, “there is a significant risk of young Africans beginning to perceive home as a ‘single story.’” To further this idea of a ‘single story’ narrative, an “enormous amount of content on Wikipedia about African culture, languages, geography, and more, is written by Westerners.”

Moleskine Foundation – WikiAfrica

Due to the fact that most of the things written on the internet about Africa and African cultures were written by Westerners, as stated before, “[t]here’s so much misunderstanding around the African continent,” says Adama Sanneh, the co-founder of the Moleskine Foundation. But with the WikiAfrica project, progress is being made to better inform and bring more information to the internet about Africa.