Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2014/Press release launch EN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Celebrate Your Local Food on Wikipedia

Cape Town, 30th September 2014 –
WikiAfrica at the Africa Centre is proud to announce the Wiki Loves Africa Competition. The Wiki Loves Africa Competition invites entries from across the African continent of media - photographs, video or audio - that illustrate a particular theme. All entries will be donated to Wikimedia Commons with the intention of being used to illustrate relevant existing articles or as a basis to begin new articles on Wikipedia and other project websites of the Wikimedia Foundation. The images donated are also available for use on the internet and beyond, under the Creative Commons license.

Wiki Loves Africa (WLA) encourages participants to contribute photographs and other media that illustrates a theme. The theme will change each year to cover a universal, visually rich and culturally specific topic (for example, markets, rites of passage, festivals, public art, cuisine, natural history, urbanity, daily life, notable persons, etc).

The theme for the 2014 photo contest will be Wiki Loves Africa Cuisine!

Under the Cuisine theme, this year’s contest is asking people to send in their photos, videos or audio of the diverse types of cuisines from across Africa. The theme will encompass the "foods", "dishes", "crops", "husbandry", "culinary art", "cooking methods", "utensils", "food markets", "festivals", "culinary events", "famine food" and any other issues that are related to cuisine on the African continent. The competition is designed to focus on the pride that people have in the food that we eat, how it is prepared, what it looks like, how it differs from another type of food, what types of rituals may be observed, and how that cuisine reflects the many diverse cultures of this complex continent.

The project is a two-month competition which will start on the 1st October and end on the 30th November 2014.

The competition is calling for entries from across the African continent (and beyond). Wiki Loves Africa has teams on the ground in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Malawi, South Africa, Tunisia ,Algeria and Uganda who will host specific actions (training, communication etc.). Volunteers are encouraged to host Wiki Loves Africa events in their own countries and entries from outside Africa will be accepted as long as they feature African cuisine.

The competition is open for two months where all entries will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a free licence. The entries will be judged by a panel of experts from across Africa who will select the best media at the continental level.

The international Wiki Loves Africa competition is organised by the Wikimedia community that created Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, and built the free media archive Wikimedia Commons. Wiki Loves Africa is supported by WikiAfrica at the Africa Centre and is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and Fondation Orange.

Useful links

Websites:

Media release by the Africa Centre

For media queries contact:
English: Isla Haddow-Flood
Cell: (edited out for the wiki)
Email: islahf @ africacentre.net

French: Florence Devouard
Cell: (edited out for the wiki)
Email: fdevouard @ kumusha.org

NOTES FOR THE EDITOR

The Competition Rules

All photos must be taken by the person submitting them. They can be either self-uploaded or uploaded during a registered mass upload session.
Upload is done in October and November 2014 only. But you can enter media that was taken at any time, even historical photographs, as long as you own the copyright on these photographs.
All entries will have the following licence: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA 3.0). Read more about the Creative Commons licences here.
All eligible pictures will be categorised under Wiki Loves Africa 2014, this will be automatically assigned during the upload process.
Participants should enable e-mail on Wikimedia Commons to be eligible for prizes.

Local Organising Teams in the Focus Countries
To contact the focus country local teams, please click here

About WikiAfrica
The WikiAfrica project is an international collaboration that redresses the imbalance of factual heritage and cultural knowledge about Africa on Wikipedia by promoting a new approach to knowledge that is fully-inclusive, mainstream and intercultural. Its mission is to assist and support the growth of Wikipedia as a free and open encyclopaedia that provides greater access to Africa’s wealth of contemporary and historical realities.

www.wikiafrica.net

About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is the nonprofit charitable organisation that is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, a top-ten internet property.

https://wikimediafoundation.org

About the Africa Centre
The Africa Centre is both a physical entity and ongoing philosophical journey that explores how Pan-African cultural practice can be a catalyst for social change.

The Africa Centre operates in the belief that creativity and innovation are powerful tools that: manifest what otherwise would only sit in our imaginations; release new ideas and make them freely accessible; and ensure that people living on this soil can define for themselves what is possible and what their reality looks like.

These beliefs are brought to life through a range of programmes in various countries as well as online. Current programmes include the Artists in Residency, Badilisha Poetry X-Change, Everyday African Urbanism, Infecting The City, Talking Heads, and WikiAfrica. All of the projects celebrate and explore what it means to be in Africa today and what is conceivable for 21st-century Africans.

http://www.africacentre.net/