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The institution

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FCAT - African Festival of Cordoba is a movie festival organized by Al Tarab, a non-profit association founded in Tarifa, Spain in 2004 in order to promote and disseminate the African culture in Spanish-speaking countries and in Africa itself, mainly through movies and cultural cooperation activities. For this purpose Al Tarab keeps an archive based in Seville with 700 "African" titles which were subtitled in Spanish, and cooperates with fellow institutions such as the Festival del cinema africano, d'Asia e America Latina di Milano and the Festival del cinema africano di Verona. The Festival was held from 2004 to 2011 in Tarifa, while the 2012 edition is going to be held in Cordoba (that's why the name mentions both cities).

The Festival began cooperating with Wikipedia in 2010 for the WikiAfrica project by adopting the CC-BY-SA license on its site, allowing users to create new encyclopedia entries and to enrich existing documentation on African cinema. The decision to adopt the CC BY-SA is closely related to the interest of the festival towards the WikiAfrica project and to the goal of making information on cultural production in Africa more easily accessible. In 2011 FCAT Cordoba joins the Share Your Knowledge project (from now on SYK). Hundreds of records of movies ​​are available on the festival site under a free license and in three languages, including technical details, divided into three categories: fiction, documentary and animation.

As of writing (May 2012), along with many entries about movies, an article about the Festival itself can be read in both English and Spanish, describing its history, structure and prizes; the Spanish encyclopedia also features an article about the 2011 edition.

Analysis of contents and upload process

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Although SYK is an Italian project, the Festival is "multilingual", so this partnership is really international. Articles in Spanish, English and French were uploaded on the matching language projects by the tutor of the SYK project[1], together with the template that identifies them as being FCAT Cordoba contents, and included in a category. Of course, the pages were also "connected" to each other by a so-called interwiki, which is a link, placed in the left column, that allows them to be quickly reached.

A number of concerns have arisen on the Spanish Wikipedia because of the dual license on the site fcat.es, but they were quickly overcome.

The same happened on the French Wikipedia, where importing contents was slightly more problematic. The presence of the same texts on websites beyond fcat.es did sound a warning bell in a sysop, and the uploads were suspended for one day. Also, as the notability criteria differ from one project to another, many of the entries were deemed not automatically eligible (for movies shorter than 3' and not in French[2]). The discussion revealed some interesting points, such as the difficulty, in some cases, to find sources as required by the guidelines (due to a "cultural gap") or the need to lower some requirements, and hopefully if the community decides to discuss these topics again, it will do so while keeping this precedent in mind.

The Original Barnstar received from user:M.casanova on en.wiki

It went better on the English Wikipedia, where Wikipedians just recommended to avoid massive uploads of one-sourced articles and some of the contents were incorporated in more general entries. Michele even got a barnstar (the image of a "medal", an informal appreciation widespread among Wikipedians) in recognition for his work on African cinema!

Meeting difficulties is normal when dealing with contents that were not originally designed for the publication on an encyclopedia and therefore don't include a substantial bibliography, but the situation is certainly not easy to handle for those who try to publish the articles, among the jungle of copyright notices, warnings, and especially notability criteria, reflecting the different sensitivity of the linguistic communities which decided them. The Festival, however, also experienced the best aspects of the collaborative projects by Wikimedia Foundation: on several occasions there was the intervention of unknown users to save an entry from being deleted finding sources to expand it and confirm its informative value (as these revisions by users not involved in the project on "Le beurre et l'argent du beurre" or those on "La Robe du temps"); the common evolutionary process of an article occurred too, once it is created it attracts many users who spontaneously improve and enrich it ("Benda Bilili!", "Moustapha Alassane, cinéaste du possible").

An illustration of 1810, which represents Saartjie Baartman
The Italian director Andrea Segre

Moreover, valuable entries of relevant movies can be found among the contents of the Festival, made by popular directors or selected, nominated for an award, winners in major international film festivals. As an example, see "Black Venus", the sad story of the Hottentot Venus, Saartjie Baartman which was awarded the 2010 Equal Opportunity Award in Venice, or some of the works of Djibril Diop Mambety, considered among the most original, visionary and experimental filmmakers in the African continent, or "Las cartas de Alou", award-winning at the Spanish Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Goya and San Sebastián. And now these other wikis contain information on two major works of the Italian filmmaker Segre, Come un uomo sulla terra and Il Sangue verde.

In addition to the aforementioned Black Venus, the most visited articles[3] on fr.wiki are the French "Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès" and the Franco-Algerian "Bab el Web"; there is much curiosity on es.wiki about two works by Michel Ochelot, "Kirikou et la sorcière" and "Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages", while on en.wiki much interest arose for Kechiche's film, "Desert Flower" and "Xala". From March (when uploads started on en.wiki) to mid-May 2012 the overall views of the 1270 created or improved pages are well over 200,000, about two-thirds of them coming from the anglophone project.

The contribution that the Festival can give to Wikipedia is still huge. In May 2012 articles about directors and actors are still missing; newly created pages need to be connected, as they sometimes refer correctly to each other but not to the Italian version; it is necessary (last but not least!) to enhance the festival properly, at least by updating the articles of films to reflect that they won a FCAT prize, and perhaps creating articles about the past editions of the event.

Article by Erica Litrenta, May 2012

Results (May 2012)

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Notes

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  1. ^ Michele Casanova (user:m.casanova), tutor of the project Share Your Knowledge.
  2. ^ http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Projet:Cinéma#Admissibilit.C3.A9_des_films
  3. ^ Data harvesting: May 2012.

In the press

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