Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Festival di cinema africano di Verona

The African Film Festival of Verona is an international film festival dedicated to the African continent; it was founded in 1981 by the magazine Nigrizia of the Comboni Missionaries and by the Centro Missionario Diocesano, currently promoted and managed by the Comitato Festival del Cinema Africano (Centro Missionario Diocesano, Fondazione Nigrizia Onlus, Progettomondo MLAL).

History of collaboration

For details on the partnership between Wikipedia and Nigrizia, which sponsors the festival, see the relevant case study.

In 2009 a collaboration started between lettera27 and the it:Festival del cinema africano di Verona in order to make available the documentation of the festival on the Italian Wikipedia, a sort of spin-off of the partnership with Nigrizia. The festival gives access to its texts by sending the authorization to the Wikipedia OTRS service in Italian (in 2010 the license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike appears on its website). Two grant recipients at Afriradio, African students of cinema, start to contribute to Wikipedia in February and March, after following some training sessions on editing and using the site; they write articles with the support of Vanessa Lanari, Iolanda Pensa, some members of Wikimedia Italy and Wikipedians. Operations are not running smoothly,^[1] but every "bureaucratic" misunderstanding is soon overcome.

Camera Africa

Classici, noir, Nollywood e la nuova generazione del cinema delle Afriche

curators: Vanessa Lanari, with Fabrizio Colombo, Stefano Gaiga
publisher: Cierre
pages: 166
city and year of publication: Sommacampagna, 2011
language: Italian
ISBN 978-88-8314-627-5

The Festival of Verona and Afriradio also participate in the FESPACO 2009 - Festival Panafricain du cinéma et de la television de Ouagadougou. In the stand at MICA - Marché International du Cinéma et de la Television Africain WikiAfrica/Cinema postcards are handed to visitors (especially students), and at the same time the possibility to consult Wikipedia as a means of knowledge and sharing of knowledge and to collaborate in the project WikiAfrica/Cinema is proposed and explained. During the festival the same year lettera27 proposes the learning module "Cinema e Wikipedia nelle scuole: nuovi accessi per la cinematografia africana", aimed at students in secondary school. The course is divided into three meetings, two in class and one in a movie theather, with the vision of a film. In 2010 the Festival, to celebrate its first 30 years, issues a catalog published by Cierre Edizioni. You can read an introduction to this publication in Italian in the Wikicatalog page written by Vanessa Lanari (who is co-author), and which refers to a selection of articles on films and African authors included on the encyclopedia on the occasion.

Content analysis

In June 2012, it is not easy to define what the most relevant pages are among the 135 produced on it.wiki thanks to the Festival. But at least some of those so far created or modified, which still offer room for improvement, should be listed:

it:Samir Guesmi , French actor and director;
it:Rachid Bouchareb, French-Algerian, and his award-winning Indigènes - Days of Glory (2006)
it:Merzak Allouache, Algerian director;
it:Gaston Kaboré, griot and director from Burkina Faso;
it:Abderrahmane Sissako , Mauritanian director
it:Catch a Fire (film) , the 2006 film and the most visited article of this category with 5,000 hits between January and May 2012 only;
it:Mahamat-Saleh Haroun , Chadian director, whose biography is also present in 10 other Wikipedias including those in galician and even latin.

Of course, entries for the Festival itself and for the editions 2009 and 2010 were also created. The first steps for those who are willing to continue this hard work are of course to create the entry for other editions and to import at least the articles about the winners, which, however, are already present in almost every other language editions of Wikipedia, especially en.wiki. Finally, as the site of the Festival is also available in English and French, efforts can be "globalized" so that contents from Verona will reach a far, wider audience.