Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Officina Griot

The institution

The Association Officine GRIOT was founded in 2008 aiming to produce projects, events and artistic and cultural contents related to Africa and the diaspora. The Association is related to the homonymous library in Rome, Italy. In the culture of some nations of West Africa, the griot is a poet and singer who preserves the oral tradition of the ancestors, and in some pre-colonial historical contexts, it also had the role of interpreter and ambassador. Nowadays some contemporary writers and intellectuals still self-identify in this figure, see i.e. this interview with Cristina Ali Farah (in Italian, 2005). Thanks to their intervention it was possible to also engage Epoché Edizioni in the Share Your Knowledge project: it was a publishing house founded in Milan in 2003, which published literature from Mediterranean and Southern Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Ocean and the Middle East (closing in 2013).

History of the collaboration

The collaboration of Officina GRIOT with the Italian Wikipedia began in June 2011, following its participation in the SYK project. Officina GRIOT has made available all the texts^[1] from its site^[2] and from the Griot Library's site^[3] under the CC BY-SA license. Thanks to GRIOT's intervention, the publisher Epoché Edizioni has licensed under CC BY-SA - through an OTRS ticket - various contents, including: biographies of authors and artists, cover images, back covers. This led to the creation of 17 new entries on it.wiki (mostly biographical) during the edit-a-thon in June 2011. The one with Griot is one of the first collaborations within the Share Your Knowledge project, and part of the initial pilot phase which involved other nine entities.

Upload of contents

The articles related to the contents by Griot and Epoché were added mainly during the edit-a-thon in 2011 by the Share Your Knowledge tutor Michele Casanova, and later by other users, a couple of them being Griot staff, G muz and TT 102. The images on Wikimedia Commons linked below, however, were all uploaded by Michele and come from a set^[4] by the non-profit institution Shoot for Change (S4C), set about the three-day meeting Biography of a continent: Africa 1960-2010^[5] (2010) which was kindly donated and licensed under CC BY-SA.

Content analysis

Most of the articles which are created or modified are biographies of internationally popular writers. Among the few exceptions there is the article about it:Epoché Edizioni itself and that about his best-selling book it:Come cucinarsi il marito all'africana. Many articles have been translated into English or French, some got additional bibliography (i.e. it:Yasmina Khadra), while others were completed by a link to the corresponding page on Library Griot's website for further study. Many new articles are about women in Africa, such as the sad story of it:Mariatu Kamara, or it:Maryse Condé (which spent some years teaching in the Continent), it:Aminata Sow Fall, it:Antjie Krog, it:Fatou Diome. And despite the fact that the WikiAfrica project is winding down, Griot has declared it will continue to work on certain articles until they became Good ones or get Featured: this proves that the project has actually paved the ground to further activities in the future.