Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipack Africa Content/WikiFundi:WikiChallenge African Schools 2017

WikiChallenge African Schools

Welcome to WikiChallenge African Schools by the Orange Foundation!!

WikiChallenge African Schools, supported by the Orange Foundation, is a multinational contest that creates a fun, engaging way to learn about knowledge building by contributing to Wikipedia. The contest encourages students from the same school to work together to create an article about their area. Their article could be about their village or suburb, a notable person or a local historic or geographic feature.

Why is the WikiChallenge African Schools important?
Did you know that ...
With regards to the coverage of Africa on Wikipedia:

More edits originate from Hong Kong each quarter than do from the entire continent of Africa over the same period.
Only 12% of biographies in sub-Saharan Africa are about women.

With regards to who contributes what information on Wikipedia:

Only 25% of edits to subjects about the Sub-Saharan region are made from editors or writers from within the region.
Less than 20% of (all) Wikipedia contributors are female.
Only 16% of the biographies on the English Wikipedia are about women.

This is why WikiChallenge African Schools is important. It is a fun, exciting way of growing the next generation of Wikipedia editors from Africa, while adding vital information to Wikipedia about notable African subjects. As part of its work, the Orange Foundation assists 500 resource-poor schools that have no books or the Internet, to participate in the WikiChallenge. The schools without books and internet that are part of the Orange Foundation Digital Schools programme, can also participate because they are equipped with digital education kits that allow 130 000 students to access to academic and educational content such as off line Wikipedia. Now, through WikiFundi, they also have the possibility of submitting an article! WikiChallenge introduces boys and girls, teachers and school staff to the joys of contributing and sharing local knowledge with the World. Wikipedia needs an equal distribution of editors across the genders, and of course, more Africa-related articles on Wikipedia. WikiChallenge African Schools is working towards both. What could be more important than that?

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Contest timeline

The following are provisional deadlines:

15th November 2016: Registration of schools opens
15th January 2017: WikiChallenge African Schools launched
30th March 2017: WikiChallenge African Schools closes
15th May 2017: WikiChallenge African Schools winners announced

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Registration

The WikiChallenge challenges schools across Africa to compete with each other by writing Wikipedia articles about their city, town, village, city, suburb or local landmark. You can create your entry by using the WikiFundi software. You can either download it from the website (http://www.wikifundi.org) or, if your school is part of the Orange Foundation's Digital Schools Programme, you can use the digital education kit of the Orange Foundation.

How do you join the WikiChallenge African Schools? To join the contest, you should:

Understand more about the contest on the Frequently Asked Questions
Check online that your country is participating : The WikiChallenge page
Register for a user account on en.wikipedia or fr.wikipedia
Register your school's participation on this page
Get started!

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Rules

The competition is only open to schools.
The school must be registered by entering all details on this link.
The competition starts from 15th January 2017.
Submissions close at 23h00 UTC on 30th March 2017.
Schools can submit more than one article. Each class or each group can submit an article to the contest.
Submissions will only be eligible if:
- they are published on http://en.wikipedia.org (or on http://fr.wikipedia.org). Please note that when articles have been created on the WikiFundi platform, they must be transferred to en.wikipedia.org or fr.wikipedia.org to be eligible.
- they must be listed on this article submission page
- the school entry or entries must be submitted by a registered user of the Wikipedia website.
- All texts, photographs, illustrations or audio or video file contributed to Wikipedia and its sister projects must be released under the CC-BY-SA license. This means that everyone can use and reuse them, provided that they acknowledge the source and keep it under the same licence.
Only the user registered as the liaison for that school will be able to claim a prize (any additions to the articles by the Wikimedia community will be incidental).

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Contest Criteria

An international jury will select the best contributions per country based on the following criteria:

technical quality (structure, encyclopedic style, neutrality of content and layout)
quality of writing (spelling, style, syntax, typography)
length of the article (number of lines, words or characters)
originality and overall value and usefulness of the information (educational, historical, economic and / or cultural)
quality citations, links and illustrations of the articles (photos, maps).

Extra consideration will go to:
Illustrated articles: The presence of relevant media (photographs, illustrations, diagrams, audio or video) and/or maps illustrating the text will be an advantage, provided they are free of copyright and uploaded in advance on Wikimedia Commons. Maps can be created by the participant or sourced from OpenStreetMap.

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Prizes

There will be three winners per country. Each country will be judged by the entries within that country. Prize categories are not yet confirmed.

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The Team and Partners

The WikiChallenge African Schools was designed to support the WikiAfrica movement and Wikimedia volunteers across Africa.

It has been developed by Florence Devouard and Isla Haddow-Flood in collaboration with Wikimedia CH, and supported by the Orange Foundation and its Digital Schools programme in Africa. The WikiChallenge African Schools and its documentation is licenced under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

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