GLAM/Newsletter/October 2012/Contents/Italy report
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Meeting African monuments, griots and Botswana administrative divisions
Exciting news in this month's wrap-up from WikiAfrica and Share Your Knowledge.
The international photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 is coming to an end: as top ten finalists are announced for each participating country, don't miss the report for the three African countries involved this year for the first time: more on the related page, which also contains details about the happy ending of an affair which concerned us closely: a proposal for the deletion of the whole WikiAfrica project on the English Wikipedia.
October's case study is focusing on one of the first institutions to join the projects, the Italian association and bookshop Officina Griot. As defined on en.wiki, a griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet and/or musician, [...] a repository of oral tradition. As such, they are sometimes also called bards. So it's not surprising that the main contribution by Officina Griot is a series of biographical articles (in Italian), mainly African writers.
Last but not least, the final efforts in the race to the 30,000 African "item" produced by the projects lead to the creation of a database. By using a bot, the data can be transformed into referenced stubs of villages and municipalities in Botswana. Examples of such stubs can be found on it.wiki, but it's worth mentioning that other Wikipedias have already taken advantage of this file such as nl.wiki or sv.wiki, and many others have shown interest in such valuable contents. Bot operators who would like to import them in their home wiki just need to drop us a line, provided their community explicitly allows the automated creation of articles like these.
