Wikipedia African Month contest needs to spread

[Vipz]

Hello Movement Strategy Forum community! You all might already know about Wikipedia Asian Month - Meta - a contest that has as of 2022 been held 8 consecutive years on an average of over 50 projects, including its first year at 43. How did the contest manage to catch on so many projects and remain popular, that I don’t know. That is why I’m posting about this here to hopefully get some information.

In the shadows of Wikipedia Asian Month, a similar contest Wikipedia African Month - Meta (every May) has been initiated in 2019 and to this day has only been held on Romance-speaking (Spanish, Portuguese, Francophone, Romanian), Chinese and Esperanto Wikipedias (kudos to the Esperanto community, they’ve been diligent in supporting new initiatives).

Just today, by chance, I happened to visit Wikipedia:Systemic bias - Wikipedia. This is when I remembered this news post: Geotagging reveals Wikipedia is not quite so equal after all. It is from 2014, but the situation hasn’t really changed much for the better. Citing:

For a start, if you look at articles published about specific places such as monuments, buildings, festivals, battlefields, countries, or mountains, the imbalance is striking. Europe and North America account for a staggering 84% of these “geotagged” articles. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia, too. In fact, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica (14,959) than any country in Africa. And while there are just over 94,000 geotagged articles related to Japan, there are only 88,342 on the entire Middle East and North Africa region.

Africa, the second largest continent in both area and population, ranks dead last in coverage on Wikipedia. Geographic imbalance has to be fought. I’ll be doing my part by joining Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia to this edit-a-thon and hopefully persuade Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian communities to do the same. But who I really think would give a headstart for the initiative to spread further is English Wikipedia.

Is this something likely to interest editors and edit-a-thon/contest organizers as much as Wikipedia Asian Month does?

[Omotecho]

Just to chime in: There is:

• a Tenri University, a private institute with African studies major for African studies;
  ** at that university, Professor HATTORI, Shiho has translated Listen, Here is a Story: Ethnographic Life from Aka and Ngabda Women of the Congo Basin by Bonnie L. Hewlett as a team of three women anthropologists in Japan.
• Kyoto University, a national institute, has also a long history of African studies;
  ** I found bibliography for Azeb Girmai, a visiting researcher at Kyoto U.
  No personal contacts with those, just for input-sake and hope somebody closer to those entities would come and join the talk. Cheers,