The Langarchiv project, officially titled “Language as Archive: European Linguistics and the Social History of the Sahara and Sahel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” is an ambitious research initiative funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Its primary goal is to explore how African languages can serve as archives for writing the social history of the Sahara and Sahel regions during the 18th and 19th centuries. The project is hosted by the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF), Paris, and led by historian Camille Lefebvre (CNRS / EHESS), in collaboration with Ari Awagana (Leipzig University) and with a team of linguists, historians, and anthropologists.
Fig. 1: The scientific blog of the ERC project Langarchiv (https://langarchiv.hypotheses.org)
Training graduate students to cope with the uneven representation of Africa in Wikipedia
Among the various outputs of this project, which explores the intellectual dialogue between African and European scholars of the past, one stands out as particularly innovative in its use of digital humanities tools. Attentive to Wikipedia’s high potential for African studies for a long time, as much as to the uneven representation of the continent and its peoples in the encyclopedia, Lefebvre has been assigning her master’s students at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) to actively contribute to the open encyclopedia. Students are tasked with writing articles documenting African intellectuals and historical figures and sources produced in or about African languages, with a focus on West Africa and the Hausa- and Kanuri-speaking areas in particular. The perspective of this project is that of a collaborative and collective restitution of documents to write the history of Africa, or, to put it another way, a recirculation of sources and information.
The idea is simple: each student is assigned a topic (e.g. a person’s biography or a text) and must write the corresponding Wikipedia article. The protocol they have to follow is described in detail here. In brief, it is the following:
- 1. Introduction and Topic Selection: At the start of the year, students are introduced to the process, which includes identifying a relevant topic, drafting, revising, and familiarizing themselves with Wikipedia’s procedures. They are instructed not to publish anything before review and validation. Students can choose from a list of suggested topics related to West African scholars, European explorers, collectors, and archival collections, or propose their own if it aligns with the Langarchiv project’s goals.
- 2. Account Creation and Guidance: Students create Wikipedia accounts, either under their own names or pseudonyms. They are directed to resources explaining how to contribute, such as text and video guides.
- 3. Community Engagement: The list of proposed articles is posted on Wikipedia’s Bistro (a community noticeboard) to inform experienced contributors about upcoming creations or edits. This step often attracts volunteers willing to review or edit the articles.
- 4. Drafting and Review: Students draft their articles directly on Wikipedia’s sandbox or draft pages. The drafting process is iterative, with corrections and revisions archived in the article’s history. Once a draft is solid, it is reviewed by experienced Wikipedians, either those who expressed interest on the Bistro or through the review forum.
- 5. Publication and Improvement: After validation, the article is published. Once live, articles are often further improved and expanded by the wider Wikipedia community.
An easy process hiding hard work and collective discussions
However, the beginning of the process has shown that engaging graduate students with Wikipedia is not so easy, as the team was still learning Wikipedia’s procedures and standards. The Wikimedia community has indeed created a lot of rules to protect the open-source encyclopedia from false information, trolls, unsourced data, and subjectivity. While navigating these procedures, Lefebvre received feedback from experienced Wikipedians on her contributor page, which helped refine the approach. Consequently, the conversations between Lefebvre and some members of Wikimedia France are very instructive. The discussion on her personal page highlights this.
For example, when she asked the community to explain the issues that had been reported in some of the students’ first articles, she was answered by an experienced Wikipedian who had been nominated to monitor her. At the end of his explanation, he added: “Please also note that Wikipedia is not a place for conducting university assignments, and that the eligibility of these articles in relation to the notability defined in the WP:CGN recommendation is debatable.”
She replies that she carefully read the rules for admissibility of an article and its topic. However, her main argument is that she based her decision on the need to develop the Africa portal and African figures within Wikipedia, which was mentioned several times, adding: “Some figures or subjects may seem minor in France or today, but the stories they produced, or that have been produced about them, are extremely well known and taught in universities around the world.” Indeed, the project is all about giving more visibility to African contributors and sources.
Fig. 2: First steps in the Wikipedia community and discussions with experienced Wikipedian (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_utilisateur:Camille_Lefebvre)
This argument, as much as her serious engagement in respecting the rules, proved to be persuasive. The next very long answer (in French, but to be read attentively) explains how to welcome students into the community, among other pieces of advice. It indicates, for instance, the important but little-known page WP BISTRO, as well as the necessary page for any pedagogical use of Wikipedia.
Here, we can see how the Bistro page has been used to share new articles written by Lefebvre’s students that have already been read, corrected and validated by their professors. These articles are displayed in draft form before being read by a volunteer in the Wikipedia community.
Once the rules had been shared and the Wikimedia France community had been reassured that Lefebvre and her students wouldn’t create too much correction work for the Wikimedia volunteers, the project could really begin. It is now on a good path for its third year.
So far, 19 articles have been created and nine have been enhanced or translated, by students and researchers taking part in the project. Most of these articles belong to the Wikimedia France project (as each language develops its own community). While creating articles requires a lot of work, the same is true for modifying existing ones, as the example of the Moïse Landeroin page exemplifies (see the discussion on the acceptability of the genealogies).
Fig. 3: A list of the articles published on Wikipedia so far
Fig. 3b: A list of the project’s participants
Moreover, one article has been created in Wikipedia in Hausa language. It is a translation from French to Hausa. The history of this article shows that, once the main article has been edited, someone in the virtual space has intervened and proposed their own improvements. One German article (on the linguist Rudolf Prietze) has also been improved by adding a scientific bibliography.
Fig. 4: An article on the figure of Al-Hajj Musa ibn Hissein, an Hausa linguist
Moreover there is one English article, about the Old Kanembu or Tarjumo language, which was modified after the corresponding French article was created. Here is the personal page of the student responsible for these two articles, who has kept working on Wikipedia after his assignment. This page shows the intensity of the work on the article, even after the work on the draft.
In conclusion, this three-year experience has already produced very satisfying results: a community of young scholars is being trained in the complex and demanding protocol of submitting articles to the online encyclopaedia, some of them having pursued their activity autonomously after the academic year. One aspect of the project is contributing to African history, the other is to raise awareness of the Wikimedia tools (Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Wikimedia Commons) and encourage young people to use them by teaching them how to contribute and why it matters. The collaborative aspects of this work highlight the fact that history and knowledge are a shared responsibility. At a time when this free, collective, open-source project is under threat from conservative politics, and when AI is producing unsourced content, this commitment to producing highly academic content on the history of Africa and Africans is exemplary.
