Wiki Open Design: when Ivorian illustration enters Wikimedia Commons

What if illustration became a powerful tool for sharing free knowledge? This is the successful challenge taken up by the Wiki Open Design project, led by Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire. Its goal: to mobilize Ivorian artists to document and illustrate their country’s culture, and make these creations freely accessible to everyone through Wikimedia Commons.

A project born from a simple observation. Côte d’Ivoire is rich in a vibrant and diverse cultural heritage—historical landmarks, influential figures, ancestral traditions, gastronomy, and craftsmanship. Yet, freely licensed visual resources to document this richness across Wikimedia projects remained scarce, or even nonexistent, for many topics.

Wiki Open Design emerged as a response to this gap. The idea was straightforward: bring together Ivorian illustrators and designers to create original visuals that reflect local culture, and publish them under free licenses on Wikimedia Commons so they can enhance Wikipedia and its sister projects.

A creative team serving free knowledge. Led by Félix Guébo, this edition brought together four other artists with complementary skills: illustrator Nana, designer Konan Abdias, and graphic designers Konan Marthe and Samuel Kakou. Together, they explored a wide range of tools—pencils, pens, digital tablets, and software such as Adobe Illustrator, Canva, and Photoshop—to produce artworks that are both culturally grounded and aligned with Wikimedia Commons standards.

The outcome lives up to the ambition: over 200 illustrations were created and uploaded to Commons. These visuals cover a broad range of themes, from portraits of historical figures to depictions of traditional dishes, as well as iconic landmarks and cultural practices.

Illustration as a tool for cultural documentation. Beyond the numbers, what makes Wiki Open Design truly unique is its approach. Unlike photography-based projects, illustration makes it possible to represent subjects for which few or no freely licensed images exist—historical figures, everyday life scenes, ritual objects, or culinary recipes. In this way, illustration becomes a powerful documentation tool in its own right.

This approach aligns closely with Wikimedia’s core mission: ensuring equitable access to knowledge for everyone, even when that knowledge is difficult to capture through photography alone. It also opens the door to new forms of contribution, making participation more accessible to artists who may not have experience in photography or encyclopedic writing.

A model for the Wikimedia movement. Wiki Open Design demonstrates how a Wikimedia community can leverage local expertise—in this case, a dynamic artistic and design scene—to address content gaps across Wikimedia projects. This model, centered on valuing local talent, is highly replicable in other contexts where freely licensed visual documentation is lacking.

For Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire, the project also marks an important step toward building a more diverse contributor community, bringing in artistic profiles alongside traditional text-based contributors. It sends a clear invitation to other affiliates: what if the next chapter of free knowledge was also written with a pencil?

🔗 Explore Wiki Open Design illustrations on Wikimedia Commons.
 Join your local Wikimedia community and contribute to documenting African culture.