Wikibase solutions for African Literary Metadata

The African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project is building a Wikibase instance to create a multilingual, linked data repository of African literary materials that often go uncatalogued in libraries and archives. While Wikidata enables a flexible solution for linking data on diverse materials, ALMEDA opted for creating a separate Wikibase instance because the project requires a robust ontology to repeal the effects of colonial library standards on literary description and to enable multilingual functionality. This paper elaborates the reasons for this choice, the challenges the project has faced in implementing a Wikibase instance, and the solutions it has employed to address those problems.