Africa Growth Pilot/Live Tutorials on Core Policies
A course focused on core policies
All Africans are invited to sign up for this new four-module free course on core policies. Details below:
The course consists of two introductory modules for everyone, and then two modules on core policies of Wikipedia, for those who express interest in contributing to Wikipedia. (It is expected that following module 2, some would self-select themselves out of Wikipedia training and pursue contribution on Commons, Wikisource, etc.)
The modules are:
- Preparing to participate in Wikimedia projects (outline)
- 101 Ways to Contribute to Wikimedia (outline)
- The Voice of Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View (outline)
- Sourcing knowledge: Verifiability on Wikipedia (outline)
The course will stress that it is equipping learners to edit and expand existing articles on Wikipedia (using neutral point of view and verifiable citations), but that we are deliberately leaving out discussion of the Notability policy, which is essential for creating new articles. This is in the interest of keeping this pilot minimal. WP:NPOV and WP:VER are enough to allow people to meaningfully contribute on Wikipedia as long as they don't seek to create new articles from scratch.
Without Notability (and an introduction to copyright and free licenses), the training in core policies is certainly incomplete. However, the pilot curriculum is a minimum viable curriculum, sufficient for this pilot. The full funnel envisioned in the larger Africa Growth program will certainly include those additional modules and more.
The total expected time commitment for the course is approximately 8 hours: 4 sessions of at around 2 hours per session.
Evaluation
Here is the evaluation report after six months.