Education/News/January 2022/Offline Education project WikiChallenge closed its third edition

Offline Education project WikiChallenge closed its third edition

Author: Anthere (Florence Devouard), project manager WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique

Summary: The WikiChallenge African Schools is a writing competition dedicated to pupils aged 8-13 and which takes place in several French-speaking African countries. Launched in 2017, it just closed its 3rd edition with 138 articles published on Vikidia and over 800 pictures, drawings and videos produced by the children and hosted on Wikimedia Commons.

Social Media channels or hashtags:

Meta page : WikiChallenge African Schools
Main page of the contest
Facebook page
Images related to the contest on Commons: Commons Category

Tags

WikiChallenge, Education, Offline, WikiFundi, Vikidia, Fondation Orange, Wiki in Africa, Writing competition, Francophonie, Africa

The WikiChallenge African Schools is a writing competition dedicated to pupils aged 8-13 and which takes place in several French-speaking African countries. The objective is to learn how knowledge is constituted by contributing through the Vikidia platform, Wikipedia for children. Pupils from participating schools are invited to write encyclopedic articles on a subject relating to their immediate environment. The competition is open to organizations that are part of the network of Orange Digital Schools and using WikiFundi, a platform of Wiki editing in offline mode. Indeed, one of the peculiarities of these schools is that most of them are not connected to the Internet! Their participation therefore implies the presence of an on-site digital facilitator (and possibly the help of Wikimedians and Vikidians) responsible for training, facilitating and ultimately collecting the content produced by the students.

Better known in educational circles, Vikidia has been developing for 12 years on principles similar to those of the well-known encyclopedia but aimed at a younger audience, 8-13 year olds. It is distributed in the same way as Wikipedia, under the same license, and is open to the participation of young and old, according to rules co-constructed by the community of editors.

Due to the pandemic, we took the decision to merge two school years into one. A bit more challenging than the first two editions, we still managed to make it a success :)

Key figures

9 countries (Tunisia, Guinea Conakry, Madagascar, Mali, Cameroon, Senegal, DRC, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso)
100 Schools participant
138 submitted by the pupils
869 Photos, drawings et videos produced by the pupils
20 Winning schools