WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique/Results and best practices 2024

Introduction

The WikiChallenge African Schools is a writing competition dedicated to pupils aged 8-13. It takes place in several African countries since 2017.

The key elements of the competition:

• improve teachers' ability to learn, understand, contribute and foster contribution to Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) within their school;
• an illustrated article by Vikidia about the village of each school (or about the city, neighborhood, local industry or geographic feature nearby);
• a friendly, inclusive and transdisciplinary project, generating satisfaction for the participants;

Links

• Main page of the competition
• Facebook page of the competition
• Images on Wikimedia Commons related to the competition
• Playlist Youtube

Tags

Education, Offline, WikiFundi, Vikidia, Writing competition, Francophonie, Africa

Presentation of the writing competition

The project is a training and writing program designed for schools. It is targeted at the education community to develop various skills of the youth and of their teachers, such as digital skills, collaborative skills, critical thinking etc. It is also meant to provide the opportunity to share knowledge since the content produced is shared through the Vikidia platform as well as through Wikimedia Commons.

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 Digital School network of the Orange Foundation and using WikiFundi, a platform of Wiki editing in offline mode. Indeed, one of the peculiarities of these schools is… that they are not not connected to the Internet! [1] 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. The competition fits into the pedagogical and educational framework. A teacher or school staff as a team can supervise and support it, with the local support of the Orange Foundation. Orange's support is expressed through the presence and support of a digital facilitator.

The articles submitted by the children are all published on the Vikidia encyclopedia, less known to the general public than its big sister Wikipedia. Better known in educational circles, Vikidia has been developing for over 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.

The theme of writing is free...but it is strongly suggested to create an article concerning the environment close to the school: its city, its village, a geographical point of interest, a museum located nearby or a local curiosity. The writing style should be suitable for an encyclopedic publication.