Wiki For Universities (Wiki4Uni)

Wiki For Universities (Wiki4Uni) is project that seeks to involve open knowledge advocates mainly intellectuals and academicians from Universities into contributing to Wikimedia projects. Intrellectuals and academicians referes to people like (Students, Professors, Engineers, Researchers, Doctors, Lecturures, lawyers, experts and individuals from any other area of expertise).

Background

This project is a result of research, discussions, insights, opinions and experience obtained from mostly Tanzanian Wikimedians and partly from experience obtained from individuals (both from Tanzania and from other parts of the world) which mainly showed that Wikipedia got less traction to be regarded as one of the educational reliable source of information due to either lack of references to its topics and or lack of professionalism for some of topics that needs technical content for the benefit of the public. This scenario often makes most academicians such as Lectures, Doctors and Professors to ban their students to do not use Wikipedia in their educational activities. Another problem learnt is that some of these intellectuals ban the usage of Wikipedia even without having a clear understanding of What Wikipedia is and What Wikipedia is not, and they also lack good understanding of How best Wikipedia can be used for educational activities. One of the examples of topics is COVID -19 pandemic that has become the world tragedy and hence needing people with expertise in this area to chip in and help/support in writing reliable information about the disease into Wikipedia rather than staying aside and critising the available content made by other volunteers.

Presentation of the idea

This idea of of having an outreach program that educates, involve and recruit intellectuals to join the Wikimedia movement have been communicated several times in our User group annual plan meetings and during WikiIndaba 2021 through a 55 session that went with the tittle Swahili Wikipedia for SADC countries.

The Idea was also communicatted to the community resources team and other potential stake holders who are interested to join hands in making this project successiful.

Swahili Language and Swahili Wikipedia

During Wikiindaba 2021 the concept of this peroject was introduced and below is the abstract that was submitted:

In 2019, the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) adopted Swahili Language to be one of its fourth official languages. This has been a huge step towards formalizing and increase of consumption of the Swahili content online. Wikipedia being one of the biggest and most visited website/online encyclopedia, has the Wikipedia version namely Wikipedia ya Kiswahili(Swahili Wikipedia). Despite that SADC comprises of many countries, only few of these countries/communities has access/knowledge/awareness of how they can contribute to Swahili Wikipedia. Most of the Swahili administrators and contributors comes from East Africa (mainly Tanzania) and some from the diaspora individuals. Wikiindaba is good opportunity for the African Wiki contributors who come from the SADC countries to come together and get to know how they can be part of the Swahili Wikipedia content creators (editors, contributors and consumers of its contents). It is a good starting point for different communities to get to know each other and get some moment to spotlight other languages within Africa that can be contributed to Wikipedia by which some people have no awareness about them. It will be a good session to spotlight the standing of African Languages Wikipedias and gain experience from the people behind these projects.

Hence Wiki For Universities project will be used as a means of reaching out to different Universities to impact the knowledge about contributing to Swahili Wikipedia (for EA and SADC countries) as well as provision of capacity building to different Wikimedia projects as it may be seen fit by a particular University.

Impact of the project

• Expand the volunteers network of people who contribute to Swahili Wikipedia.
• Growth of Swahili Wikipedia due to involvement of Swahili contributors from East Africa, SADC countries and Swahili speakers from the Diaspora.
• Increase of intellect people into the Wikimedia movement, this will largely help to get content with proffesionalism in Wiki projects.
• Briedging the content gap existing between the African language Wikipedias through editathons, workshops, photo contests and trainings.
• Icreased knowledge and awareness and (positive change of mindset) about the usage of Wikipedia in educational activities.

Scalability of the project

Initial implementation of this project targets African universities in EA and in SADC countries, but the program can be adopted in any other parts of the world that are in need to work on similar scenarios as the one explained in this page.

The inaugural activity is set to kick off in February,2022 in Kenya, starting with a swahili capacity building workshop for community organisers within the the Wikimedia Community in Kenya. You can read more about the project by visiting this page: Igniting Swahili Wikipedia and Capacity Building in Kenya

Ongoing activities

1. Wikipedia Training for Diaspora Wikimedians- Janury 2022, will be co-organized by Tanzania Development Trust
2. Igniting Swahili Wikipedia and Capacity Building in Kenya- From Feb 2022