Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania/Annual Report 2023

Introduction

Building collaborative platforms within the Wikimedia Movement is crucial for sustainability of the movement. Wikimedia Tanzania User group has been actively collaborating with the rest of Wiki communities in the region to achieve this. Below is the summary of the activities the user group has been engaged with for the year 2023.

Active participation on EARTHub research phase

The East Africa Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) proposal focused on doing extensive research on identifying the existing problems facing East African communities and finding out more whether having an EARTH Hub is something of interest to these communities as well as finding out how this hub will be a solution to the existing EA communities problems. Following this research, a plan and conversations with several well-established, and emerging communities will be carried out to help create a draft implementation plan, for future engagements, whether through a regional, thematic hub or not, and to seek the necessary agreement and support for the project at Wikimedia events.

Active participation at WikiIndaba 2022

Our user group had at least 4 in person members who engaged actively on this conference, one being serving as a COT member. Among other activities engaged in this conference, we participated in exploring how the new WMF campaign tool could help organizers to better organize and participate in Wikimedia events.

AfroCuration Project 2022 in Tanzania

Afrocuration project was a cultural and inspirational experience where participants were empowered to create knowledge on Wikipedia about their culture and identity, redressing the historical bias, and taking ownership of the digital narrative. During this project, Tanzanian Wikimedians joined this project by writing articles that related to the theme Africa Designs Future, the idea that was centered on telling stories about our African cultural designs to the world through the adding of content into our African Wiki projects including Swahili Wikipedia.This project was done in partnership between Wikimedia Tanzania with Moleskine Foundation in collaboration with Politecnico University’s School of Design through #WikiForUniversitiesProject also as part of exchange programs

Wiki Loves Africa 2022 in Tanzania

Wiki Loves Africa 2022 in Tanzania was an annual contest where anyone across Africa was invited to contribute media that relates to that year's theme to Wikimedia Commons) for use on Wikipedia and other project websites of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wiki Loves Africa encourages participants to contribute media (photographs, video, and audio) that illustrate the specific theme for that year. Each year the theme changes. Each year's theme is chosen by the community to be a universal, visually-rich, and culturally-specific topic (for example, markets, rites of passage, festivals, public art, cuisine, natural history, urbanity, daily life, notable persons, etc). For the year 2022 we encouraged participants to submit any photos of Home and Habitats. We were happy to get a signiicant number (584) photos depicting the target theme. These photos can be found in commons here

Participation on Swahili Wikipedia discussions

Our user group members continued to actively taking charge of matters ralated to building Swahili Wikipedia which includes both on wiki na offwiki feedback provision on Swahili Wikipedia improvement. There is a general awareness increament on the usage of Swahili Wikipedia Village pump

Special appreciation

The User groupo is grateful for the continued support from the Foundation and from all Wikimedia projects stake holders acorss the world for working together. We look forward to co-create more avenues for collaboration within the movement.