Wikimedia MA User Group/2024

This page details the diverse array of projects and initiatives planned by the Wikimedia Morocco User Group in 2024. The group aims to participate in several endeavors both online and offline, such as projects involving editing and writing, technical advancements, conference participation, and thorough documentation using photographs, audio recordings, and videos.

General goals

• Number of all participants: 500
  • 300 professors online
  • 20 conference participants
  • 80 edit-a-thon participants
  • 100 contest participants
• Number of all editors in Wiki MA activities: 150
  • Number of new editors: 30
  • Number of retained editors: 10
• Number of all organizers of Wikimedia activities: 15
  • Number of new organizers: 5
• Content creation through Wiki MA activities:
  • Wikipedia articles: 3000 articles
    • New: 1000
    • Improved: 2000
• Wikimedia Commons: 1000 new media
• Wikidata: 1000 new items
• Wikimedia Incubator: 500 new entries

Reading Wikipedia in the classroom (4th edition)

Members

• Mounir Neddi :Contact person, local coordinator, and trainer.
• Abdelilah Jalal: Technical support and program implementation.
• Hanaa: assistant

Technical project

Goals

The goals for the next 3 years have been decided, but still need to be broken down by year.

Scope

• Wikipedia: local languages (ary, shi, zgh), and potentially (ar, fr, en)
• Wikidata
• Wikimedia Hackathon
• Tooforge

Members

• Mounir Afifi (Contact person)
• Zakaria
• Hachem
• Abdelilah Jalal
• Lhoussine AIT TAYFST

Subprojects

• Darija Text-to-speech (Hachem)
• Topic suggestion bot (Abdelilah Jalal)
• DarijaBot and other bot tasks (Mounir Afifi)
• Adding new items to Wikidata
• Presentations and events

Tasks

Finished

• Meeting 1 (11.02.2024)
• Decide on individual projects for present members

Planned

• Meeting 2 (TBD)
• Break down 3-year goals by year
• Presentation: how to get pages from Wikimedia projects, different approaches with python (TBD)

Documentation project

Goals

• 1000 new media (photos or videos) on Commons

Communication project

Goals

• Reach out to the larger community of Wikimedians and Moroccans
• Create 12 podcasts (1 per month) as part of WikiPodcast Morocco

Scope

• Social media: Facebook, Instagram
• Video/Audio Publishing platforms: YouTube, Spotify
• Communication apps: Telegram, WhatsApp

Members

• Farah (contact person)
• Loubna

Editing contests

Goals

• Number of contests: ?
• Number of participants: 100

Tasks

Planned

• Prepare lists of topics for potential edit-a-thons

Edits-a-thons

Goals

• Number of edit-a-thons: ?
• Number of participants: 80

Wikicamp Morocco 2024

Members

• Anass Sedrati
• Rachidourkia

Tasks

Finished

• Contact potential sponsors

Participation at Wikimedia events

Several members of Wikimedia Morocco User Group have applied for, and/or plan to participate in regional and international Wikimedia events, such as:

• Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 and AI Sauna
• Wikimania 2024
• WikiArabia 2024
• WikiConvention Francophone 2024
• WikiCon 2024
• WikiIndaba 2024

This project will follow these participations, learnings, and reports by participating members.

Wikimedia Hackathon 2024

Members

• User:AyourAchtouk
• User:Ideophagous

Goals

• Develop and maintain some technical tools used by Wikimedia Morocco projects and members
• Learn about other projects that could be useful to the Moroccan Wikimedia community
• Connect with the larger technical community within Wikimedia

See also: Ideophagous presenting two specific goals at the opening ceremony (min 52:15):

• DarijaBot on Toolforge
• Feedback on automating categories and articles

Tasks and Results

• Put DarijaBot on Toolforge Y
  • Task T7.1 for updating editor ranking on the main page of arywiki is now run from Toolforge on an hourly basis (shoutout to Urbanecm for his valuable help).

Last run of DarijaBot T7.1 on Toolforge when the screenhot was taken

First page editor ranking on arywiki

• Presented a session and received feedback about automating categories and articles on small Wikis Y
  • Etherpad (includes the transcript of the talk and discussion)
  • Phabricator task
  • Suggestion 1: Develop a UI with Codex to build a dynamic form that allows non-technical users to generate automated texts and categories
  • Suggestion 2: update ArticlePlaceholder Extension to use text templates filled with data from Wikidata
    • Phabricator task
• Project showcase by Ideophagous at 35:00
• Received feedback on the issue with the drop in human views on arywiki in Q1 of 2024 Y
  • Phabricator task
• Learned from more tech-savvy Wikimedians Y
• Collaborated and supported other Wikimedians when possible Y
• Sought collaborations with various Wikimedia chapters and User Groups Y
• Deployed a task to distribute navigational boxes usng TohaomgBot on arywiki with the help of Tohaomg (project showcase by Tohaomg at 30:40) Y

Future plans

• Create a simple tutorial to put a bot task on Toolforge for Wikimedia Morocco Technical Project (Techma)
• Do a workshop for members of Techma or any other Moroccan Wikimedians who want to put a tool on Toolforge
• Add other recurrent unsupervised tasks on Toolforge, such as DarijaBot tasks T2.1, T2.2, T3.1, T4 and T16
• Create a UI with Codex to generate simple articles where information is filled from Wikidata or an external source (POC)
• Translate messages for Wikiscore app on Translatewiki, to Standard Arabic and Moroccan Darija
• Request to join Wikimedia CEE Spring contest in 2025
• Make a list of websites used on arywiki for scraping

• 
  Tohaomg and Ideophagous at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024
• 
  Group photo 1
• 
  Group photo 2
• 
  Ideophagous at the closing ceremony

AI Sauna

The AI Sauna is a side event that took place in Helsinki, Finland, right after the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024, where some participants in the later also joined, in addition to other actors in the Artificial Intelligence arena, or those who seek collaborations involving AI applications, such as in preserving archives and libraries.

The event was held at the National Archives of Finland over two days, 5-6 May 2024.

Members

• User:AyourAchtouk
• User:Ideophagous

Project idea

• Use fine-tuning and RAG techniques to generate texts in Moroccan Darija

• 
  Ideophagous at the AI Sauna in Finland

Research project

Our group members presenting Darija Wiktionary at University of Navarra.

Attendees at day 1 of 8th Congress of Moroccan Arabic

Poster of 8th Congress of Moroccan Arabic at the conference room door.

Goals

• One publication Doing...
• Attending one conference Done

Members

• Anass Sedrati
• Reda benkhadra
• Mounir Afifi

Tasks

Finished

• Meeting 1 (21.01.2024)
• Meeting 2 (04.02.2024)
• Meeting 3 (11.02.2024)
• Meeting 4 (18.02.2024)
• Meeting 5 (25.02.2024)
• Meeting 6 (10.03.2024)
• Complete preparing the panel about Darija Wiktionary
• Participate at the conference at Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (24-26 April)

Planned

• Complete writing paper (State of the art of Moroccan Darija Wikipedia)

Results

In the period of 25-26 April, three members of the user group participated in the 8th Internation Congress of Moroccan Arabic, an academic conference organized at the Institute of Culture and Society of the University of Navarra, in Pamplona, Spain. Both Anass Sedrati and Mounir Afifi participated in person, while Reda Benkhadra joined through Zoom in both days.

In this conference, the focus was about Moroccan Darija in the digital era, with a considerable highlight over the Wikimedia project. In that sense, our group participated with two main contributions:

1. A communication about our research paper entitled "Standardizing Darija: Collaborative Approaches in the Moroccan Darija Wikipedia", detailing the state of the art of the Darija Wikipedia, from its inception until today (with over 10 000 articles); and
2. A round a table about "Darija Wiktionary: Building a Collaborative Moroccan Darija Dictionary", where we took the opportunity to explain the work done by the team in the Darija Wiktionary, that is currently in the Incubator, and the next steps related to it.

An important aspect of the conference was the participants of researchers from different universities and countries (Poland, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Morocco), who were all researching on Darija, and directly interacting with the material produced in the Wikimedia projects. Sitting in the same room as these notable researchers was a very valuable moment for our team members, who could both advocate the importance of free knowledge in helping under resourced languages, and get several inspirational ideas for collaborations and future ways of working.

Finally, the conference was also an occasion for our group members to enrich the Wikimedia projects, with pictures of notable participants who have a Wikipedia page, but were missing pictures, such as Farouk El Marrakchi, Marcin Michalski, and Mena Lafkioui, who all have now good images in their profiles in different languages, thanks to their participation in the conference.

Pictures of the event uploaded to Commons can be found in this category.

Malta-Morocco collaboration

Goals

• Complete edit-a-thon 1
• Find other venues for collaboration

Members (Wikimedia Morocco)

• Anass Sedrati
• Reda benkhadra
• Mounir Afifi
• Yosh cvd
• Rachid
• El Hachem

Tasks

Finished

• Meeting 1 (15.02.2024)

Planned

• Meeting 2 (date 14.05.2024)
• Complete all articles in edit-a-thon 1 list

Arywiki survey

Goals

• Conduct a survey to assess readers' backrgound and opinions on arywiki and Darija in general
• Adjust our strategies to develop the project

Members

• Anass Sedrati
• Reda benkhadra
• Mounir Afifi

Tasks

• Create a list of questions
• Get feedback from contact person at Wikimedia