Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Dagbani Wikimedians User Group 2022 Annual Programs

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Applicant details

Wikimedia username(s):

User:Shahadusadik

User:Din-nani1

Organization:

Dagbani Wikimedians User Group

G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?

Applied previously and did receive a grant

H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?

No

H.1 Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?

N/A

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

Additional information

R. Where will this proposal be implemented?

Ghana

S. Please indicate whether your work will be focused on one country (local), more than one or several countries in your region (regional) or has a cross-regional (global) scope:

Local

S1. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.

T. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)

https://dagbaniwikimedians.org/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCm-kfTKq73C1bhbsIKh6vQ

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

Proposal

1. What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? How does this proposal connect to past work and learning?

Increase the visibility of the Mole-Dagbani languages on Wikimedia: In 2021, the Dagbani Wikipedia graduated from the incubator to become a fully recognized language Wikipedia Since then, the Dagbani Wikimedians user group have been able to incubate two other sisters Mole-Dagbani languages, the Gurene and the Moore language Wikipedias.

The overall vision of the user group is to incubate all the 16 Mole-Dagbani languages spoken in Benin, Burkina Faso and Ghana on Wikipedia, develop structured data for these languages by leveraging the power of Wikidata to increase the visibility of all the languages on Wikimedia, and to provide general support for individuals and organizations interested in contributing to Wikipedia in these languages.

Recruitment and Community Engagement: Over the years, the Dagbani Wkimedians user group have been able to recruit and engage several volunteers with little or no prior knowledge of Wikimedia from our past projects.

Capacity Building: Through our engagement with community members, we want to equip them with the relevant skills necessary to contribute to Wikimedia projects. We have transformed some of the community members to take up some key leadership roles within the user group.

2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?

In line with the Wikimedia 2030 strategy recommendations, our community programs will work to support the following strategy recommendations:

Innovate in free knowledge: We believe that digital TV as a mass communication medium has the potential to reach more audiences in Ghana and beyond. To continuously explore and expand the range of free knowledge projects to stay relevant and to serve our user group's vision, we are continuing our ongoing tele-education program on NTV called the ‘Dagbani Wikipedia Saha’, a Wikipedia TV broadcast program that seeks to promote our programs, recruit volunteers and train more people who are interested in contributing to the Dagbani Wikipedia and may otherwise not be able to attend our in-person workshops because of their location, time and distance. https://w.wiki/57iw

Currently, the Dagbani Wikipedia does not have any significant coverage on Ghanaian politicians and parliamentarians as most of the contents on the Dagbani Wikipedia are mainly articles about people, places art and culture etc.

Every 4 years, the Electoral Commission of Ghana organizes general elections to elect a new president and lawmakers for the parliament of Ghana, which means some parliamentarians will be replaced.

Invest in Skills and Leadership Development: There is generally low interest in contributing to indigenous and low-resourced language Wikipedias in Africa just as the Dagbani Wikipedia in Ghana. Most Wikimedia language affiliate communities do not have the capacity needed to support smaller language Wikipedias.

Over 70% of our community volunteer base are students and teachers from different universities and colleges across the country and their contributions help the Dagbani Wikipedia to thrive. But once they leave for school, they are unable to participate in our programs due to distance and time.

To be able to equip them with the requisite skills required to contribute to Wikipedia, there is the need for us to take Wikipedia activities to these schools by establishing Wiki hubs that align with the ‘Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom’ program.

Provide for Safety and Inclusion/Identify Topics for Impact: We will establish community-wide standards for an inclusive, welcoming, safe, and harassment-free environment within our community. This will enable us to better attract and retain new female contributors and diverse volunteers and grow as a community.

Arts+Feminism Campaigns - Getting more female contributors for the Dagbani Wikipedia is quite challenging and there is a big gender gap on the Dagbani Wikipedia that we want to fix. We want to dedicate our community projects to programs that have more impact on bridging the content gap on Wikipedia through our Art+Feminism Campaigns. Currently, only 18% of biographies on the Dagbani Wikipedia are about women and less than 10% of women are currently contributing to the Dagbani Wikipedia.

Improve User Experience: Wikidata Lexicographical Data (Abstract Wikipedia) - As one of the 5 Seed languages for the rollout of Abstract Wikipedia in 2024, we want to focus on improving the user experience of all the Mole-Dagbani language Wikipedias and incubators, increase the lexicographic extension of Wikidata for Dagbani and other sister languages.

In addition to increasing the lexicographic extension of Wikidata to support the Abstract Wikipedia program, we also need to add language labels and descriptions to several Wikidata properties. Currently, only 0.08% of Wikidata labels are described in Dagbani (84,694). We want to shift the needle to a significant percentage by describing at least 1,000+ Wikidata labels in Dagbani.

Wiki Loves Activities - A significant percentage of photos uploaded during Wiki Loves Campaigns are currently not being used on other Wikimedia projects. We want to change this narrative by organizing edit-a-thons to create more articles and also attach existing photos to Wikipedia and Wikidata during our Wiki Loves Campaigns.

3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.

The main strategies we will adopt and the activities we will develop to achieve these changes are based on the following Wikimedia 2030 strategy recommendations:

Innovate in free knowledge: We will continue to use our ongoing tele-education program to promote our programs, recruit volunteers and train more people who are interested in contributing to the Dagbani Wikipedia and may otherwise not be able to attend our in-person workshops because of their location, time and distance.

The program will also be streamed live on Youtube and Facebook to enable us to connect with our audience, collect feedback and also respond to their questions.

We will organize a 'Parliament of Ghana Wiki Contest' series to create/improve on the biographies of members of the first four parliaments of the 4th Republic of Ghana. The 4 month-long edit-a-thon contest will help create and improve over 1,000 articles in the Dagbani, Gurene and Moore Wikipedias as well as Wikidata items for these parliamentarians (8th, 7th, 6th and the 5th parliament of the republic Ghana).

Invest in Skills and Leadership Development: We will educate more teachers about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and how they can use Wikipedia as a teaching tool.

More than 200 members from our communities and the campus Wiki hubs will benefit from our capacity building and leadership training programs.

We will establish three Wiki hubs at the University of Education, Bagabaga College of Education and the Tamale College of Education campuses. These hubs will help us connect Wikipedia to students and teachers as well as educating them about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and why they should be involved in contributing to Wikipedia.

Provide for Safety and Inclusion/Identify Topics for Impact: We will collaborate with the Assistance Hub and other women mission-aligned organizations in Ghana to recruit and train more female contributors on how to contribute to Wikipedia.

We will organize a series of Art+Feminism contests to create and improve more articles relating to women in sports, academia, STEM and entertainment.

Improve User Experience: As one of the selected focus languages for the abstract Wikipedia project, the community will embark on a two months Wikidata challenge to increase the lexicographical data for the Dagbani Wikipedia by creating at least 2,000 Wikidata Lexemes in Dagbani. Currently, less than 0.09% of Wikidata labels are described in Dagbani as a result of that, we will organize a series of Wikidata hack-a-thons to describe at least 500+ Wikidata properties labels in Dagbani.

We will organize Wiki Loves Folklore, Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments campaigns to contribute photos, audios and video files to Wikimedia commons.

We will also organize edit-a-thons to create and improve Wikipedia (Dagbani, Gurene and Moore) articles and Wikidata items for at least 50% of the photos uploaded from the contests.

4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?

Organizing Media outreach campaign: We want to leverage the power of digital media through the Dagbani Wikipedia Saha TV program to reach more volunteers who may otherwise not be able to attend some of our programs due to time and distance. We believe that digital TV as a mass communication medium has the potential to reach more audiences in Ghana and beyond. NTV is a northern-based free-to-air digital satellite TV channel on the Multi-TV decoder, which means anyone in Ghana and beyond can access our program irrespective of their geographical location.

Contests: We will organize a series of contests to create and improve biographies of Ghanaian parliamentarians through our parliament of Ghana contest series. Each contest series will focus on one of the eight parliaments of the 4th republic of Ghana. Volunteers are usually motivated more to take part in projects especially when prizes are involved as a reward and a recognition for their continuous efforts. Most people are eager to do more when they have to compete for prizes.

Organizing online/offline Workshops: We will organize online and offline workshops, edit-athons and hack-a-thons on various projects we will be embarking on to equip volunteers with the requisite skills necessary for contributing to Wikimedia projects. This will help build the capacity of community members and also enable them to take part in our community projects.

Organizing Edit-a-thons During Wiki Loves Campaigns: Only a few images from wiki loves are currently being used on Wikimedia projects. As a result of that, we will organize Edit-a-thons to add existing images to articles created and also write new articles during the Wiki loves campaigns and use the images uploaded on other Wikimedia projects.

Partnerships: As a community, our main strategy to expand the scope of our work in supporting the 16 Mole-Dagbani languages is to collaborate with academic institutions, GLAM institutions and organizations that are interested in supporting these languages. We will continue to work with the Dagbani Teachers Association, Art+Feminism, Rising Voices, Wikitonges and the teacher training colleges in Ghana to recruit more contributors for the Mole-Dagbani language Wikipedias.

5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?

No

5.1 If yes, provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan?

N/A

6. Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal.

Dagbani Wikipedia Saha - May 2022 to October 2022.

Parliament of Ghana Contest Series (4th Republic) - May 2022 to August 2022.
Community Engagement Activities - May, July, August, September, October and *November 2022 to January, February, March, April 2023.
Learning and Evaluation Excercise - June September and December.
Art + Feminism Campaigns - March to April 2023.
Wikidata:Lexicographical Data (Abstract Wikipedia) - October to November 2022.
Wiki Loves Campaigns - September 2022, February 2023 and April 2023.

_Timetable - 2022 Timeline.pdf

7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?

Sadik Shahadu User:Shahadusadik -Executive Director (Paid role)

The Executive Director is the leader of the organization and oversees all initiatives and programs related to the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group. He coordinates all the activities of the user group and ensures that projects are well executed.

Yussif Abdul-Rasheed User:Din-nani1 - Projects Manager (Paid role)

The Project Manager is responsible for managing all projects and will be in charge of managing grants and taking bookkeeping for all projects.

Khadija Iddrisu User:Dheejah IT Manager

The IT Manager is responsible for managing the website of the organization and also provides general IT support.

Alhassan Mohammed Awal User:Alhassan Mohammed Awal - Communications Manager

The Communications Manager will be in charge of providing both internal and external communication services. He will render outreach and campaigns services for all projects.

Fuseini Musah User:Musahfm - Co-lead, Moore Wikimedia Community

The Co-lead will serve as the resource person for the Moore community he will provide general support for the Moore Wikimedia community.

Fuseini Mohammed Kamal-Deen User:Dnshitobu - Co-lead, Gurene Wikimedia Community.

The Co-lead will serve as the resource person the Gurene community he will provide general support for the Gurune Wikimedia community.

Hamidu Rukaya- User:Ruky Wunpini - Logistics Manager

The Logistics Manager will basically be in charge of planning and managing logistics, transportation and purchase of materials required for the project.

Alhassan Abdul-Wadudu - User:Achiri Bitamsimli - Facilitator 1

The facilitator will be in charge of handling training sessions for the Dagbani Wikimedia User Group.

Abdul-Rafiu Fuseini- User:Alhaj Darajaati - Facilitator 2

The facilitator will be in charge of handling training sessions for the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group

8. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Content Gender gap, Language, Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

8.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.

Our programs are focused on preserving the 16 Mole Dagbani languages on Wikipedia and the internet at large, It also seeks to reduce the gender gap on the Dagbani Wikipedia.

Our tele-education program ensures that participants can participate in Wikipedia training sessions via TV broadcasts at the comfort of their homes without the need to travel our workshop centers.

Our Wiki Loves campaigns are helping us to increase the visibility of our cultural heritage by contributing audios, videos and images relating to the 16 Mole Dagbani languages on Wikimedia commons and other sister projects.

9. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.

Education, Advocacy, Culture, heritage or GLAM

10. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Please note, we had previously asked about inclusion and diversity in terms of CONTENTS, in this question we are asking about the diversity of PARTICIPANTS. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Gender Identity, Disabilities, Linguistic / Language

11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?

Our targeted participants are the Dagbani, Gurene and Moore language students and teachers at the universities, teacher training colleges and senior high schools in Ghana.

Over 70% of our current community is made up of students and teachers from Ghana.

We will organize ‘Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom’ programs to equip students with research and 21st-century skills. Teachers and educators will also learn how they can use Wikipedia as a teaching tool to facilitate teaching and learning.

Other contributors and volunteers include Dagbani, Gurene and the Moore language translators and researchers from Ghana.

To be able to continuously support these communities, we will provide stable internet access and/or data allowance to our most active contributors to enable them to contribute more to the Dagbani Wikipedia, Gurene and the Moore Wikipedia incubators.

Our community members who cannot afford laptops and internet data will have free access to our co-working space.

12. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?

As a Wikimedia affiliate User Group, we have created a friendly space policy for our community. Please find the link here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dagbani_Wikimedians_User_Group/Memberships.

We also hope to translate the UCOC into Dagbani so that our members can read and better understand the Wikimedia friendly policy and the universal code of conduct in Dagbani.

Again, we have created a simple reporting process for the community to report any form of misconduct, violation, abuse or bridge of community policy.

During our online and offline events, we always share our friendly space policy and community participation guidelines.

13. Do you have plans to work with Wikimedia communities, groups, or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?

Yes

13.1 If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.

We are currently working with the Global Open Initiative in Ghana, Gurene and the Moore Wikimedia communities in Ghana, the Dagbani Language Department of the University of Education Ghana (School of Languages), Art+Feminsm, Dagbani Teachers Association and the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub.

We use the Dagbani Wikipedia community portal to share our ongoing and upcoming projects.

We will share on the discussion pages of other Ghanaian Wikimedia community meta pages .

14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?

Yes

14.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.

We will continue to work with students and educators at the University of Education (School of Languages Department), Bagabaga College of Education (BACE). the Tamale college of education (TACE) and Dagbani Teachers Association.

We are currently in partnership with NTV and they currently give us up to 40% discount on TV airtime for the Dagbani Wikipedia Saha program.

We currently enjoy free radio airtime at Radio Tamale and Justice FM promote to discuss our Wiki Loves campaigns.

We will partner with other media institutions in northern Ghana to promote our projects and campaigns.

Social Impact Ghana Live Other local partners include:

The Assistance hub

Natural Language Processing Ghana

Ghana Bureau of Languages

We will continue to use the facilities of the Dagbani Language Department of the University of Education Ghana (School of Languages)

15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?

We will continue to organize bi-weekly meetups to retain and engage volunteers and contributors in our community.

Every week, our community will continue to improve the quality of at least one article on the Dagbani Wikipedia, Gurene and the Moore incubators respectively as part of our ‘article of the week’ program, where community members join hands to collectively add/improve the quality of an article through the week.

We will organize quarterly meetings for community members and partners to share their learning experiences.

We will conduct surveys to collect feedback from community members and partners on what worked or did not work well.

We will evaluate the overall impact of our initiatives by engaging our partners and volunteers to learn more about how we can sustain our relationship with them.

16. What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these. This can include factors such as external/contextual issues that may affect implementation, as well as internal issues, such as governance/leadership changes.

Anticipating risks and how to mitigate them is an important part of our organization’s planning process. Having a clear sense of these risks can help us prevent or prepare for upcoming risks. Below are some anticipated risks and ways we will ensure to mitigate risks in the event that they arise:

Scope risk (scope creep) occurs when the initial project objectives aren’t well-defined. It’s important to communicate our project roadmap with our team community and stakeholders from the beginning and hold firm to those parameters. How we will mitigate scope risk: We will mitigate scope risk by creating clear project parameters from the start of this project. This will strengthen our project scope. Being in consensus with our team and other stakeholders and communicating our vision with community members will help us mitigate this risk. We will also schedule regular progress check-ins to ensure that our projects stays in line with the original scope. Performance risk may occur when we deliver as well as initially expected. While we may not immediately identify the root cause of some projects, we can identify some risks that may lead to low performance and look for ways to prevent those risks. Examples of these risks include a time crunch and miscommunication among team members, stakeholders and our community.

How we mitigate low performance: Assessing potential low-performance risks early in our planning process can help us prepare very well. We intend to mitigate this kind of risk in the event that it occurs by creating a project performance monitoring tool to be able to track project performance.

Cost risk: To mitigate cost risk, we will create a project plan template to align with the deliverables, scope, and schedule. When the project goes into development, we will consider scheduling regular check-ins to review our budget and how we are pacing.

Time risk (project schedule risk), is the risk that tasks in your project will take longer than expected. This is a common risk that we may run into as an organization.

Time crunch: To mitigate time risk, we will adjust the time needed to complete the various projects in our planning phase and build in time contingency. That way, we will have wiggle room for scheduling later on. We will also do so by creating a project schedule using google sheets.

17. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of three options that most apply.

Improve User Experience, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Innovate in Free Knowledge

18. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.

No

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation

19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?

Improve on our community engagement activities - Do bi-weekly meet-ups in the hubs help retain and support volunteers and editors?

Reach out to more volunteers through TV broadcast and social media campaigns - Is our TV broadcast strategy helping to retain volunteers and editors?

Set up wiki campus hubs in universities and teacher training colleges - What motivates community members to contribute to Dagbani Wikipedia?

Increase partnership and collaborations - Did our alliance with NTV help us bring in new contributors and/or maintain existing contributors active?

Organize training and capacity building programs to empower team members and volunteers - What actions are taken that help improve the quality of articles that are contributed to Dagbani Wikipedia?

Improve the quality and quantity of articles on the Dagbani Wikipedia -What factors are leading to poor quality?

20. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following space provided.


Main Metrics	Description	Target
Awareness Campaign	1. We will broadcast 24 episodes of our Dagbani Wikipedia Saha on partner TV station to recruit, train create Wikipedia awareness using Digital TV broadcast. 2. We will organize Art+Feminism campaigns in 3 teacher training colleges to engage more students.	27
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

Here are some additional metrics that you can use if they are relevant to your work. Please note that this is just an optional list, mostly of quantitative metrics. They may complement the qualitative metrics you have defined in the previous boxes.


Additional Metrics	Description	Target
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities	We will retain at least 200 editors after this project	200
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities	At least 20 organizers will be retained after this project	20
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability	We hope tp retain at least 8 active strategic partners/institutions after this project	6
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors	We will share surveys after each project to learn more about how we can improve on our programs	N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees	We will evaluate the diversity of our participants and community from our project survey responses	N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications	We will reach at least 10,000 people from our TV program and at least 20,000 from all programs	30000
Number of activities developed	We hope to develop atleast 4 new projects from our current projects and communities	4
Number of volunteer hours	N/A	N/A

21. Additional core quantitative metrics. These core metrics will not tell the whole story about your work, but they are important for measuring some Movement-wide changes. Please try to include these core metrics if they are relevant to your work. If they are not, please use the space provided to explain why they are not relevant or why you can not capture this data. Your explanation will help us review our core metrics and make sure we are using the best ones for the movement as a whole.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Description	Target
Number of participants	This will include people who participate in our campaigns, workshops, contests, photowalks,edit-a-thons etc. Dagbani, Gurene and Moore communities)	800
Number of editors	This will include new, existing and returning editors from the Dagbani, Gurene and Moore Wikimedia communities.	400
Number of organizers	This will include the total number of event and campaign organizers from our community hubs, partners, Wiki communities	40

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target
Wikipedia	The total number of Dagbani Wikipedia articles created or improved.	1200
Wikimedia Commons	Total number of photos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons	7000
Wikidata	The total number of Wikidata items created or improved, Lexemes and Wikidata labels described in Dagbani.	10000
Incubator	The total number of articles created on Gurene and Moore Wikipedia incubator.	1000
N/A	N/A	N/A

21.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.

N/A

22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?

The outreach dashboard Wikidata query service The ISA tool The fountain tool The hashtag tool The montage tool

Financial Proposal

23. & 23.1 What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.

418349 GHS

23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?

92768.68 USD

23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ccazdgeLYA70tZumoAKpYle6wRM1GH1DZEDJC1NVT4Y/edit?usp=sharing

23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.

Our budget contains separate budget sheets for different projects, staffing, operational cost and administrative cost. These reflect the needs of our user group and the community at large.

Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.

Final Message

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Feedback

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