Planning Wikimedia Community User Group Gambia/Projects and Events

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Agenda and Reports

January

6/01/2018  : we held a general meetup to welcome volunteers and members of the Planning Wikipedia Gambia. We have registered so far eight (8) members :

Boubacar Colley Alagie Suwareh Dame Hane Sarifa Jallow Souleymane Salomon Jaxin Camara Amie Sonko Bakary Sonko

7/01/2018 : we held the first training session for the Planning group. We have succeeded so far to create an account for 7 members and took a global overview of the Wikimedia projects. Members took the time to discover the various projects such as :

Wikipedia (which is the main target of the Gambia planning group in order to contribute with significant articles related to the country) 

Commons (which we plan to contribute through our photothons) Wikidata Wikiquote MediaWiki WikiVoyages (which we plan to contribute too as Gambia is considered as one of the most chosen tourists destination) etc.

09/01/2018 :

We have the extra meetup to think and work on a roadmap which will be our core mission as wikimedian and plan to present the topic as lecture at WikiIndaba if accepted.

Extract : In Africa, we understood today that the key of the success in several domain is in the access to the information. Thus by seeing that all the Wikimedia projects works in the opening of a massive and free access to the information, we understood that a large-scale popularization was necessary to include as much as possible our local populations. The fact is our countries, like The Gambia, are in a wide range dominated by a very young population where the greater part are students and academics with usually a specific lack of access to open information; so our program as a grassroots approach aims to gather all that youth potentiality under wikimedia projects by highlighting and underlining the various interest and possibilities existing through digital and physical communities. With The Gambia as a case study, our approach is based on an global and local inclusion of the youth as main actors and contributors through different methods that raise their awareness about open culture and free knowledge platforms.

Challenges :

The main challenge we are facing is the internet access with a reliable access point to pass the restriction we are facing during trainings. We cannot create many accounts from the same access point, and we are very limited by the use of 3G hotspot sharing which is very costly and inefficient when it is about long duration use. And that main reason is limiting global contributions and volunteering. 

March

7/03/2018 : Held an online meeting for reporting on contributions and discuss about our invitation from the Art+Feminism event. Unfortunately the same challenge still faced and the limitation of a reliable internet access lead to return the invitation and the application for a grant to organize the event in Gambia.

April

09/04/2018 : Planning Wikimedia Gambia meetup committee and training (contributions of the month)

21/04/2018 - 22/04/2018 EditAthon Gambia

28/04/2018 - 29/04/2018 HackAthon Gambia (Special Phabricator Event)

May

06/05/2018 : Planning Wikimedia Gambia meetup committee and training (contributions of the month)

June

03/06/2018 : Planning Wikimedia Gambia meetup committee and training (contributions of the month)

July

21/07/2018 - 22/07/2018 EditAthon Gambia

28/07/2018 - 29/07/2018 HackAthon Gambia (Special Phabricator Event)