Wiki-Cred Boot-Camp for Information Professionals in Nigeria

The information ecosystem is incomplete without an information cycle that is made up of different stages which are typically characterized by creation, collection, processing, dissemination, use, storage, and disposition with the effort of the stakeholders such as authors and journalists who make up the focal point of information creation and collection; editors, reviewers, and publishers who are in charge of processing information; Librarians and Teachers who are in charge of disseminating, using, storing, and disposing information; and media literacy Activists advocating for a safer internet and open access to reliable and verifiable information globally. In today’s world, the information providers and consumers are made up of a category of stakeholders whose independent and collaborative efforts as resulted in the increasing availability of information resources in print and non-print formats that has led to information explosion and widespread mis/disinformation and fake news, making the retrieval of credible and reliable information almost impossible as the art of finding out what is true seems to be more difficult than ever before. Wiki-Cred Boot-Camp is aimed at engaging information professionals in Nigeria in a series of activities that will strengthen the credibility of the overall information ecosystem, change their misconceptions about Wikipedia, and expose them to other Wikimedia projects that promote open knowledge such as Wikiversity, Wikidata, and WikiCommons. .

Importance of the Project

This is the first effort to bring together different actors in the information ecosystem in Nigeria and expose them to the importance of Wikipedia in the information ecosystem as an open knowledge based platform; need and impact of their involvement in free knowledge; get their views and opinions on how they share and create knowledge, and how the technologies we use shape information and free knowledge production on Wikipedia; backend activities of Wikipedia reviewers and administrators to prevent mis/disinformation and fake news online; expose them to the five pillars , and core content policy of Wikipedia; it controls measures for fact-checking that can be applied to the general information ecosystem to curb misinformation and disinformation online and on Wikipedia. More so, this project has the potential to orient, revitalize, train, and expose teachers to 21st-century ICT skills that will enhance their teaching methodologies, media, and information literacy skills, and provided them with an alternative format for using Open Education Resources in their classroom using Wikipedia as a learning tool to deliver quality education for life -long learning in the Nigerian Education system. Furthermore, this project is important because it will make Teachers proactive content creators in the information ecosystem and provide them with actionable guides that will help their students to identify and fight mis/disinformation, and fake news online. Thereby improving their ability to make sense of information, the ability to verify, evaluate, and shift reliable information from information chaos. By tying Wikipedia to the components of UNESCO's Media and Information Literacy framework, it will also assist instructors to understand the five pillars of Wikipedia.

Impact

This project will recruit 30 information professionals (Journalists, Librarians, Academia’s, Publishers as well as Authors in Nigeria to develop vital media and information literacy skills that promotes critical engagement with Wikipedia as an open-source platform and provides open access to fact-based information online. It will also impact information professionals by training them on how to;

Create new roles and opportunities for information professionals to become Wikipedia content creators instead of consumers.
Debunk mal-information, mis/dis-information, and fake news online to become fact-checkers and verifiers of information on Wikipedia, and other online sources.
Provide information professionals with opportunities to teach students essential 21st-century skills for lifelong learning.
Also contribute to Wikipedia in all 3 local languages available on the wiki-space for Nigerians (e.g., Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa)
Increase teaching efficiency, develop lesson plan, and improve classroom activities by incorparating Wikipedia into their curriculum.
Create and/or improve 100+ articles on Wikipedia (i.e.grammatical errors, broken links,expanding article sections, adding citations and images etc).
Create and/or improve 100+ items on Wikidata.
Create and/or improve 10+ new courses on Wikiversity.