Wiki In Africa/Tech and Tools

The tech projects have been developed by Wiki In Africa to increase access to training and contribution, and to better support community engagement. Both tools support the outcomes of our programs, making them easier to achieve.

WikiFundi was developed to facilitate Wikimedia outreach and content creation-based education programs in places where access and data can be challenging. At its heart, WikiFundi is open-source software that provides an offline editing environment that mimics the Wikipedia ‘online’ environment. It allows for teaching and content creation when technology fails, access does not exist or is too expensive, and electricity is unreliable. With WikiFundi, individuals, groups, and communities can learn how to create and improve articles on a wiki and can work collaboratively to build articles and other content. In 2021, WikiFundi was awarded the Open Education Award of Excellence for Open Infrastructure.

The ISA Tool was developed to ensure that the images contributed each year to Wiki Loves Africa (and, in turn, other photographic contests, and GLAM collections) achieve their best potential placement on the Wikimedia projects through better labeling and descriptions.

The recruitment of a Lead Ambassador for Wiki Africa Tools is planned in 2024.

WikiFundi

Status: Active

WikiFundi provides an offline editable environment that is a similar experience to editing Wikipedia online. WikiFundi allows for training on, and contribution to, Wikipedia when technology, access and electricity outages fail or are not available at all. The project is currently operational in 16 countries via two programmes: Wikipack Africa (where it assists the outreach work of Wikipedians in Algeria, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda) and the WikiChallenge African Schools programme that is part of the Orange Foundation’s Digital Schools Project). The creation and pilot project has been funded by Foundation Orange, supported by Wikimedia CH in 2016. A version 2 was under development in summer 2018 with a release in fall 2018, with the support of Wikimedia Foundation. In 2021, a new release in Spanish language has been produced, in collaboration and with the support of Kiwix and Wikimedia CH, the promoted in 2022.

Students from Congo living in Cape Town, South Africa, explain how to use WikiFundi.

Links

WikiFundi - Summary: presentation, people, figures, releases etc.
http://www.wikifundi.org - WikiFundi Website
WikiFundi Offline Resources - Resources curated for WikiFundi

ISA Tool

Status: Active

The ISA Tool is a fun, multilingual, mobile-first 'microcontributions' tool, that makes it easy for (groups of inexperienced) people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons. With ISA, you can choose a pre-defined set of images on Commons and then ask contributors to 'tag' these with multilingual structured metadata. Points are counted for each contribution, and therefore it is possible to organize 'tagging' or microcontributions competitions or challenges with ISA.
ISA is originally built to provide better multilingual and structured descriptions of Wiki Loves Africa images. But it is also developed to be useful to all of the Wiki Loves competitions, and eventually for all media files on Wikimedia Commons.

Florence explains how the ISA Tool can be used to increase Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons.

ISA is developed as a collaboration between Wiki In Africa, Histropedia and the Structured Data team on Commons project. It is a GLAM pilot for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons. The software was released in fall 2019. An update of the tool was worked on in 2021-2022 in partnership with Wikimedia Sweden as part of the Content Partnership Hub. Report on the GLAM Newsletter
In January 2024, the recorded impact of ISA since its launch in 2019 is:

1,817,623 images reviewed
257 campaigns
602,675 Wikidata descriptions and contributions
1,132 unique participants.

Links

Additional materials

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