Wikimedia tutorial at DHASA Conference

On 3 December 2021, WikimediaZA was invited to The Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) conference organised in partnership with The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), an interdisciplinary conference for researchers working on all areas of Digital Humanities (including, but not limited to language, literature, visual art, performance and theatre studies, media studies, music, history, sociology, psychology, language technologies, library studies, philosophy, methodologies, software and computation, etc.). It aims to create the conditions for the emergence of a scientific Digital Humanities community of practice.

WikimediaZA ran an edit-a-thon to teach participants on the academic use of Wikipedia, Wikivarsity and Wikisource. The aim of the editathon was to

• translate already existing articles to South African languages,
• improve already existing article
• creating new articles about South African or African content.
• As well as to work with South African Universities that offer South African languages to adopt Creative Commons Licensing for all the thesis and dissertations written in Indigenous languages so that we can also easily make these works available on Wikipedia’s sister project Wikisource. As part of our 5 year strategic plan we believe this would be a revolutionary way to build on the indigenous knowledge corpus.