In Conversation with Nichole Saad from the Wikimedia Foundation!

My name is Nichole Saad, I lead the Education Team at the Wikimedia Foundation.

WHAT IS WIKIPEDIA’S VISION FOR AFRICA?

Wikipedia is a product of a movement of people who believe that free knowledge should be available to everyone. The mission of the movement is for the sum of all human knowledge to be available to everyone in the world for free and for free participation in knowledge creation. The movement is made up of multiple actors, including the Foundation, which is kind of like the fiscal sponsor for it.

There are other affiliated organisations all around the world, including in Africa. We have chapters, user groups and affiliated and allied organisations. There are also individual contributors all around the world who participate in the movement because they believe in its mission. The foundation is there to facilitate that.

If you look at content available online right now only about 10% of edits about Africa come from the African continent. So who’s writing the story of Africa? Our vision is to change that. To let Africa tell its own story online and to centre marginalised knowledge. The Wikimedia Movement strategy for 2030 states, “As a social movement, we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. We will break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge.”

Our vision on the Education Team is that the Wikimedia projects can be used in education to promote student learning in a way that is right for the context. In Armenia, for example, they run Wikiclubs and camps for students to participate in after school. Sometimes they write about the history of their town or they’ll go and take pictures and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. In Africa, you have a lot of really interesting activities happening. At the university level some professors will assign a Wikipedia article as an assignment instead of a traditional essay. We are supporting a team of volunteers in Ghana who are working with students in an after-school programme who are learning about the circle economy. They are going to create a school garden using the information they learned and will document it on Wikimedia projects so that others can follow in their footsteps.

HOW WILL THE WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION ACTIVELY SUPPORT AFRICANS IN TERMS OF EDUCATION PROGRAMMES?

We provide opportunities and we give equal access to those opportunities to people all over the world. We currently have three main projects that we’re working on in collaboration with our community. The one that I just mentioned we call the Wikimedia and Education Greenhouse. It has two components: one of the components is a kind of idea incubator. It was open to applications worldwide, and we selected the project in Ghana because it was the most innovative and inspiring project. It is essentially like a startup incubator but for a Wikimedia and Education Project. They get seed funding, ongoing mentorship, and on site visits to support the project throughout.

WILL THEY GET PAID?

They’re volunteers who are affiliated with one of our partner organisations in Ghana called the Open Foundation West Africa. They get seed funding to spend on their project.

WHAT OTHER PROJECTS ARE YOU WORKING ON?

Alongside the incubator part, but there’s also an online course that’s open for everyone. Now anyone can follow along and learn the same things as the team in the incubator. We currently have about 100 people enrolled in the online course. Some of them are from Africa, the rest are from all over the world. The course is currently in English, but we’re hoping that once it is successful, it will be adopted into local languages for people to contextualise to their to their own realities.

The other big project that we are operating this year is Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom. This project is working alongside our communities in three different countries to create teacher learning resources that help teachers understand how to use Wikipedia to teach information literacy. Research found that teachers use Wikipedia for their own learning, to plan their lessons, but they refuse to let students use it as a reference. This is interesting because one of the most important 21st century skills is information literacy. So rather than saying ‘don’t use something’ it’s better to teach students how to check the information for accuracy and reliability. Wikipedia is one of the best tools for that, because every piece of information on Wikipedia can be sourced.

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