Hello there! Welcome to the University Students Wikimedians communitiesâ monthly learning series. This series will contain a total of two seasons and each season will contain 6 episodes. The main of this series is to share our experience in establishing, running, and maintaining wiki clubs and communities as a community-based in Tanzania for the years 2022-2023 projects which are currently running.
In this particular episode, we will be focusing on the programs that run from July to August (One month) where we had three regions participating (i.e. Morogoro, Dodoma, and Iringa regions).
Planning and Structuring
As well-known planning and structuring are the basics and the key to a successful project. The University Students Wikimedians Core Organizing Team (USW C.O.T) had the mandate to support the communities in the whole process so everything was put in place before the beginning of the project where we had a training for trainersâ session which included the C.O.T and the club leaders in the late June 2022 at Udzungwa in Morogoro region.
The main aim of the training for trainers was to equip all leaders with the skills needed to run the clubs and different departments during the whole period of the project.
However, in this particular episode, all the events were online!
Kickoff
After a long wait from the communitiesâ members, we were able to kick off the project in mid-July 15th 2022 where we had all three regions participating in the programs. All the clubs had a chance to choose their preferred edit-a-thon theme after which the clubsâ leader had to prepare the list of articles that were to be worked on.
Monitoring and Maintaining
With the help from the Clubsâ Coordinator, Miss Wahida we were able to monitor the progress of each club using the outreach dashboard for metrics, online sessions, one on one calls, and in-person meetups with some of the members just to make sure everything is running as planned before the programs end date.
Challenges
As well-known challenges are part of any given project and for us, we did also face challenges during the running of our project as stated below:
Online Events
Due to the closure of Colleges and Universities in Tanzania, we were unable to run in-person events and thus we were forced to move online. This was a challenge due to other editors not being able to utilize the technology efficiently mostly for the newbies and hence we had to use a lot of time providing training.
Skills
A big challenge was for the newbies who were new to computer use. Basic computer skills were to be taught before they could join in contributing to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. However, we are grateful we were able to achieve a great outcome through the program.
Inactive members
We faced a challenge where we had many inactive members in the community. Many of the inactive participants were due to the interference between their timetable and the programsâ timetable. Also, we have students who were at their field practical training so lacking enough time to participate in the edit-a-thon. We are still looking for a way forward on this issue.
Privacy, Safety, and Friendly space
As a community, we are always committed to the provision of privacy, safety, and friendly space to all the community and non-community members. During this episode, no act violated any of these. We are happy and will always make sure that we maintain this act during and after the project.
Outcomes
For this particular episode, we were contributing to the Swahili Wikipedia, and below are the statistics and outcome data for this program.
New Articles Created: 414
The number of editors: 78
Articles Views (as of 26/08/2022 13:31 EAT): 5,458
Dashboard links:
https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/USW/Uoi_Club_July_2022/home
https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/USW/Moro_Swahili_Month/home
https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/USW/USW_CHSS/home
https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/UDOM/USW_CIVE_Club_July_Program/home
You join us in our upcoming events by emailing us via: hello@uswiki.africa or WhatsApp +255685261018.
Incase you missed our last post see it bellow:
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