Bringing WikiForHumanRights into focus: Climate storytelling from around the Wikimedia Movement

Wikimedia communities often deploy a variety of communication tactics to share their participation in movement campaigns. In 2023, during the WikiForHumanRights Campaign, we witnessed new and inspiring communication strategies used by organizers in the movement. 

The 2023 Senior Content Campaign Organizing Fellow, Euphemia Uwandu accompanied by Wikimedia communities, adopted a regular weekly storytelling practice on LinkedIn. Find them all here (post 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). These stories reached broad and more diverse professional audiences from across the Wikimedia community and beyond with the collective efforts of the movement in building public knowledge on climate change and sustainability. Specifically, it featured collections of different community activities in the 2023 WikiForHumanRights campaign. One of the highlights from these posts told the story from the Maghreb, where campaign regional coordinator, Amine Benloulou Muhammad worked with regional communities in the region to shoot a video at the Botanical Garden Hamma in Algiers, Algeria. This video, featured in Arabic and sign languages evokes a sense of urgency and inspires viewers to participate in building public knowledge about the right to a healthy environment on Wikimedia projects through the campaign. 

Beyond this, some communities leveraged radio shows for elevating the campaign work. For example, the WAFTAI community in Cameroon engaged in a talk show on Nkwalla radio and the Algeria community on the Mostaganem radio. 

Inspired by these innovative storytelling practices and campaign activities, Romeo Lomara, a 2022 Organizer Lab participant initiated the WikiForHumanRights 2023 Podcast to feature stories of implementing communities. 

Eugine Masiku, the communications officer at Open Foundation West Africa and podcast participant, shared their strategy and motivation in organizing a local campaign photowalk in the Walewale community in Ghana. According to Eugine, they focused on less commercialized communities to sensitize people on climate change and how they can mitigate flooding and deforestation due to industrialization efforts through advocacy on the topic on Wikimedia commons.  

If you want to learn more about the great work of different Wikimedia communities in communicating about the campaign in different capacities, we invite you to see the video promotion, Campaign podcast, LinkedIn weekly storytelling, and the radio shows in Cameroon and Algeria. 

Euphemia has shared more lessons from the campaign in this post on Diff.