Wikimedia Chile in Visviri: Free knowledge and education at Chile’s starting point

This entry is part of our series Wiki Recorriendo Chile, (original text in spanish) an initiative that has taken us to different parts of the country to strengthen ties with local communities and members from varios regions, promoting a more open, diverse and representative knowledge deeply connected to the realities of each territory.

Text by: Patricio Romero Yunge, Education Director at Wikimedia Chile

In April 2025, the Education Program of Wikimedia Chile remotely launched the educational and digital certification project Wikiprofes at the Visviri Boarding School, located in one of the most remote and isolated corners of our country: the commune of General Lagos, in the Arica and Parinacota Region. Over 4,000 meters above sea level, Visviri marks the place where Chile literally begins, just 15 kilometers from the tri-border point with Bolivia and Peru.

We chose to start the project at this school because we believe it is more meaningful to reach places far from the capital, where digital gaps can pose real challenges for children, young people, and the wider Visviri community.

Our initiative seeks to address the challenges that the digital divide imposes in rural and remote areas by promoting the use of Wikimedia platforms as a tool to strengthen digital skills among both teachers and students. The goal: for every child graduating from the Visviri Boarding School to have the necessary tools to navigate digital environments independently, safely, and collaboratively as they continue their secondary education in places like Putre, Arica, or other areas of the country or region.

The project includes teacher training and student work focused on using Wikipedia, Wikispecies, and Wikimedia Commons to document elements of the local environment, such as flora, fauna, and traditional knowledge. One of the key objectives is also to encourage editing on Wikipedia in Aymara, the language spoken by the majority of the population in the area.

As part of this linguistic and cultural revitalization effort, we will invite native Aymara speakers from the community to share oral stories, including folktales, proverbs, and other traditions, which will be recorded and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Meanwhile, students will record their voices using Lingua Libre, helping to expand the Aymara-language content available online.

Pedagogical innovation at Chile’s Northern Edge

To kick off the project, I traveled to Visviri from July 21 to 25. Getting to this town is a significant challenge: it’s about a 7-hour drive from Arica along high-altitude roads. Being such a remote area, it still lacks a permanent electricity supply: power cuts happen every night and the service is restored the following morning.

The Visviri Boarding School includes Chilean, Peruvian, and Bolivian students (as those are the closest areas), and despite the difficulties, it has a committed teaching staff dedicated to pedagogical innovation. One such educator is teacher Nelson Acuña, who is leading a project to document ancestral knowledge about medicinal plants from the Altiplano (Andean highlands). Students actively participate in this work by gathering native tubers, explaining their traditional uses, and complementing this with scientific knowledge acquired in class.

This collaborative work is a tangible example of how ancestral knowledge can be connected with digital technologies to preserve, share, and strengthen the knowledge and languages of each community.

From where Chile begins, we hope this experience becomes a replicable model for other rural and Indigenous areas of the country and region, advancing towards truly free, diverse, and territorially distributed knowledge.

Photos: Promeroy CC BY SA 4.0