Wikiskills for Librarians Workshop 2025

Open Foundation West Africa (OFWA), in partnership with Goethe-Institut, organised a 3-day workshop for Librarians in Ghana. The workshop convened selected librarians from across the country, at OFWA’s premises in Accra. The aim was to empower them with the relevant skills and knowledge to navigate Wikipedia and its sister projects, to enhance their work and to enable them to play an active role in contributing to open knowledge.

The Librarians were taken through an introductory session on Wikipedia, which included creating an account, editing existing articles, creating articles, citation and referencing. They were additionally trained on using Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiki Commons. Training them on these Wikimedia sister projects is relevant to their role as guardians of information, which had been mainly restricted within the four walls. Empowering them with knowledge to navigate these sister projects, enables them to expand access to information beyond the physical walls, therefore contributing to open knowledge and access to information, advancing the goal to attain knowledge equity.

A key observation was that many of the participants held misconceptions about Wikipedia at the start of the workshop. Working within the academic space, the most prominent misconception was Wikipedia being viewed as a primary source with inaccurate information and consequently, advising their students against citing it as a reference.  At the end of the workshop, a lot of these myths surrounding Wikipedia were debunked, therefore resulting in a shift in perceptions of Wikipedia and its sister projects by the Librarians.

At the end of the workshop,  feedback from the librarians indicated that they were able to successfully edit and contribute to nearly all the Wikimedia projects on which they received training. Among these, Wikimedia Commons emerged as the most appealing Wikimedia project, and the one to which they successfully contributed the most.