Who We Are: We Are a Family, Rebuilding Our Home in the Digital World

A meeting of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group in Tamale, Ghana.

If you were to look for us on a map, you would find us in the heart of Dagbon, in Northern Ghana. Our culture lives in our songs, our stories, and the wisdom of our elders. For a long time, that’s where our knowledge lived—in the air, in memories, in the oral traditions passed from grandmother to granddaughter, from father to son.

But the world is changing. The digital universe is expanding at a breathtaking speed, and for a long time, it felt like it was expanding without us. Our language, our history, our very identity, risked being left behind, becoming a footnote in the grand story of human knowledge.

This is who we are: We are the people who decided to say, “No more.”

We Are Not Just One; We Are a Family of Languages

We are the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group. We are teachers, students, farmers, and activists. We are sons and daughters of Dagbon who looked at the vast, brilliant, but incomplete story of Wikipedia and asked a simple, powerful question: ‘What about us?’

Our mission begins with Dagbani—a language spoken by millions of people in Northern Ghana. But our heart extends much further. We are part of a beautiful, large family: the Gur/Mabia languages.

Imagine a tree with many branches. One branch is Gurune, spoken by millions of people in the Upper East Region  and southern Burkina Faso. On another is our own Dagbani. On yet another is Dagaare, and many others. For too long, these sister languages, these branches of the same ancestral tree, have been absent from the digital world. They are spoken by millions, yet are virtually invisible online.

Our mission is to be the gardeners for this entire tree.

We work to:

• Incubate all 16 Gur/Mabia languages on Wikipedia.
• Develop structured data for them using Wikidata, so they become digitally usable.
• Provide a home and support for anyone who wants to contribute.

We are not just building a library for Dagbani; we are helping to build a digital homeland for an entire family of cultures across Benin, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. When we help a sister community like the Gurene Wikimedia Community or the Dagaare Wikimedia Community, we are strengthening our entire linguistic family. We are reuniting siblings who have been separated by borders, but never by heart.

The Spark: Why We Do This

Our work is not a hobby. It is an act of love. It is an act of courage and resistance.

Every time we create a new article on the Dagbani Wikipedia, we are not just adding text, we are planting a seed for a tree under which our grandchildren will one day sit and learn. We are building a digital home for a culture that has existed for centuries. We are translating the wisdom of our proverbs so a child in Tamale can understand them, and so a researcher in the USA can discover them. We are writing about festivals (e.g Damba festival), chiefs (e.g Yaa Naa), local foods (e.g Wasawasa), not as outsiders looking in, but as insiders reaching out.

We are fighting what we call “digital erosion”—the slow fading away of a culture when it doesn’t have a strong presence online. When the internet has little to say about you, it is as if you do not matter. We are here to scream into the digital silence, “We are here! We have always been here! And our story is beautiful.”

The Journey: Our Triumphs and Our Struggles

Our path has not been easy. We edit from our villages and on mobile data that is expensive and unreliable. We struggle to find verifiable, published sources about our own history, because so much of it is stored orally. We have felt the frustration of seeing a new editor join, make one well-intentioned edit, be met with a complex, scary warning message, and disappear forever.

But our triumphs, oh, our triumphs are what keep the flame burning.

The joy of seeing the article count on the Dagbani Wikipedia grows. The joy of watching a young person in our community use the wiki to learn a traditional song they had forgotten. The unforgettable moment when we learned that Dagbani was chosen as one of the first pilot languages for Wiki Functions, a recognition that our small, determined community is a global leader in the fight for language equity.

These are not just data points. They are heartbeats. They are proof that we are winning.

The Fire We Carry Forward: Our Vision in Action

Our vision is vast, but our steps are deliberate. Through edit-a-thons, we gather to breathe life into new articles. Through photographic contests, we fill Wikimedia Commons with the vibrant images of our people and our land. Through Wiki Clubs at universities like KNUST, TACE, BACE and HTU, we plant the seeds for the next generation of keepers.

We are building a movement, brick by digital brick.

So, who are we?

We are the keepers of a flame. The flame is our language. The flame is our culture. The flame is the simple, radical belief that every single person on this planet deserves to see their world reflected in the sum of all human knowledge.

We are building a library for cultures that never had one. We are giving our entire linguistic family a seat at the world’s table. We are writing our existence into the future, one edit at a time.

We are the Dagbani Wikimedians. And our story is just beginning.

If this story touched your heart, we invite you to join us. Whether you can help with translations, add a single fact, or simply share our mission, you can be a part of preserving world culture. Visit our Meta-Wiki page to learn more. We are open to all.

Thank you very much.