On October 19, 2025, the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group office in Tamale was busy with a training on Common Voice and the Wikidata 13th Birthday celebration. We hosted a dual-purpose event: a pre-celebration of Wikidata’s 13th birthday and a hands-on training session for Mozilla Common Voice. The goal was simple but powerful: to equip our community with the skills to contribute to both structured data and spoken language preservation.
User:Musahfm opened the day with a warm welcome, setting the stage for a collaborative and productive gathering.
Session 1: Moving into the World of Wikidata
The first training block, led by Mr. Fuseini Kamaldeen (User:DnShitobu), focused on building a strong Wikidata foundation.
Wikidata Basics & Account Creation: DnShitobu began with a clear overview of what Wikidata is and why it matters. For our newest members, he provided a step-by-step guide on creating a Wikipedia account, a very important first step to getting a unique identity and contributing information across Wikimedia projects.
Navigating Your New Toolbox: Once accounts were created, the session moved to practical user skills. Participants learned how to add Babel boxes to their profiles to indicate language skills, change their interface language, manage their watchlists, and use talk pages for communication.
Session 2: Editing and Playing
With the basics covered, we moved on to active contribution, blending serious editing with fun.
Fuseini Abdul-Rafiu (User:Alhaj Darajat) took the participants through creating a new Wikidata item. Using the name “Nawabzada Muhammad Ali Khan Hoti” as a live example, he demonstrated the entire process, making it feel simple and achievable for everyone.
Learning Through Play: To solidify these new skills, DnShitobu continued the session with Wikidata Games. This hands-on session was a highlight, as participants played games to add missing descriptions to items and find images for unillustrated entries, turning the challenges of editing into more fun for both newcomers and experienced editors.
Session 3: Connecting Projects and Introducing a New Tool
After a short break, User:DnShitobu introduced the core team of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group. This was followed by an inspiring address from our Executive Director, Sadik Shahadu, who connected the dots for participants, explaining the big picture of Wikipedia and its sister projects.
Giving Dagbani a Voice: The focus then shifted to a crucial tool for language preservation: Mozilla Common Voice. DnShitobu explained its mission and how it is used to collect and donate voice data, which helps build open-source speech recognition technology for under-resourced languages like Dagbani.
Hands-On with Common Voice: User:Musahfm then took the lead, walking everyone through the process of creating a Common Voice account. The training covered the entire contribution workflow: how to navigate the main page, record and upload voice recordings, contribute sentences, and review submissions from others.
Wikidata Birthday Celebration
We concluded the day with a joyful pre-celebration of Wikidata’s 13th Birthday. Although the official birthday is on October 29th, we seized the opportunity to share a cake and celebrate the platform that helps structure the world’s knowledge. It was a perfect, sweet ending to a day dedicated to building skills, strengthening our community, and contributing to the global open-knowledge ecosystem.
Key Takeaways from the Event
Dual Skill Development: Participants left equipped with practical skills for two major platforms: editing structured data on Wikidata and contributing to speech technology for the Dagbani language via Mozilla Common Voice.
We’re saving the sound of our language: Learning about Mozilla Common Voice was powerful. It’s not just about writing our language down anymore; we’re also preserving the way it sounds for future generations.
It’s not as hard as it looks: Creating an account and making our first edit seemed scary, but the step-by-step guide made it easy. Everyone, even complete beginners, left feeling like they could actually do this.
Celebration keeps us going: Cutting the Wikidata birthday cake was a fun reminder that we are part of a global community. It feels good to celebrate what we all help to build.
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