Black Lunch Table 2025 in Botswana: What it meant to be a Regional Proxy (and why it mattered)

When I accepted the role of Black Lunch Table (BLT) Regional Proxy for Botswana, I knew the work would be about more than campaigns, dashboards, and edit-a-thons. I saw it as a chance to help answer a bigger question we keep returning to in the Wikimedia movement: Who tells African stories and who gets left out?

This Diff blog post is a reflection on what we built through BLT 2025 with Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana, what we learned, and why this work is urgent for African knowledge equity.

Why BLT 2025 felt personal

Across the internet, African stories are still too often told about us, not by us. And even when stories exist, they’re frequently framed through external lenses shaped by unequal access to platforms, publishing power, and documentation systems.

Black Lunch Table 2025 gave us a practical way to push back:

• by strengthening structured data about Black people globally
• and by amplifying women’s voices through Wikiquote and Wikidata

As Regional Proxy, my role was to help coordinate locally, mobilize participation, support contributors, and keep the work aligned with our wider goal: representation with dignity and accuracy.

The conversation that framed everything: “Who tells African stories?”

On 30 August 2025, we hosted a virtual panel discussion themed: “Who tells African stories, and who gets left out? It wasn’t just a talk, it was a mirror. We reflected on how history, art, and identity are documented, and what it costs when African voices are missing from global knowledge spaces. We were joined by powerful voices, including:

• Ceslause Ogbonnaya (education enthusiast, digital inclusion advocate)
• Wendile Chipo (filmmaker, elevating underrepresented voices)
• Ruby D-Brown (women’s empowerment advocate, Africa Wiki Women co-founder)
• Thato Radijeng (director/producer focused on cultural heritage)
• and myself, Candy Khohliwe, moderating as Wikimedia Botswana’s Program coordinator and Co-founder

One message landed clearly: If we don’t document our knowledge, someone else will and we may not like the version that survives. That panel became the heartbeat of the entire BLT program. We also extended the conversation beyond the Wikimedia space through a Botswana Television interview on Saturday, 30 August 2025 (19:30), where Wikimedia Botswana representatives Chandapiwa Malema and Candy Khohliwe spoke about the inspiration behind the panel, the everyday challenges African contributors face, and why underrepresented regions, languages, and cultures still struggle for visibility across Wikimedia projects. The interview also highlighted how policies like notability can unintentionally disadvantage African topics when local achievements aren’t widely documented online reinforcing why partnerships, local storytelling, and intentional documentation are essential if we want Africa’s knowledge to be reflected fairly on the world’s digital stage.

What we delivered: big outcomes from a small cohort

One of the most encouraging lessons from BLT 2025 was this: You don’t need a massive editor community to create massive impact. You need focus, coordination, and clear goals. We hosted two Wiki trainings. as follows;

1) BLT Wikidata Contest 2025

Theme: Black people in entertainment, sports, and culture

This theme was intentionally chosen because entertainment, sports, and culture are some of the most visible yet most distorted spaces where Black people are represented globally. While Black creatives, athletes, and cultural practitioners have immense influence and impact, their contributions are often poorly documented, inconsistently linked, or completely missing from structured knowledge systems like Wikidata. By focusing on this theme, the campaign aimed to correct gaps, improve accuracy, and ensure that Black excellence is discoverable, verifiable, and connected across Wikipedia, search engines. Below are the results contributed by the Wikimedia Community Usergroup Botswana members from the BLT Wikidata Contest 2025 dashboard.

Results:

• 819 items created
• 957 items improved
• 10,400 total edits
• 13 active editors
• 1.18 million words added
• 5,590 references added
• 10,200 views recorded

2) BLT Wikiquote Contest 2025

Theme: Women

To deepen this focus, we also hosted a Wikiquote training (dashboard) to support contributors in documenting and curating women’s voices correctly and confidently. The training guided participants on how to identify notable quotes, attribute them accurately, and contextualize women’s words beyond relationships or secondary associations.

Results:

• 698 pages created
• 789 pages improved
• 1,060 total edits
• 12 active editors
• 410,000 words added
• 9,140 views recorded

The invisible work behind the visible results

The dashboards show outputs but not always the human work that makes them possible. As a Regional Proxy, the most important parts of the job were often behind the scenes:

• helping editors navigate notability, sourcing, and “what counts”
• building confidence for new contributors
• reminding people that their knowledge belongs online
• creating a sense of community and shared purpose

What BLT 2025 confirmed for me

1) Visibility is power – If knowledge isn’t documented, it becomes easy to erase, distort, or dismiss.

2) Data is storytelling too – Wikidata may look technical, but it shapes what the world can “find” and “know”.

3) Women’s voices face a double gap – It’s not only that there are fewer biographies, there’s also a gap in how women are represented: too often through relationships, not achievements.

4) Our communities can lead this work – We don’t need permission to tell our stories. We need commitment and platforms that protect and reflect our realities.

In summary, BLT 2025 in Botswana highlighted the power of intentional, community-led documentation in advancing knowledge equity. Through focused campaigns on Black people in entertainment, sports, and culture as well as women’s voices, alongside capacity-building trainings, public panel discussions, and national media engagement, we strengthened the visibility of Black excellence, creativity, and intellectual contributions across Wikimedia platforms. To explore more on the project see our project page here.