On 17th January 2026, the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group successfully organized a training session to introduce community members to Wikisource, one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s free knowledge projects.
The training formed part of the group’s ongoing commitment to building local capacity in open knowledge creation and preservation, especially in underrepresented languages and communities.
Participants were first taken through an overview of Wikisource, which is best described as a free online library of texts. Wikisource hosts a wide range of materials, including: Books and novels,Essays and poems, Historical documents and Letters and speeches
All materials on Wikisource are made available under open licenses, particularly the CC-BY-SA license, or are in the public domain, ensuring free access and reuse by anyone.
The session also explored the history of Wikisource. Fuseini Mohammed Kamal-Deen (User: Dnshitobu) took participants to learn that the project began in 2003 as “Project Sourceberg” at sources.wikipedia.org.
Initially, Wikisource operated as one multilingual wiki, but in 2007, it was reorganized into separate language subdomains to better support language-specific content development.
Today, Wikisource has over 70 language editions, and a Multilingual Wikisource, which hosts works in languages that do not yet have their own dedicated subdomain.
A key focus of the training was understanding what content can be added to Wikisource. The facilitator, explained the difference between Public domain works, and Freely licensed texts. Participants were guided on how copyright status determines whether a document is suitable for Wikisource, emphasizing the importance of respecting intellectual property while promoting open access.
The training included hands-on practical sessions where participants were introduced to core Wikisource editing activities, including: Adding books and documents,Creating and managing index pages, Proofreading scanned texts, Validating proofread pages and Transclusion, which involves assembling proofread pages into complete, readable documents.
These activities helped participants understand how raw scanned materials are transformed into high-quality, readable texts for public use.
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