Igbo Wiki Days 2025

The Igbo Wiki Days 2025 was organized as a virtual workshop aimed at skill enhancement, expanding the community of active contributors to Igbo Wikipedia and other sister projects, and promoting advocacy for the Igbo language. We had the following specific objectives:

• Build the capacity and engagement of editors primarily on the Igbo Wikipedia, and other sister projects including Igbo Wikiquote, Igbo Wiktionary, Igbo Wikisource, Wikidata, and translatewiki.
• Strengthen advocacy efforts for the Igbo indigenous language.
• Improve event organizing and management skills for event organizers in the community.
• Build the translation skill of participants, especially with the content translation tool and other language tools.
• Recruit and train new editors.
• Develop a structured close mentorship program for both existing and new editors for a 3-month period.

Activities 

The workshop was held from September 19 – 21, 2025 with 83 registered participants. To build anticipation, we hosted a pre-event on September 6, 2025, with over 50 editors in attendance. At the pre-event, the trainer, UOzurumba (WMF), expanded on the Content Translation Tool. She shared practical steps on how to avoid common translation errors and best practices to ensure effective use of the tool.

Day 1 – September 19, 2025

The first day focused on event organizing, project management, and community engagement. With Udehb-WMF and EUwandu-WMF as trainers, participants learnt the concept of organizing in the Wikimedia movement, stages of event or campaign organizing, CampaignEvents Extension Tools, Transclusion and use cases. 

Day 2 – September 20, 2025

On the second day, we had Amir Aharoni who took us through an insightful session on Translatewiki.net, as a valuable localisation platform for language communities and open source projects. We had a demo showing how to make translations, while also encouraging participants to fully complete the translation of user interfaces and other pages into Igbo language. The second session was facilitated by King ChristLike, emphasizing on Wikipedia key policies and guidelines, setting user preferences, making major and minor edits, classes of articles, new article creation, and improving existing articles on the Igbo Wikipedia.

Day 3 – September 21, 2025

The grand finale was facilitated by Oby Ezeilo and Tochi Precious, which focused on Igbo Dialect Variation and Standardization. This session was quite interactive and helped to strengthen Igbo language advocacy. We tried to understand the Igbo dialects and their influence on content consistency. We also discussed strategies for handling dialectal differences in articles, as well as establishing content standards to ensure uniformity.

Mentorship Program

At the end of the workshop, we designed a structured mentorship program which lasted from October – December 2025. Participants chose their learning tracks across different Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource), and were paired with experienced editors within the community as mentors to further improve their skill, giving room for discussions, further learning and application. Overall, we had a total of 14 hosted mentorship sessions via zoom. Find all recordings and resources here. 

Here are selected testimonials from participants of the mentorship program:

“What motivated me to participate is the deal and hunger for growth on the Wikimedia space. The most interesting part for me was getting to know how to navigate some gadgets and settings that make contributions on Wikidata so stress free that I never knew existed.” – Charipearl

“I participated in the program so that I would be better equipped, that way I would become more efficient in my contributions. I learnt to fix reference errors and DefaultSort.” – Chikerenma Ndubuka

“My motivation to participate was to acquire skills which will help me contribute towards promoting Igbo language. I learnt about adding statements, uploading images, and translation.” – Philip Emeka

“My motivation to participate was to sharpen my writing skills and widen my knowledge in the editing horizon. I learnt about managing time during editathons, easy and fast editing format even during self translations.” – Iwuala Judith Chinenyenwa

“The primary motivation for me was to learn and become better. I learnt how to navigate on the Wikisource and also how to use tools on Wikidata.” – Andikan Efiok Eduok

Beyond the sessions and metrics, what truly defined the project was a shared commitment to empowering voices, strengthening digital literacy, and fostering a supportive environment where both new and experienced contributors could thrive. Igbo Wiki Days 2025 was not just an event, but a reminder that sustainable language revitalisation on Wikimedia is driven by mentorship, collaboration, and shared purpose—and that this collective momentum will continue to shape the future of Igbo-language knowledge online.