The Runyankore Wikipedia community has moved from building a test project in Wikimedia Incubator to receiving approval for its own Wikipedia. Behind that milestone is a story of practical mentorship, shared leadership, university partnerships, and volunteers determined to make knowledge available in their language.

Introduction

What does it take to build a Wikipedia in a language whose contributors often edit from mobile phones, while working through an interface that many find difficult to navigate? For the Runyankore Wikipedia community, the answer has been persistence, practical mentorship, stronger leadership, and a growing network of people and institutions willing to support the work.

At the time of publication, the Language Committee has approved the creation of Runyankore Wikipedia. The project is now awaiting the remaining technical work needed to create its independent site. That approval is a major achievement, but it is not the whole story. Behind it are volunteers who continued contributing despite technical and financial barriers, a community leader learning how to share responsibility, a mentor who helped turn broad ambitions into practical steps, and university students discovering that they could contribute to knowledge in their own language.

This is the story of what happened when the Runyankore community and the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub worked together.

A Community with Momentum, and Real Barriers

The Runyankore community entered the mentorship with a strong base. Its initial assessment recorded 654 pages, 54 active editors and 4076 edits. The community already had an emerging leadership structure, active communication channels, and a shared ambition to graduate from the Incubator into an independent Wikipedia.

There were also serious challenges. Many contributors relied primarily on mobile phones, with limited access to computers. Editing in Wikimedia Incubator on a small screen was difficult, especially for new contributors trying to understand prefixes, templates, categories, and other technical processes. Internet access and data costs also affected how often volunteers could participate. Even after the community created tutorials, the interface remained a barrier.

“Even with tutorials, the Incubator remains difficult to use. If it can be improved, it would make things much easier.”

The challenge was not a lack of interest. People wanted to contribute, but the pathway into editing was often more complicated than it needed to be. The community also wanted to broaden its content. Much of the early work focused on a small number of subjects, including politics, religion, and disasters. The goal was to create a Wikipedia that could eventually reflect the full range of Runyankore-speaking life, including history, culture, education, science, notable places, biographies, health, agriculture, and everyday knowledge.

“Mentoring the Runyankore community has been a reminder that courage is not the absence of fear. it’s the decision to contribute despite it. Their enthusiasm, consistency, and willingness to learn have been inspiring to witness.”
Tochi Precious

When Mentorship Became Practical

The Language Diversity Hub’s 2025–2026 Community Mentorship Program was created to help emerging and recently launched Wikimedia language projects address technical and organisational challenges. Runyankore was selected as one of the communities participating in the 12-month programme. From the beginning, the mentorship focused on needs identified by the community itself. These included graduating from the Incubator, improving article quality, strengthening leadership, building partnerships, and finding resources for training and internet access. The support soon became more practical than Christopher had expected.

“The kind of support I have received has been very helpful. It has been more practical than I expected, and it has enabled me to improve as a person and as a leader.”

Together, the community and its LDH mentor developed a phased action plan. They created a content-diversification plan, prepared materials for approaching institutions and media partners, worked on a microgrant application, and discussed how to manage volunteers more effectively. One of the most important changes was the formation of a small community leadership team, referred to as the COT. The team helped distribute responsibilities, develop community guidelines, and make decisions that would previously have depended almost entirely on one person.

“We formed a Core Organising Team (COT) based on Tochi’s recommendations, and they have supported the community, including creating guidelines that I would not have been able to create alone.”

The mentorship was therefore not only about increasing article numbers. It was also about making the community less dependent on one leader and more capable of sustaining itself.

A Microgrant Opened Another Door

One of the mentorship’s biggest achievements was helping the community secure an LDH microgrant for a focused Runyankore Wikipedia event at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, commonly known as MUST. The event, held on 6 June 2026, combined practical training, article creation, Runyankore translation, a local photo walk, and uploads to Wikimedia Commons. It also extended the community’s university partnerships beyond its earlier work with Kabale University.

The project had set a target of 40 participants. Forty-one people attended, including 24 new editors. Together, participants created 96 Runyankore articles and uploaded 214 photographs to Wikimedia Commons. New editors outnumbered returning editors, showing that the event succeeded in introducing a new group of contributors to Wikimedia. The numbers mattered, but so did what they represented. Students and local contributors were not only being taught how to edit. They were being invited to see Runyankore as a language in which knowledge could be documented, shared, and made visible internationally.

The event also revealed an important gap. Although participants created many new articles, the target for improving existing articles was not achieved. That result reinforced one of the community’s main lessons at the midpoint review: future activities should place greater emphasis on quality, including better sources, clearer structure, stronger language review, and the use of relevant photographs.

The next phase is not simply about creating more pages. It is about building a trustworthy and useful Wikipedia.

Progress That Could Be Seen

The growth of the Runyankore project was already visible before the midpoint review. Community reporting shows that between the end of February and the end of March 2026, the number of articles increased from 621 to 793. Total pages grew from 980 to 1,630, while total edits increased from 29,778 to 46,161. As of 13^th July 2026, there are 1,174 articles, 2083 pages and 245 editors. This is tremendous progress. The mentorship documentation recorded progress in several other areas. New editors were joining, article quality was beginning to improve, communication remained regular, a university partnership had been established, funding had been secured, and the new leadership team was active.

“One of the most rewarding parts of this mentorship has been watching the Runyankore community embrace new challenges with curiosity and determination. They may not always feel fully confident, but they keep showing up, learning, and growing together.”
Tochi Precious

These developments contributed to the community’s request for graduation from Wikimedia Incubator. The request was submitted in April 2026, and the Language Committee later approved the creation of Runyankore Wikipedia. The project is now waiting for the technical site-creation process to be completed. For the community, this approval is the result of many connected efforts: regular editing, localisation work, volunteer training, article review, documentation, institutional partnerships, mentorship, and the willingness to keep working through difficulties.

A Midpoint Review That Looked Beyond the Milestone

On 18 June 2026, representatives of the Runyankore community and the Language Diversity Hub met for a midpoint review. The conversation was celebratory, but it was also honest. The community described itself as positive and motivated. The microgrant and new university partnership were seen as major wins. At the same time, mobile editing, the Incubator interface, logistics, internet access, and long-term volunteer retention remained serious concerns.

The review also raised an important question: what happens after graduation?

A major milestone can produce excitement, but that excitement does not automatically create a sustainable community. Once the independent Wikipedia is created, contributors will still need training, coordination, article-review systems, technical support, partnerships, and reasons to remain active. Christopher described the risk as a possible “post-graduation shock”, a decline in motivation after the community achieves the goal that has driven so much of its work.

The next six-month plan therefore focuses on sustaining momentum rather than simply celebrating approval. At the midpoint review, the community set goals that included reaching 150 active editors, strengthening the COT so that more members take an active leadership role, and moving from rapid article creation toward deeper improvements of existing content.

“We still need a bit of hand-holding to make sure we are on track.”

That request does not diminish what the community has achieved. It recognises that graduation is a transition, not an endpoint.

Mentorship Should Also Connect Mentees to One Another

Another lesson from the review was that mentorship should not only connect a mentor with an individual community. It should also create stronger connections among the communities being mentored. Christopher asked for more regular opportunities to meet fellow mentees, exchange experiences, complete joint activities, and learn from communities that have already passed through similar stages.

Ideas included peer assignments, co-created Wikimedia events, communities documenting one another’s work, and experience-sharing sessions on sustaining participation after graduation. This kind of peer learning can be especially valuable for smaller language communities. Many face similar challenges, including limited technical capacity, volunteer burnout, mobile-first editing, funding constraints, and the concentration of responsibilities in a small number of people.

A mentor may offer guidance, but another community can offer something different: lived experience. Following the review, LDH committed to organising a peer-learning session focused on post-graduation sustainability and to exploring more opportunities for direct collaboration among mentees.

What This Experience Has Taught Us

1. Mentorship works best when it responds to real community priorities. The community did not only need general encouragement. It needed help preparing grant applications, developing leadership structures, planning content, approaching institutions, navigating graduation requirements, and thinking about what would happen after approval.

2. Small grants can create opportunities beyond a single event. The MUST project produced articles and photographs, but it also introduced new editors, strengthened the community’s presence in a university, and created a foundation for continued collaboration.

3. Leadership development is essential for sustainability. A growing project cannot remain dependent on one person. By forming a leadership team and creating community guidelines, the Runyankore community began building the structures needed for its next stage.

4. Technical design affects participation. When most contributors use mobile phones, an interface that is difficult to navigate becomes an equity issue. Communities can create tutorials and offer training, but better tools and more mobile-friendly workflows are still needed.

Looking Forward

The creation of an independent Runyankore Wikipedia will open a new chapter. The community’s immediate priorities are to prepare for the transition from Incubator, maintain contributor activity, strengthen its leadership team, and improve the quality and range of its articles. It also plans to continue developing university and media partnerships, while seeking support for internet access and volunteer activities.

LDH will continue supporting the community through peer learning, experience-sharing, mentorship, and guidance during the post-graduation period. There is also a deeper question for the community to keep exploring: what knowledge should people be able to find when they visit Runyankore Wikipedia? Answering that question will require more than translating articles from larger Wikipedias. It will involve documenting local places, people, histories, institutions, cultural practices, and forms of knowledge that may not yet be well represented online.

Conclusion

The approval of Runyankore Wikipedia is an important milestone, but the strongest result of the mentorship may be the community that has grown around it. Beginners became regular contributors. Students discovered a new way to participate in open knowledge. A community leader learned to share responsibility. A small leadership team began creating the structures needed for sustainability. Universities became partners, and a language that remains underrepresented online moved closer to having its own permanent home within the Wikimedia movement.

None of this happened through one event or one person. It came from the work of Runyankore editors, the Core Organising Team, Christopher Liberty, Tochi Precious and the Language Diversity Hub, Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda, Kabale University, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, the microgrant programme, technical volunteers, language experts, and everyone who contributed an article, photograph, translation, review, question, or idea.

Runyankore Wikipedia has been approved. The technical creation of the site is still ahead, and the longer work of building a strong Wikipedia will continue after that.

The Runyankore Wikipedia community is ready for its next chapter!