Beyond Wikipedia: A Technical Workshop Introducing Moroccan Teachers to Wikidata and the Wikimedia Technical Ecosystem

As part of the Wikipedia in Education Workshop held in Casablanca in August 2026, I had the opportunity to lead a technical workshop for a group of Moroccan teachers who had previously participated in the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program.

The workshop was designed to take participants beyond simply reading and editing Wikipedia and introduce them to some of the technical infrastructure and interconnected projects that make the Wikimedia ecosystem work.

Moving beyond the Wikipedia article

For many new contributors, Wikipedia initially appears to be a website made mainly of articles and references. However, behind every article there is a much larger ecosystem of projects, tools, structured data, templates, categories, media files, and technical connections.

During the workshop, I wanted participants to discover this less visible side of Wikimedia and understand that contributing to free knowledge can take many different forms.

We discussed how Wikimedia projects communicate with each other and how a single contribution can sometimes be reused across several languages and projects.

Discovering Wikidata

One of the main parts of the session focused on Wikidata.

Participants learned how Wikipedia articles can be connected to Wikidata items and how structured information stored on Wikidata can support different Wikimedia projects.

We explored the basic structure of a Wikidata item, including:

• items and identifiers;
• labels and descriptions;
• statements and properties;
• links between Wikipedia articles in different languages;
• the relationship between Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons.

For teachers who were mostly familiar with Wikipedia as readers or editors, seeing how information could be organized as structured and reusable data offered a different perspective on Wikimedia.

Introducing WikiTechMa

The workshop also provided an opportunity to introduce participants to WikiTechMa, an initiative focusing on the technical side of the Wikimedia movement in Morocco.

The aim was not to turn every participant into a developer, but rather to demonstrate that Wikimedia also offers spaces for people interested in technology, data, automation, tools, and technical problem-solving.

This opened a discussion about how technical skills can support Wikimedia communities and how contributors with different backgrounds can participate in building and improving free knowledge.

Learning through practice

Rather than limiting the session to theoretical explanations, participants were encouraged to explore the Wikimedia ecosystem directly.

They examined connections between Wikipedia pages and Wikidata, navigated between different Wikimedia projects, and experimented with some of the concepts discussed during the session.

The practical activities helped participants understand that Wikipedia does not exist independently, but is part of a much broader collaborative knowledge infrastructure.

Connecting education, technology, and free knowledge

One of the most important aspects of the workshop was connecting three areas: education, technology, and the Wikimedia movement.

Teachers are not only potential Wikipedia editors. They can also help students understand how digital knowledge is created, organized, verified, connected, and reused.

Introducing educators to projects such as Wikidata can therefore contribute to a broader form of digital and information literacy.

A Wikipedia article can be the beginning of that learning process, rather than its final destination.

Looking forward

The workshop demonstrated that technical Wikimedia topics can also be introduced to participants without a programming background when they are presented through practical examples and connected to familiar Wikipedia activities.

I hope that some of the teachers who participated will continue exploring Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and the broader Wikimedia technical ecosystem, and eventually introduce some of these ideas to their own students.

For me, facilitating this workshop was also an opportunity to share a part of Wikimedia that I am particularly passionate about: understanding not only how to contribute to free knowledge, but also how the infrastructure behind that knowledge works.