Africa Wiki Women’s 4th Training Session for the Inspire Inclusion 2024 Campaign: Office Hour for Wikidata and Spotlight partner W.TEC

On May, 10th 2024, Africa Wiki Women hosted the 5th Inspire Inclusion 2024 Campaign. The online session continued with an Office hour of Editing Wikidata.” The training session was led by Rhoda James, a community team member, and moderated by Linason Blessing.

The session attracted over 17 participants, including project leads and community members from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, and  Rwanda.

Linason Blessing, the moderator for the day, welcomed participants to the session. Following the welcome, each attendee introduced themselves during the introduction session.

Bukola James then provided background information on the day’s agenda, highlighting the partner to be spotlighted. She gave an overview of the project, detailing its goals, achievements to date and recapping past training sessions for the benefit of new participants and to motivate returning contributors. She shared the project’s meta page link for more information and introduced the partners spotlighted since the project’s inception. Additionally, she presented the project timeline, resources available for contributions, and explained the disbursement criteria for reimbursing active contributors. Ruby D Brown also added that an evaluation would be conducted after the campaign to gather participant feedback.

Rhoda James recapped the previous week’s Wikidata training session, covering:

• Activating the recoin tool on Wikidata.
• Creating a Wikidata item.
• Improving existing items on Wikidata.

The session then moved to the partner spotlight. Linason Blessing introduced Tolulope Ibiyeye, the program officer and state coordinator for Women Technology Empowerment Center (W.TEC). Tolulope, passionate about advocating for and empowering African women through digital literacy, began her presentation by outlining W.TEC and its projects. She addressed the gender gap in STEM, particularly in Nigeria, and discussed W.TEC’s mission to educate, connect, and empower Nigerian women through ICT. She highlighted their vision of a society where Nigerian women and girls effectively use information and communication technology for learning, activism, entrepreneurship, and professional activities.

Tolulope detailed their programs, which combine technology classes, mentoring opportunities, and research, aiming to bridge the gender gap in technology use, employment, invention, and innovation. The objectives include building the science and technology skills of 4000 girls and women in Nigeria annually and connecting them with STEM opportunities through competitions, hackathons, mentorship, scholarships, internships, and networking.

She showcased W.TEC’s programs such as She Created Camp, Early Innovation, W.TEC Academy, Inclusive Technology for All (IT4ALL), Makeher Space, Mentorher, She Can with ICT, Staying Safe Online, and She Talks Tech. Tolulope also presented their statistics and milestones, noting that W.TEC, in its 16 years of existence, has empowered 46,504 females. She concluded by explaining how participants could support and reach out to W.TEC and answered questions from attendees.

The session included a brief icebreaker where participants shared their comments on the project. Bukola James then addressed questions regarding Wikidata and contributing to the AWW IWD Inspire Inclusion 2024 project. She demonstrated how to link a Wikipedia article to a Wikidata item and merge duplicate items on Wikidata. The session concluded with a group photo, where some attendees turned on their video, and screenshots were taken.

For those who may have missed the session, the link to access it is available on the community meta page. Additionally, we encourage you to register for our upcoming sessions to ensure you receive timely email notifications one hour before each online session begins. We encourage you to visit our YouTube channel as well for previous sessions recordings. If you wish to become an active member of our community, please take a moment to complete the registration form. Let’s work together to bridge the gap on information about women on wikipedia and sister projects.