What we Learned from Wiki Women In Red @8 Campaign 2023 Women for Sustainability Africa

As part of the Wiki Women in Red @8 campaign in 2023, we collaborated with various organizations, such as the University of Professional Studies Office of the Women’s Commissioner and the former Women’s Commissioner for the University of Ghana to conduct a series of workshops and Trainings empowering over 60+ people new editors through various in-person and online workshop. There was also an online contest for both existing and new editors to participate. These workshops educated and empowered women especially with Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons Skills. Part one of this article provided an overview of the campaign and the various activities which took place. In part two of the article (this post) we highlight some of the challenges and how we navigated our way through the campaign and what participant had to say.

Challenges

IP block

One of the main challenges encountered throughout this training was IP Block on English Wikipedia. Although many of the participants were eager to edit Wikipedia, this was a major challenge. To counter this challenge we asked participants to create their Wikipedia account through Wikimedia Commons. We also tried to create wikipedia accounts for others using the dashboard. And later on requested participants to email Graham with their username and IP. Even after all these steps they still couldn’t edit on English Wikipedia. This experience was very discouraging for the participants as they are eager to make improvements to the wiki page and to practice. As a result we had to focus more on creating articles on Wikidata and uploading Images on Wikimedia Commons which was fulfilling. At the training most did not have images about women so resorted to uploading some exiting images not related to the topic for their hands-on practice. We noticed that this experience is usually encountered by Newbies. We hope something can be done about this for future events. 

Lack of sources for women articles

Sources can be a challenging when writing about women. Example – There are a lot of women football teams in Ghana, however one for the challenges was the fact that they lacked sources/references to create the articles. For those that even had some few publications not much was documented about them. In future we will also push some efforts into translating existing articles 

Notability on Wikidata

Wikidata was one of the projects the campaign focused on. Some Wikidata articles that were documented by the volunteers were deleted due to some notability criteria which some of the team members felt the subject was notable. We believe that issue of notability is not universal and can vary from community to community. Nevertheless we ensured that guidelines are adhered to avoid further deletion.

Excess participants

Another challenge was that the campaign attracted a lot of new participants, over a 100 new  participants on our whatsApp group who were eager to learn new skills using wikipedia. As a result we were unable to extend one on one support and host all members during the in person training although they were eager to participate. Another challenge was also the location which required us to host them, this didn’t now allow us to accommodate participants from afar, however we held general online training session which some benefitted from.

Challenge using Dashboard

Using the dashboard was great, however we had a lot of work digging into the data to discover what was relevant for our campaign. In doing that exercise we realized that a lot of articles that were edited within the period of the campaign were captured on the dashboard. We found this by checking the article history. That exercise, although cumbersome, helped us to identify the actual articles and contributions made by participants of the campaign.

Event registration tool

Another challenge we encountered was about creating the event registration page. First challenge encountered was the delay in granting our request to be able to create the campaign page.  We had to make a request for an organizer right before we could actually create an event registration tool. Due to this delay we used Goggle form to start recruiting and then switched back to the event registration tool when it was ready leading to duplication of registration.

Secondly we had already put up our main campaign page already set up and registration ongoing. We also learned that we could not build the registration tool on the existing campaign meta page. this led us to create a separate registration page. In future we will take note of this as having the event tool on the main campaign page minimize duplication.

After the approval, we couldn’t embed the registration tool on the existing campaign page we created. We learned that it should have been created from the onset of starting a meta part. This led us to create another page for the event registration.

Another things we learned was that because we had created a dashboard already with editors signed on already, we couldn’t also link that dashboard to the event registration page that was being created because that was not possible so we maintained the already created dashboard.

We also had multiple events we were recruiting at the same time. This led us to use Google form alongside since we did not want to create another event registration page. 

We couldn’t add our own questions to the event registration questions for evaluation purposes

In spite of the challenges with the registration tool, we found it very easy to and had features that provided us information about participants, also we were  able to send messages through the event registration page to participants to keep them posted. This tool is a game changer for wikimedia organizers and more impactful with continues improvement it will serve its ultimate purpose in the community.

Recommendations

Although the on wiki registration tool is great there are still some improvements needed to make it easier for organizers to use . Some of the recommendations from our team are;

1. All organizers should be given access rights to be able to create their event registration page or Speedily granting organizers to create registration pages when request is made.

2. We recommend a way that is flexible for the event page to be adjusted and refreshed- Another question we asked was what happens if the same page is maintained for another event the following year. Would that mean we keep creating a separate event page or how can we amend the existing registration to make way for the new campaign?

3. More education is needed around the limitation of the tool to help organizers mitigate ahead. Eg you cannot create registration page on an already existing meta page, The registration page creation works along with the dashboard creation. You cannot embed your existing dashboard to the registration page.

4. In future we hope that the registration tool can adapt some of the features from the Google form in terms of providing downloadable infographics of summary characteristics of the registered participants and ability to download

5. Event registration tool questions should be made flexible for other questions to be added to meet organizers needs. Eg we are not able to even ask the origin of the participants, and other questions we will want to understand about our target population.

6. There should be an option for on wiki messaging tool that sends messages to participants whose emails were not linked to their account to be able to receive update notifications on then wikipedia account . At the moment the mass messaging is only for emails.

Opportunities

This campaign opened a lot of opportunities for us as an organization. This includes partnering with the University of professional Studies who is looking forward to more of such training for their students and the University of Ghana. 

After learning about our Wikipedia training program, we were reached by Doctor Yaw at the Center for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies at the university of Ghana for a partnership with their institutions to incorporate Wikipedia education as part of their semester learning activities for Masters Students and undergraduate students. During our partnership discussion we identified possible collaboration opportunities that also included starting a wiki club for the Sustainability and Climate change Association. We see that this could be one of the long term goals to build their capacity on wikipedia , map content gap areas, and bridge knowledge gap areas around sustainability and Gender as that is also one of their work.  We foresee the possibility of engaging with them as part of the WikiForHumanRights Campaign.

To sustain our communities interest and offer continued support, we constantly share online events eg from the Let’s Connect Telegram as well as other events to benefit from. Continues program and engagements are needed to help

Resources and Support

Some of the ways we resolved IP Block issues was guiding participants to send emails to an admin requesting IP Unblock. While some felt it was a long process others were able to make the request and had IP unblock days after the training which allowed them to improve existing Wikipedia articles. 

We also had office hours to help them with IP Unblock as well as made a video recording on how to get IP Unblock which we hosted on our Youtube Channel. 

We also created a special Wikipedia Community WhatsApp group where we enrolled all that were interested in the campaign to learn about Wikipedia. The campaign attracted many people to join our Wikipedia and we currently have 190 members where we will be engaging from time to time to build their capacity on Wikipedia

As part of the resources we also created an article list for participants to start with, almost all of which have been created. We also shared article list for Wiki Women in Red

We received tremendous support from 2 staff at the wikimedia foundation event registration team Euphemia and Ilana who trained us on how to use the event registration tool . They also assisted us to activate wiki bulk sms to send on invitation to participants who could be potential candidates for the campaign. Although that also had its own limitations, it was exciting to have made use of it to invite 20 experienced editors to join the contest although we didn’t get much response from that outreach. 

We also had massive support from Wiki Women in Red liking and resharing our campaign on Twitter which boosted the campaigns visibility. This was really encouraging. We also exchanged some beautiful swags  with Wiki Women in Red in Scotland as a kind gesture and some of the swags they sent us were given to contributors of the campaign. 

Experienced Editors: Having experienced editors providing us with guidance and support was very encouraging and contributed to the success of the program. With their wealth of experience they provided support where they could. They assisted with me mentoring selected participants who demonstrated willingness to learn. They also trained my team to perform some tasks like editing the metapage, creating the dashboard, leading some of the training amongst others. This has really increased the editing skills of our team and some have continued to join other campaigns contributing to translations. Some of the new bees have joined our wikipedia team to support us during future trainings and campaigns.

Special thanks to the wonderful team and resource persons who supported with the trainings; Jesse Aseidu Akrofi, Ruby D-Brown, Queen Murjanatu, Garbrialla, Anita Ofori, Kojo Owusu, Phillip.

Results

Although the theme was documenting articles about women in sport, we realized that participants wanted to not only document women in sport. When we asked them what topics they were interested to contribute to, Women in Tech, Women Empowerment, stood in addtion to women in sports. We went on to create wiki data items and wikipedia articles about women sport organization/teams and organizations that are into women, Women in sustainability education etc. 

We were cognisant of the fact that the dashboard sometimes tracks other sources of contributions. Although some of the newcomers who joined wrote about other subjects which were not about women, for the purposes of the impact attained we tracked articles related to women on the dashboard and here is the statistics we gathered.

Articles related to women that we tracked from the dashboard were;

Wikipedia article improved and newly created – 658

New Wikidata Items- 600+

Wikimedia Commons images – 972

Testimonials

The testimonial participants gave after the event were encouraging as  most of them were excited about gaining this new knowledge and are enthused. We  have shared video testimonials. 

“Impressive”

“Educational”

“Wiki women in red adding our voice as women”

“The best, the fun, the zeal”

“It’s absolutely great to gain editing skills on Wikipedia.”

“The best people to lift women are women so let’s work together and support each other to get to the top”

“Much grateful for this initiative, i have learnt a lot within a short period of them and this has opened my minds to a lot of things on wikipedia”

“Wiki Women in Red workshop is quite an essential training workshop for women. It does not only promote women’s image and brand on the internet but equips others with very important digital skills in today’s world.”

“This is a good initiative. We need more of these. African Women deserve a spotlight too. Thank you so much for doing this!”

“I just love volunteering to anything about Wikimedia Foundation”

“That it’s easy and all it takes it dedication”

How has the Wikipedia Training changed your perspective about Wikipedia?

“I appreciate how far authentic recognition goes and the verification process of information”

“Anyone can edit on Wikipedia but one need to follow the five rules”

“It has helped me a lot as a blogger and a digital marketer, i have learned a new skill through this program, a skill have been wishing to learn for long.”

“This training has helped me realize that we can put more notable people out there because it’s people like me that put the information on wikipedia”

“Anyone can edit wikipedia”

“They are into women sustainability group that helps young ladies”

“I thought it was difficult and complicated to work edit on Wikipedia or I thought Wikipedia information was from an advanced source but now I know that it is simple”

“The training had thought me about the gender bias on Wikipedia and the need to level up”

“That Wikipedia can be a reliable source of information”

“Women need to be represented and works edited on Wikipedia is for everyone. Anyone can correct whatever information you put out there but credit will still be given to you”

“Wikipedia is free to edit and is for everyone”

Data

Gender

• 75% – Women
• 25% – Men

Age Group

• 63.5% – 20-25
• 12% – 25 – 30
• 18.8% – 35 +

Is this your first time hearing about Wiki Women in Red?

• 50%- Yes
• 50%- No

Is this your first time participating in a Wikipedia campaign/Training?

• 68.8%- Yes
• 31.3% – No

If  YES were you able to create your wikipedia account?

• 93.8% -Yes
• 6.3% – No

Gallery