Education/News/November 2023/Tyap Wikimedians Zaria Outreach

Tyap Wikimedians Zaria Outreach

Summary: Tyap-speaking lecturers and students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and other neighboring institutions were present in the outreach event organized by the Tyap Wikimedians User Group in collaboration with the Wikimedia Nigeria User Group. They were taught how to create Wikipedia user accounts and introduced to editing on Wikimedia Foundation projects like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. It also had non-native speakers of Tyap present. The mission was to promote the writing of Tyap online using Wikimedia Foundation's platforms and establish an editing hub in Zaria for the Tyap Wikimedians.

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To extend our reach further, we went all out in a bid to recruit a whole new set of volunteer editors for the Tyap Wikimedia and other sister projects such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and to establish an editing hub in the university town of Zaria, Kaduna State, Nigeria.

A week before the main event on 7-8 October 2023, a representative of Wikimedia Nigeria User Group, Isma'il Atiba, was present with the Tyap Wikimedia event organizers in Kaduna to train them on the use of tools like the Outreach Dashboard, Event Matrix, and uploading media on Wikimedia Commons. Ramatu A. Haliru, President of Wikimedia Kaduna Network, and Umar Ibrahim Askira of the Hausa Wikimedians User Group were also present to partake in the training. A representative of the Tyap Language Development Board (TLDB), Atyoli Akila D. Bungwon, also came to lend his moral support on behalf of the TLDB and dialogues with the team.

For three weekends (14-15, 21-22, and 28-29 October 2023), event organizers of the Tyap Wikimedians User Group traveled to and from various places to attend the event they organized alongside a Tyap-speaking professor in the Faculty of Agriculture, Thomas Bidoli, and a staff of the institution, Emmanuel Kambai Yusuf.

The event was tagged as "TYAP WIKIMEDIANS ZARIA OUTREACH".

Utilizing those three weekends, participants were introduced to what the Wikimedia Foundation, the Tyap Wikimedians Organisation/User Group, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons are, and how users can use them to document their endangered languages through text, audio recordings, images, and other media.

There were 66 attendees including another professor, lecturers, staff and students of the institution and neighbouring institutions — excluding seven of the organizers, out of which over 40 were able to create their own Wikipedia accounts. Over 170 articles were created in the Tyap Wikipedia and over 160 entries also created in the Tyap Wiktionary, with cross-editing on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

The highest contributing editors in each week (male and female) were gifted with a customized T-shirt and a cap to boost their morale and at the end of the three weeks, all attendees got certificates and the overall top editors for male and female categories were handed prizes for their efforts to learn.

A group was created on WhatsApp to coordinate the attendees of this event and groom them together for post-event activities.

For more images and files related to this project, please click here.