Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Songhay Wikipedia Incubator (ID: 23653575)
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Applicant Details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Gazuma
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal
[edit]- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Songhay Wikipedia Incubator
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2026-02-02 - 2026-03-03
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
Regional (more than one country in the same continent or region) Mali Niger
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Other (please specify) We are using this project to move our Songhay Wikipedia project from the Incubator to an official website. Launched in 2019, the project registered sporadic contributions, then stagnated. We revived it in early August 2025, and the number of original articles has increased seven times by the time of this submission. Still, we see a great potential for rapid growth in quantity, quality, and diversity if we are able to organize periodic intensive writing and editing sessions on site. These will bring together active contributors and new volunteers who attend for a day. The experienced contributors will help them create accounts and learn how to create and post articles. They will also learn how to edit titles and texts as well as contribute on their own by joining the group.
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
Having an official Wikipedia site in Songhay (Koyraboro Senni [ses]) will be a major step toward inclusion in open-access knowledge platforms. Our main challenge is to get complex tasks done by people who live, in most cases, in remote areas, with low-capacity devices and limited or erratic connectivity. This is why our current request is mainly geared toward the needs of contributors who functional devices to take good pictures, write conveniently and store important documents externally (hard disks and online). After equipping active volunteers, we will bring current contributors and workshop groups together to accelerate the production of texts and illustrations as well as create a bond between participants, and anchor the effort durably among their communities (through schools, leaders, youth and women's associations).
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
- Weekly contributions: writing and posting texts and images by regular contributors; editing texts by volunteers skilled to carry this task out thoroughly
- Periodic contributions (2 monthly workshops): engaging up to 30 participants each time on site to create account, write and edit texts, and upload images
- Ongoing outreach: local contributors work with school teachers and literacy course instructors to recruit volunteers for regular or sporadic contributions
- Tutoring and dissemination: offer online instruction and on-site demonstrations by experienced contributors to potential volunteers
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
At the moment, our team is made of 11 members: 1. Local content contributors (7): 5 contribute texts regularly though only 4 online, 2 contribute texts periodically but regularly edit texts online and offline. 2. Technical support (4): They live abroad and mentor/coach the contributors.
Link to our Incubator site: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Wp/ses/
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
First the standing Incubator group for Songhay Wikipedia (11 members), then the new volunteers they are supposed to enroll and retain through periodic on-site activities and follow-up networking.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
We have an existing group of eleven (11) contributors mainly enlisted between July and September 2025. The group communicates through a chat group in which topics, processes, techniques, and problems are regularly discussed. We thus adapted guidelines and simplified them in Songhay to produce clear-text instructions in Songhay for different tasks: 1) how to open a Wikimedia account, 2) how to create and article, 3) to make edits (title, text). in the same way, we collected obstacles, needs and suggestions for remedy them, as much as possible, on a local basis. This application reflects this process and is a result of it.
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Language
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Culture, heritage or GLAM
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Linguistic / Language
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Innovate in Free Knowledge
Learning and metrics
[edit]- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
We want to experience the effect of mobilizing our cultural and linguistic community to meet a challenge related to language – namely, to contribute collectively toward taking a live Songhay Wikipedia site from dream to reality. So, on the enthusiasm of the core team, we want to build an enduring commitment among the larger community to keeping a visible content-rich platform alive and thriving online. At this stage, we ask ourselves:
- How much interest is out there beyond us in the core group?
- How many will join one time or continuously?
- What perspectives will we take from the two-month experiment for coming out with a critical mass for Songhay Wikipedia?
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 70 | We expect to have 30 participants at each monthly session, plus about 5 experienced contributors, respectively in the middle February and March 2026. |
| Number of editors | 6 | We plan to enroll 3 new editors to support and release the current editors. Editors are highly skilled language specialists who ensure that texts are thoroughly proofread and revised according to the spelling, grammatical and stylistic conventions in place for the Songhay language in Mali. |
| Number of organizers | 8 | We plan to add 4 new mentors and technical support team members residing in the region. |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | |
| Wikimedia Commons | |
| Wikidata | |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | 60 |
| Translatewiki | 100 |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | 12 |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
N/A
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
Yes
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Boost of content production | Since we project to be at 250 articles in the Incubator by the end of January, this will mean more than double the previous output (August 2025-January 2026) | 300 |
| Build an online photo library | With adequate devices, take and upload pictures to WikiCommons on a regular basis | 200 |
| Build community of contributors | Recruit and retain new contributors representative of social, generational and professional groups (men/women, youth/elders, urban/rural, academics/practitioners) | 15 |
| Local anchoring | Create regular contact points with local communities through existing contributors and new recruits. | 5 |
| Outreach events | Foster physical interaction to cement online contacts and meet community members in the 5 local focus points.
(When possible, enable members to organize informal, spontaneous, or punctual meetings to assist new or aspiring volunteers.) |
2 |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
- articles added to Incubator
- articles submitted to experienced contributors (as recruiters and mentors)
- images and illustrations uploaded to WikiCommons
- visual and audiovisual material availed to team members with rights to add to Incubator or WikiCommons
Financial proposal
[edit]- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
2644320 XOF
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
4547 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
[edit]Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).