WikiCite/2020 Virtual conference/Wikipedia in African Libraries : Existing situation and opportunities

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Wikipedia in African Libraries : Existing situation and opportunities[edit]

14:26 UTC

30min

Summary[edit]

The use of Wikipedia by African librarians and their contribution to it could be considered minimal and this can be attributed to a lack of understanding and ‘ownership’ of the resource by them and every member of their user communities.In response to the 'disconnect' and low numbers, the Wikipedia in African Libraries project ,over 12 months, will use the adapted and reviewed OCLC curriculum (Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together), to train at least 300 librarians across Africa acquire skills that will enable them to understand, evaluate the reliability and relevance of Wikipedia articles for information dissemination and research, create, edit Wikipedia articles and implement Wikipedia programming for their user communities. In this presentation, we talk about the Wikipedia in African Libraries Project; discuss the existing relation between African librarians and Wikipedia; and the opportunities presented by this situation .

Bio[edit]

Alice Kibombo (African Library and Information Associations and Institutions, Ghana) is a librarian at the Goethe-Zentrum Kampala UGCS, and a member of Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda where since 2016, she has coordinated and facilitated a number of Wikimedia campaigns including the ones related to Gender Gaps and Reference Support. In 2020, she was appointed as a Wikipedian in Residence to actualize the AfLIA / Wikipedia project of training at least 10 librarians each from 30 African countries and as a Visiting Wikimedian in Wikimedia Deutschland to learn and support the organization of large-scale capacity building and coordination events for Wikimedia affiliates such as Wikimedia Summit.

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