WikiLinguila/malongolu

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Strategic Plan

Strategic Plan for WikiLinguila 2025-2028: Read more.

Our purpose and motivation

Our organization includes three wiki administrators, two on Lnwiki and one on Luawiki, as well as a significant number of event organizers on Meta. Fostering collaboration with a multitude of individuals and groups on the basis of mutual support and adaptation to realities on the ground, with the aim of giving participants sufficient autonomy and competence leading to drive constant improvement. We know that our varied languages lack written documentation, and that the majority of documents published in local languages are subject to copyright, so we will partner with other educational structures and work with training centers in African languages in this area to prepare tailor-made documentation to train and continually upgrade our members in editing via our respective languages on Wikipedia and its sister projects, in order to maintain and ensure the relevance of online content on our various Wikimedia projects.

We have strategically chosen to dedicate ourselves to the promotion of the national Congolese languages and to expand Wikimedia activities in other regions of the country that remain little or not at all reached, given the vastness of the country and the specific daily realities of each area, by launching a major initiative to fill the digital and cultural gap of local Central African languages on Wikimedia throughout the month of February, as part of a broader effort to promote mother tongues.

Our achievements and our vision

1. Our vision is to initiate the creation of an Academy to develop these languages and their adoption in national education, as is the case with French and English as language courses. The objective is rather to contribute to the enrichment and preservation of these languages in the digital realm but not to replace the dominant languages (French and English, which are rich and evolved in vocabulary);
2. In our vision, we will not create wikiclubs per se, but we wish to collaborate closely with local language groups and enhance the sense of belonging by focusing on strengthening ties and collaboration with other peoples who speak the same languages.

• To date, we already have three main groups for the Congolese language versions of Wikipedia in three distinct cities, two of which, Matadi and Mbuji-Mayi, had not previously seen in-person Wikimedia activities until they were recently introduced under our aegis:
  • Lingála (lnwiki) for Kinshasa
  • Kikôngɔ (kgwiki) for Matadi
  • Tshiluba (luawiki) for Mbuji-Mayi
• We are also paving the way for regional collaborations, notably with Angola and Congo-Brazzaville, Wikimedians in Central Africa, where these languages are also spoken, to organize, promote and improve our language projects in the above-mentioned countries. With these partners, we plan to implement a strategic collaboration framework in the Pool region;
• We have implemented this approach through the WikiForMotherTongue campaign, which received significant media coverage in 2025 and is part of an effort to reduce the digital divide between large and small wikis. This initiative has actively engaged our local communities and mobilized contributors on a global scale, thereby drawing attention to the need to strengthen the online presence of underrepresented or minority languages
• We firmly believe that Wikipedia, recognized as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance approved by the UN, plays a key role in education. Due to the existence of Wikipedia projects in Swahili, Lingála, and Kikôngɔ, we have mobilized to advance the Wikipedia project in Tshiluba as the remaining national language, still in incubation, to make it a fully operational project;
• Moreover, given our geographic position and the predominance of certain languages in our region, we are currently prioritizing Lingála and Kikôngɔ as models, while planning, as far as possible, to expand our actions to other widely spoken languages in the country;
• Start projects that don't exist in the incubator in (lnwiki), (kgwiki) and later in (luawiki) and (tekwiki);
• More work on translations and enriching the Wiktionary.

References