Jump to content

Wiki In Africa/Tech and Tools

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
Translate this page
Other languages:
Poster of presentation of the ISA Tool during Wikimania 2025


The tech projects have been developed by Wiki In Africa to increase access to training and contribution, and to better support community engagement. Both tools support the outcomes of our programs, making them easier to achieve.

WikiFundi was developed to facilitate Wikimedia outreach and content creation-based education programs in places where access and data can be challenging. At its heart, WikiFundi is open-source software that provides an offline editing environment that mimics the Wikipedia ‘online’ environment. It allows for teaching and content creation when technology fails, access does not exist or is too expensive, and electricity is unreliable. With WikiFundi, individuals, groups, and communities can learn how to create and improve articles on a wiki and can work collaboratively to build articles and other content.

The ISA Tool was developed to ensure that the images contributed each year to Wiki Loves Africa (and, in turn, other photographic contests, and GLAM collections) achieve their best potential placement on the Wikimedia projects through better labeling and descriptions.

WikiFundi

[edit]

Status: Active

WikiFundi was developed to facilitate outreach and education goals of Wikimedians in places where access and data can be challenging. WikiFundi is open-source software that provides an offline editing environment that mimics the Wikipedia ‘online’ environment. Throughout 2021, WikiFundi was translated and adapted into Spanish. In 2022 onwards we continued our planned visibility campaign with educators and Wikimedia organisations to increase usage beyond Africa. It is difficult to assess the impact of WikiFundi due to the offline nature of the tool. We will be monitoring and requesting user experience through conversations with known users. In 2021, WikiFundi was awarded the Open Education Award of Excellence for Open Infrastructure.

Students from Congo living in Cape Town, South Africa, explain how to use WikiFundi.

The overarching goals are to:

  • Provide a practical solution to challenges in accessing online platforms due to electricity and data instability or expense.
  • Supply an offline platform where students and community members can learn and continue content creation activities similar to the Wikimedia projects.
  • Facilitate the transfer of knowledge offline to a small community through offline versions of Wikimedia and other knowledge platforms
  • Build the Wiki-knowledge of those engaged with WikiFundi using relevant, up-to-date Open Education Resources in the language of the users

Links

ISA Tool

[edit]

Status: Active

The ISA Tool is a fun, multilingual, mobile-first 'microcontributions' tool, that makes it easy for (groups of inexperienced) people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons. It was created to enhance the placement of images contributed each year to Wiki Loves Africa (and other photographic contests and GLAM collections) by improving labelling and descriptions. With ISA, you can choose a pre-defined set of images on Commons and then ask contributors to 'tag' these with multilingual structured metadata. Points are counted for each contribution, and therefore it is possible to organize 'tagging' or microcontributions competitions or challenges with ISA.
The ISA Tool links structured data from WikiData to Wikimedia Commons images through targeted online drives. At the WikiDataCon 2019 awards, the ISA Tool was recognised as the coolest data tool. In 2024, the ISA Tool received the Eggbeater Award at the Coolest Tools during Wikimania Katowice. Initially developed in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation's Structured Data on Commons project, the ISA Tool has also received support from the Wikimedia community. In 2022, Wikimedia Sweden supported the tool's development as part of the Content Partnership Hub. Report on the GLAM Newsletter. In early 2024, the WikiMentor group hosted a Hack-a-thon for the ISA Tool. In 2025, Egbe Eugene (the main maintainer of the tool and one of its primary developers) won the Tech Wikimedian of the Year during Wikimania Nairobi. On accepting his award, he mentioned that the ISA Tool is the project/tool he was most interested in and spent much of his time on. At the Wikimania Nairobi Hackathon, Eugene also gathered Wikimedians who were interested in the tool. He has since organised an ISA Spotlight Session during the WikiMentor Africa Tool Series (an online hackathon after Wikimania to involve more people in this community to help improve ISA further).

Florence explains how the ISA Tool can be used to increase Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons.


ISA Tool Impact

Links

Additional materials

[edit]


  • • • •


Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wiki_In_Africa/Tech_and_Tools&oldid=29676178"