Wikimedia Fulfulde Community/Reports/Annual Report 2024

This report outlines the accomplishments and activities of the Wikimedia Fulfulde Community between March 2024 and December 2024. Commencing with our strategic projects for the year, our primary objective was to amplify language content and media representation across diverse Wikimedia platforms, specifically focusing on North East Nigeria. Through meticulous planning and execution, we organized edit-a-thons, capacity-building workshops, and localized community campaigns. Generally, these community-driven programs successfully created, edited, and enhanced entries across core Wiki projects (including Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons), making this period the time where the Fulfulde Wikipedia achieved its most significant growth in new articles.

See detailed report below.

2024 Programs and Campaigns

The Wikimedia Fulfulde Community drove impactful progress across North East Nigeria throughout 2024. The structured breakdown of our major programs and campaigns is highlighted below:

Campaigns

Wiki Loves Africa 2024 Campaign in North East Nigeria (March, 2024 - April, 2024)

Wiki Loves Africa, an annual photographic, video, and audio contest, was heavily supported across North East Nigeria from March to April 2024. Participants were tasked with capturing and uploading high-quality media files aligning with the year's international theme on Wikimedia Commons.

The Fulfulde community actively mobilized local volunteers, organizing introductory sessions to guide photographers and editors on contribution metrics. This campaign was crucial in enriching Wikimedia Commons with authentic media portraying regional contexts, cultures, and landscapes from North East Nigeria.

A+F Solidarity Campaign in North East Nigeria (April, 2024 - May, 2024)

The Art+Feminism (A+F) Solidarity Campaign was organized between April and May 2024 to directly address the structural gender gaps existing across Wikimedia platforms.

The campaign brought together editors in North East Nigeria to translate, expand, and create articles focused on women, non-binary figures, and gender-equity subjects. Through localized training tracks, new and existing contributors learned translation methodologies, adding missing perspectives and expanding language equity within open knowledge ecosystems.

Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2024 Campaign in North East Nigeria (July, 2024 - August, 2024)

Running from July to August 2024, the Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) campaign targeted the visual improvement of unillustrated Wikipedia articles.

Volunteers across North East Nigeria utilized the digital media files collected from previous photowalks and international competitions to embed relevant images into existing articles. Community mentors organized technical walkthroughs on proper media embedding practices, image licensing constraints, and accurate usage of Wikimedia Commons categories.

Wikimedia Fulfulde Community Semiannual Plan (July, 2024 - December, 2024)

The Half-Yearly Activities initiative served as the foundational operational hub for the community during the second half of 2024. The project was strategically executed to drive community mobilization, member enrichment, and accelerated participant engagement.

Over the six-month period, the community successfully hosted 7 edit-a-thons, which included:

Five (5) physical, on-ground training events spanning across 3 states of the North Eastern region of Nigeria.
Two (2) virtual/online cleanup sessions to refine digital contributions.

Program Impact and Innovation

The activities focused heavily on enhancing volunteer technical skills, identifying un-reviewed topics, bridging key content gaps on the Fulfulde Wikipedia, and mastering the use of the Machine Translator tool to streamline article creation.

A standout milestone of this project was the introduction of the Data Support Program to mitigate internet access barriers—a frequent challenge for local editors. The program utilized two primary strategies:

Event Hall Connectivity: Participants were provided with seamless, free internet access during physical workshops using community-specific routers.
Transparent Reimbursement Pipeline: A dedicated project page was designed where participants could transparently request data expense reimbursements. The organizing team reviewed contributions after every two edit-a-thons, disbursing data support to top contributors.

Thanks to these interventions, this operational window recorded the highest number of new articles created on Fulfulde Wikipedia compared to the entirety of 2024 and all preceding years. As hoped in our application, the implemented activities helped us maximize our community engagement, build a strong sense of connection between them and Wikimedia projects, and also grant us with the opportunity to offer them the needed support for internet access which helped gather our strengths in making effective contributions to the targeted Wikimedia projects leading to this huge success.

Project Documentation & Resources

Below are the links and tools used to track contributions, evaluate impacts, and share the community's story:

Project Page on ffwiki: Project Page
Tracking Dashboard Tool: Outreach Dashboard Tracking Link
Event Gallery & Documentation: Photos from the Campaigns and Events
Public Outreach & Social Media: Key Social Media Posts
Multimedia Training Assets: Video Documentary played during the events

Strategic Evaluation (Rapid Fund Metrics)

Our efforts during the Fund period have helped to achieve the following movement goals:

Bring in participants from underrepresented groups: Strongly agree
Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community: Strongly agree
Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups: Agree
Develop content from underrepresented perspectives: Agree
Encourage the retention of editors: Agree
Encourage the retention of organizers: Strongly agree
Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement: Strongly agree

Key Learnings

Learning 1 (Long-Term Operational Planning): We learned the immense value of long-term plan activities in solving small community resource challenges while exerting a huge impact on growth and development. It kept members' spirit high, instilled a deep sense of belonging, and built strong mutual teamwork. Frequent meet-ups across community hubs and fan clubs substantially strengthened internal community bonds and reshaped their passion for continuing contributions.
Learning 2 (Engagement Acceleration): The project effectively boosted community engagement by successfully retaining existing editors and accelerating their contribution rates. Providing structural infrastructure (like the Data Support Program) directly correlated with an accelerated editing pace, stabilizing the community's active contributor base.