For the time I have been on Wikipedia, I would say most of the time has been spent learning how stuff works and I can say that it is only now that I can make very meaning full contributions. By no means am I implying that the simple typo corrections or Wikignome work is useless, it is definitely important and very welcome. I have been thinking of how the time taken for folks to learn without compromising any fundamentals like the copyvio laws and other aspects of Wikipedia contributions.
Rationale[edit]
Africa's coverage is minimal or quite low because of lack of awareness of Wikimedia. And the ones aware of it are lost on where to start or how to proceed. To increase coverage from this part of the world we need contributors who cannot just edit an article but those that can do much more advanced stuff like create templates, nav boxes, category trees, advice on Coypvios, answer OTRS questions, offer support and so on. This project would best be undertaken under the English Wikipedia since it is well mature with all the structures in shape. After users get to know the mechanisms and structures there, then they can move on to other Wikipedia languages that serve African languages. I once had the privilege to give a talk to librarians and professors in Tanzania in 2011. At first I thought 2 hours was a lot to give the talk, it later spilled on to have Wikipedia sessions for the whole day and the participants were still begging for more. The talk involved hands on sessions with practicals and it was quite an enjoyable experience for me and the attendees. I was later sent the report of the whole workshop and the Wikipedia day was voted the best of the sessions. '..From then I discovered that it is possible to summarize work done on 4 million articles in a day:-)..' I have a copy of the report from the organizers and I cannot upload it to commons since am not certain of its license :-([1]
The Wikimedia Universe[edit]
Wikipedia in itself does not work alone but it depends on other projects like Wikimedia commons, meta wiki and the other Wikimedia projects. This might seem obvious to the already long time contributors but one notices the case is not so when you are doing an editathon outreach and a contributor of several moths asks you whether etherpad.wikimedia.org is also a Wikimedia project!
There is a lot to learn in this 'universe'. I have tried to break down most of the stuff into the packages as below;
- All Wikimedia projects with an incline on the most important/popular/most used
- Editing — GOCE, Wikification, Wikignomes,
- Programming — JS scripts, mediawiki extensions, CSS, Bots
- Internet based tools — IRCs, Mailing lists (Public and Private lists), QR Pedia,
- Law — Copyrights, Creatice commons, BLP policies
- Librarians — Categorization and other info organization methods
- Translations — The multilingual Wikimedia projects are, the closer we get to "..Sum of all human knowledge in a language at least everyone can understand.."
- Media — Commons, WLM, Wikipedia Takes Cities
- AGF — The cornerstone of Wikimedia
- The chapters — WCA,
- Wikipedia tools - STiki, Wikipedia Cleaner, Huggle, AWB, Igloo to mention but just a few
- The Wikipedia interface
- Wikipedia structures - Wikiprojects, Templates,