Wikimedia Chapters Work Together to Bring More Free Knowledge to Africa
Next Sunday, 20 Israeli students will leave for humanitarian work in Africa, equipped with portable offline Wikipedia thanks to a coordinated effort between Wikimedias from Israel, Switzerland and France.
Every year, the Africa Center at BGU, headed by Dr. Tamar Golan, sends a group of students on a three-month humanitarian expedition to developing countries in Africa. This year’s group is going to the Republic of Benin and the Republic of Cameroon.
To help, Wikimedia Israel decided to equip the students with computers running free software and containing an offline (static) version of the French Wikipedia, so that the students can bring free knowledge to Africans without access to the Internet. The students also have portable installations of the offline Wikipedia, so that they may install it on any other computers they may run across in Africa
We reached out to Hamakor, the Israeli Free and Open Source Software NGO, and Hamakor helped obtain computer donations, refurbished them and installed the Linux operating system on them.
Wikimedia Israel collaborated with members of Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia France to produce an up-to-date static version of the French Wikipedia (numbering about 1 million entries, and including images), French being a major language of reading and writing in Cameroon and Benin.
Incidentally, the Linux version installed on those computers is called Ubuntu Linux, ‘Ubuntu’ being an African word (in the Zulu language) roughly translated as “unity of mankind” or “mutual reliance”.
We are very excited about this project that continues the Wikimedia Movement mission of supporting and promoting the distribution of free knowledge to everyone in the world. We can’t wait to hear an update from the students next month.
Itzik Edri
Spokesman, Wikimedia Israel
Thank you Itzik for sharing this information with the entire Wikimedia movement. It is important to note that Africa is a huge continent with many countries and diversity of cultures. We found a relatively easy way to reach out to two French-speaking countries, Cameroon and Benin, and we are hoping to have them sharing knowledge and information about their countries and culture with the rest of the world just as much as we hope they will benefit from the Wikipedia-equipped computers. I say “relatively easy”, because the infrastructure is already there – there are annual Africa Center delegations, HaMakor regularly takes care of such projects and the French Wikipedia is large and rich in material. All we had to do is to make the phone calls, set the meetings and make ends meet. Dr. Tamar Golan, who lived in Africa for many years, and other experienced people, offered us a lot of valuable information, according to which some of our outreach ideas would be harder to realize, but we should make the effort bearing in mind that this is not charity, this is an action for the benefit of us all, in all five continents.