Teaching rural teachers in Namibia how to edit Wikipedia

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Namibia. Just like everywhere in the countryside, schools in Omaheke Region have computer labs but nobody to use them. Polytechnic of Namibia, in cooperation with a number of academic institutions, runs a Knowledge Portal project on six pilot schools in Omaheke, and Wikipedia is on board as one of the possible hosts of local indigenous knowlege.
The Omaheke population is predominantly Otjiherero-speaking but also has a sizeable number of Khoekhoe natives, and it houses several San communities whose languages are almost extinct. Dissemination of indigenous knowledge has for centuries happened out in the field or in the village: Elders tell tales on the fire, healers take youngsters around the savanna and teach them about medicinal plants, herders share their knowledge of ruminant husbandry on the job. This is no longer working because the youth has left the village in search of jobs and a better life. Village elders still tell their tales on the fire at night, but they tell it to each other; there is nobody else left to listen.
To prevent the complete loss of indigenous knowledge in this environment, a group of researchers from several institutions in Southern Africa is investigating how technology can help. We design tablet software that can be used by the functionally illiterate, we investigate non-invasive methods to record audio and video, and we need a portal to store that knowledge. Wikipedia is a logical choice.
On the other hand, Namibia is still underrepresented on Wikipedia, and we want to enable more editors to contribute. The OvaMbanderu, the dominant tribe in rural Omaheke, have no English Wikipedia coverage at all, except a few red links. The Otjiherero (hz) Wikipedia is in the Incubator with less than 50 articles, and so is OshiNdonga (ng) and Khoekhoe (naq). All other native Namibian languages did not even make it that far.

The group of facilitators and attendees at OTC in Gobabis, Namibia. Center back: Operi Murangi, Head: OTC, front right: Dr Winschiers-Theophilus, academic project leader, front left (red shirt): Peter Gallert, workshop facilitator.
Attendees of the Gobabis Wikipedia training, February 2013.
Attendees of the Gobabis Wikipedia training, February 2013.

On 26-27 February 2013, I conducted the first Wikipedia training in Gobabis, the capital of Omaheke Region, for teachers from our six pilot schools. Further participants were local government representatives, the community librarian, and a few out-of-school youth. I taught them how to create an account, make edits, use references, and write in an encyclopedic style; “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” is quite a meaningless statement for people who have never seen one.
Together we expanded one article, Witvlei, from a one-line stub to an acceptable start-class article on the English Wikipedia. The highway from the capital Windhoek to Gobabis leads through Witvlei, so I could even contribute a picture and GPS coordinates. We then went to the OtjiHerero incubator and created a few articles, one for every village the participants came from, by translating the first paragraph from the English Wikipedia.
Progress was slow at first. The lab computers were not working as expected, the participants shared a 56K dial-up connection, and as in every workshop I had so far we ran into the 6-accounts-per-day rule for account creation, this time with the additional trouble that several members never set up an email account in their life, and that there was nobody “at home” at the Account Creation team.
It was not the standard first-world workshop setting. The venue was quite hot and unventilated, fifteen people in a small room with only a tin roof, and the inside temperature about 35°C. Even after 13 years in Namibia I think I haven’t been sweating that much before. The “buffet” consisted of an aluminium pot that contained cheese rolls, and a bucket of artificial fruit juice from which one had to scoop with the only available cup. The petrol station proudly offered yesterday’s newspaper for sale. Alas, the food was tasty, the accommodation as rustic as its name (“Onze Rust”, Afrikaans for our rest), and the relationship among the participants was colleagial.
When the teachers went back to their villages, they did not yet have Internet access there. Telecom Namibia agreed to sponsor this, but it is not in place yet. Let’s hope they really teach their pupils what Wikipedia is, and that everyone is invited to contribute.
Peter Gallert, Polytechnic of Namibia

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Inspiring… congratulations:) (BTW, I love that Wikipedia Belongs in Education T-shirt!)

Thanks for the writeup! I noticed that you ran into an account creation issue: “as in every workshop I had so far we ran into the 6-accounts-per-day rule for account creation, this time with the additional trouble that several members never set up an email account in their life, and that there was nobody “at home” at the Account Creation team.” Have you perhaps tried asking for account creator permissions ahead of time, or requesting a temporary lift of the IP cap via filing a bug? If those solutions are not working for you, it would be good to know… Read more »

Thanks, Sumana, I never really knew how that account creator permission works—thought it is the same as being a member of the Account Creation team but apparently one can independently hold that right. Thanks for the hint, I have read up on it now.
However, most of my workshop attendees are supposed to reach out to their respective communities where they will run into the exact same problem. So I have to cover that anyway.

Hi Peter! Excellent stuff – thank you for carrying this Wikipedia for Education flag in Namibia – even when you’re frustrated by the conditions in Omaheke (and Windhoek – come to think of it:-)). You may want to hook up with the folks at WikiEducator – we’ve been doing teacher training sessions on that wiki platform for some seven years now, thanks to some inspirational effort by Wayne Macintosh… check out http://wikieducator.org/Main_Page If you ever need assistance give me a yell – or make contact on the FB EduNet platform started Gerard Jensen – we’re rolling out a free and… Read more »

[…] charity interested in distributing FREE educational content. On their Wikimedia blog there was this by Peter Gallert, about teaching rural teachers in Namibia how to edit Wikipedia, and thought that […]

Hi Peter!
Regarding “nobody being at home” at the account-creations bit on enwiki, we’ve been chronically backlogged for ages now. I’ve set up a graph at http://acc.stwalkerster.info/acc-new/2week/acc.png so you can see how we’re doing, but we do get around to all requests, it just may take a day or two at the moment.
Regards, Simon (stwalkerster)

Nice work Peter! Please keep us posted on any more workshops you do and let us know if you do any follow ups to see how many people continue to contribute and/or how many new contributors they might have introduced Wiki-editing to.

Just try to do same things in Russia. My sorrows about that.