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Event Toolkit

Are you appalled about how few African women are represented in the media, on the news and in encyclopaedias? Do you often find your experiences are not being reflected when you look up something on Wikipedia? Do you work in the gender-equality sector? Or do you work in heritage, the arts and cultural sectors and want more representation of the African female leaders online?

Wiki Loves Women’s Event Toolkits is designed to help you gather together a community around a gender-focused subject and add local information about notable African women that inspire you to Wikipedia and other global education projects.


PLEASE NOTE: this page is being created. It is currently in draft. This means that not all elements are in place or have been finalised. If you have noticed something missing from the lists below, please point this out on the talk page. We will be happy to add it. Please also feel free to suggest any resources that you have found invaluable to your events!


Purpose of the Toolkit

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[draft]

Wiki Loves Women is a multi-country, multi-faceted project that aims at encouraging the contribution of content that celebrates the influence of African women leaders, and reflects the realities faced by women and girls across Africa. It usually operates with local Wikimedia volunteer groups, working with content organisations to contribute freely-licensed information, texts, images and media to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wiki Loves Women was initiated in 2015 for the WikiAfrica movement by the principals of Wiki In Africa in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, and further funded in 2018 by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Part of the activities of Wiki Loves Women are to organize edit-a-thons, which are face-to-face events during which people meet and work together to write Wikipédia articles (as well as various other related activities). Since 2015, several dozen of Wiki Loves Women edit-a-thons have been held in African countries. Over the years, lots' of supporting material created and best practices collected. We have decided to share those as much as possible through an Event Toolkit. Our toolkit is aimed at bolstering the Wikipedia content creation activity in communities (established, nascent and not yet existing) across Africa and encouraging the participation of women.

The Wiki Loves Women Events Toolkit provides the communications templates and other materials needed to sustainably host writing and contribution events dedicated to African women’s issues on Wikipedia. The WLW Event Toolkit ensures that individuals (mainly women, but not excluding men), groups and NGOs passionate about access to knowledge on Women’s issues in Africa have the tools necessary to easily host events and sustainably build communities.

The WLW Event Toolkit has been created to provide background material and statistics for organisers and contributors, organisational guidelines and how-tos, communications materials and templates, and evaluation techniques. The Event Toolkits is intended to support wikimedia communities and other groups and organisations as they inform, train and host new editors who will add local knowledge about women leaders, gender activists and the topics they work on to Wikipedia.

About Wiki Loves Women

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Wiki Loves Women video presentation

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Wiki In Africa's Wiki Loves Women project was created in 2016 to dramatically shift this dynamic; to ensure that women and men are introduced to the problem that is inherent in the lack of representation for Africa’s women online and to provide the tools to close these gaps. The project empowers women and gender-sensitised men to be active participants in knowledge creation and not just passive receptors of the status quo. Its primary goal was to encourage participation and facilitate the contribution of quality information on and about African women to be published on, and made widely available via, Wikipedia. It also strongly encouraged the activation and support of new and existing editors (both female and gender-sensitised male Wikipedians). Over 2016-7 and in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, the programme was run intensively in 4 countries in Africa (Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria) with direct training, mentorship and project management support.

The Wiki Loves Women poster launched at Wikimania 2018.

We noticed that, in addition to the above goals, the project impacted hugely on the strength, skills and numbers of the local volunteer groups. The direct impact included:

  • a better understanding of how Wikimedia projects operate
  • more visibility in their country
  • consolidated Wikimedia group structure (eg, in Cameroon and Ghana)
  • leadership roles and increased capacity for women within the local teams (especially, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana)
  • significant increase in numbers of women involved in the project both as partners and as Wikipedia editors
  • more awareness and contact with the international Wikimedia community (Cameroon’s volunteers became a UserGroup; Nigeria became involved with WMF over readership access; Ghana gained several partnerships with gender based institutions including Africa Women's Development Fund, Women Who Code, Fabulous Women Network, Tech Needs Girls, etc.; the Cote d’Ivoire team attended Wikimedia Francophone Conference and later created WikiMousso to extend the work done on WLW).

These were all elements that were not apparent before the start of the project.

Finally, a massive boost to local groups came in the long-lasting relationships that were created between the local Goethe-Instituts and the Wikimedia groups in each country. These relationships have strengthened over the year with Wikimedia groups being given venue and logistical support for a number of events.

The specific actions of the project can also be viewed on the Wiki Loves Women website and on the [[en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Loves Women|project page in English] and the . Work in Nigeria can be viewed through a documentary from Germany's 3Sat.

Why you should host a Wiki Loves Women Event

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Since its launch in 2016, Wiki Loves Women events have been being hosted in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. You can host one too! [draft text]

On Wikipedia African subjects are not covered with nearly as much depth, nuance and layers as those from the “global north”. At the same time, subjects about and relating to women are similarly under represented. When it comes to subjects that relate to or discuss African women, the gaps become an abyss. These gaps perpetuates the “single story of Africa”. It means that the realities of millions of people are just not reflected back to them when they go online. By not seeing their realities reflected, millions of people are alienated from these knowledge sources. Few understand that it is within their power to change this. Wiki Loves Women believes it is important to close these knowledge gaps by empowering a critical mass of new editors who will celebrate and contribute their local knowledge to this global resource.

There are multiple reasons why people do not yet contribute from Africa. Part of this relates to a lack of visibility for Wikipedia, and a lack of knowledge and support when editing for the first time. Articles are hard to write, and the majority of contributors to Wikipedia have been encouraged to contribute through events where volunteers socialise and collaborate on articles in the city where they live. When there are enough people formally working together in a geographical place, they are referred to as Wikimedia groups. There are some formally recognised groups in Africa, and there others working towards that recognition.

It is important to support new and emerging groups as they organise events that inform interested sectors about the opportunities; work with civil society, media, academia and cultural organisations that already hold knowledge; and create physical events to train editors.

The Wiki Loves Women Events ToolKit Project develops, creates and disseminates the templates and materials needed to host contribution events around African women’s issues on Wikipedia. The WLW Event Toolkit is geared to ensuring that individuals (mainly women, but not excluding men), groups and NGOs passionate about women’s issues in Africa have the tools necessary to easily host events and sustainably build communities.

The Events ToolKit Project is aimed at bolstering the Wikipedia content creation activity across Africa, especially encouraging the participation of women. A series of physical activities will test the effectiveness of the Events Toolkits in five supported countries and will provide a communication event to disseminate the Events Toolkits to new parties.

Quick check list

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my event check list

Step by step

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To go into more details, read here Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Loves Women/Resources/Event Toolkit/Step by step

Context and tools

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Context

Tools

Other awesome gender-based projects to get involved in

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In Africa

Globally and online

  • Women in Red (create missing biographies about women in English)
  • (create missing biographies about women in French)
  • Art and Feminism
    - Art and Feminism (stylized as Art+Feminism) is an annual campaign improving coverage of cis and transgender women, non-binary folks, feminism and the arts on Wikipedia. Art+Feminism is a do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others campaign teaching people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia. It held once a year, in March, all around the world.
  • WikiGap - is a global campaign held across the world by Wikimedia volunteers in collaboration with the Swedish Embassy and other gender civil society groups in each country. Single events are held around 8th March.
  • Wiki4Women, organized by UNESCO and Wikimedia Foundation at spaces around
  • #VisibleWikiWomen, organized by Whose Knowledge
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Nothing is created in isolation. This toolkit could not have existed with out those who have worked on similar projects before hand. Thanks goes to these amazing people who have created the following toolkits for their own projects.

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