Hello everyone,

Our education projects based on version V1 are now coming to an end.

There were two of them.

- The first was in English language, within South Africa high schools. Articles were meant to be for Wikipedia. We are currently collecting the texts produced and getting feedback.

- The second was in French langage, within schools in 4 French speaking countries. Articles were meant to be for Vikidia and production was done as part of a writing contest amongst schools. Participants were in the 9-12 years old range. The list of articles produced may be found here : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Projet:WikiChallenge_Ecoles_d%27Afrique/Ecoles Overall, it worked well ! We got some good feedback from teachers. Apparently, the manual transfer of articles worked pretty well. What was perhaps an issue was more about images (half of them were uploaded on Commons, the other half on Vikidia, and most did not have attributions, descriptions etc.)

We are discussing next steps with both partners (Orange Foundation in the francophone countries and Moleskine Foundation in the anglophone ones), trying to figure out the next best options.

We are starting to work on the next steps. Wikimedia Foundation and the committee agreed to fund those : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/WikiInAfrica/WikiFundi

Those will include

1. Fix existing bugs and make coding improvements that have been reported by the current users, 2. Increasing the outreach, educational and training resources that are available on the platform, 3. Increase the training experience of the users by adding interactive tutorials in English and French, 4. Meet with and develop a dissemination strategy with relevant partners working in the field of offline access to open source resources, 5. Increase the communication reach and scope, and 6. Explore future improvements to the software.

If you want more info, or if you are interesting to know more and get involved, please get in touch with me.

Cheers

Florence