Hello everyone,
Wikimedia South Africa has just entered into an agreement with the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources https://sadilar.org/index.php/en/ (SADiLaR) to run a series of workshops training participants how to start editing Wikipedia with a focus on translating Wikipedia articles into other South African language versions of Wikipedia. It is Wikimedia South Africa's flagship project to help support the growth of African language Wikipedias.
Normally we would all run these edit-a-thons entirely as unpaid volunteers as we have always done in the past. However this project is so large and ambitious (SADiLaR wants to do workshops at all of South Africa's universities across the country each one lasting up to 3 days) that we have budgeted an amount to reimburse trainers. This is a much larger commitment than any other workshop training event we have ever done before in the past. As such the board decided it was only fair and most practical to reimburse trainers for running the workshops and coaching the participants.
This email is to ask our community, such as yourself, if anyone with extensive Wikipedia editing experience (more than 500 edits and at least a year of editing experience) is interested in becoming a trainer to run a few workshops?
Trainers will need a strong understanding of both Wikipedia's culture and rules in addition to the practicalities of how to make edits. Trainers will also need to attend an online training session to learn the lesson plan, how to teach editing, coach participants and get informed on the focus of the workshops.
We have a limited budget to cover travel, accomodation, and an hourly rate for each trainer. Each workshop only needs one or two trainers and we don't have much more in the budget to cover more people than that sadly. So there are a limited number of places. We will prioritise trainers who are located close to the workshop venue and who have prior Wikipedia training experience.
SADiLaR is still in the process of setting up all of the university venues and selecting the participants so we currently do not yet have a list of dates, places and workshop participant numbers. The project will last until the end of 2024 and might continue into 2025.
Please contact myself or Shupai Mchuchu shupai.mchuchu@wikimedia.org.za for more details.
In the meantime, for those that are interested, you can view the workshop outline on meta here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WM_ZA/SADiLaR_2023, the lesson plan here https://docs.google.com/document/d/173x7Y0QuYYGbcQ80xARWLrKbCEs47lBXVBC3-FafWjk/edit?usp=sharing, and the introduction presentation here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1m2wmw26-djoMBkO1YZgiw8saARfWzLjsVLAwlaBX8WQ/edit?usp=sharing .
Regards,
Douglas Scott
Director
Wikimedia South Africa Website: wikimedia.org.za
Phone: (+27) 079 515 8727
A non-profit membership organisation
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