SADiLaR workshops: opportunity to help train new Wikipedia editors at universities across the country - WikimediaZA

26 Sep 2023


      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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