 Alright, hi everyone and thank you for joining our session on mentorship as a pathway to two sustainability. My name is Stochie and presenting with me is Benedict. As you know, Wikimedia relies on a vast and diverse community of volunteers to create and maintain its many tools. These tools are essential to the Wikimedia mission of free knowledge for all, but they're also complex and require ongoing maintenance and development. And we've come to realize that mentorship is a way to ensure the sustainability of these Wikimedia tools. By pairing experienced volunteers with newer volunteers, mentors can pass on their knowledge and skills, helping to ensure that the next generation of Wikimedians have the skills they need to keep our tools running and Wikimedia projects up and running. Just in some rementorship is a relationship between a more experienced person, which is the mentor, and then a less experienced person, which is the mentor. The mentor provides guidance, support and advice to the mentor and also helping them to learn and grow. We're going to be going through why mentorship is important for two sustainability and then we'll be talking about how we've been able to use the Wikimental Africa project to test this aspect of it. Benedict, please. Thank you so much, Stochie. So the question why is mentorship important for two sustainability? Mentorship is important for two sustainability because one, it helps to transfer knowledge and skills. Mentors can pass on their knowledge and skills to mentees, helping them to learn how to use and maintain Wikimedia tools. Just like Stochie said, mentorship is just that relationship between the experienced two creator, in this case, the mentor and the inexperienced two creator, the mentee. So that relationship will tend to also share, you see the transfer of skills that will be shared in that the cost of that relationship. Another thing that this relationship does, mentorship, is capacity building. Mentorship can help to build the capacity of the Wikimedia community, ensuring that there are enough people with the skills needed to keep our tools running. An example would be considered, say, for instance, a two creator, someone who created a particular tool from the Wikimedia Dutch land, for example, adopts someone from Igbo Wikimedia user group and then mentors that person on how to use that tool, how to fix bugs on that tool. What that person has successfully done is not just transfer the skills alone, but he has also been able to give capacity to the Igbo Wikimedia user group to be able to use that particular tool in a way best suited for them. Next slide, please. Another thing that's another reason why mentorship is important for two sustainability is it encourages participation. It encourages participation in the sense that mentorship can encourage participation in the Wikimedia community by providing new volunteers with the support they need to get started. This is something that almost everyone has faced, being a new volunteer, you tend to face the obvious question, where do I start? And so one thing that mentors can help do is they can help you answer that by giving you tax, by showing you the way, you'll know how, where to start. You don't need to ask again, where do I start? It also encourages participation in the sense that whenever you stalk, whenever a new or inexperienced volunteer is stalked with a particular challenge or task, they tend to, because they know that they have someone who can help them, that tends to encourage them to participate even more. One other thing that mentorship also provides is also gives the sense of a community. Now, this is not just for the mentee themselves, but also for the mentor. Mentorship can help to create that sense of community within the Wikimedia community by bringing people together from different backgrounds and experience. Now, this can be seen in terms of, say for instance, a mentor takes in, like the scenario I gave with the Wikimedia Dutchland and Igbo Wikimedia user group. So just by both of them being connected together with the focus of one goal, which is that tool that was created, you see that there is a community. Mind you, a mentor can have more than one mentee. So it seems to the mentor, he's building a community to the mentee, he's part of the community. So it gives them that sense of belonging. So it gives the sense of community. Next slide, please. So to the question, how can mentorship be used to sustain Wikimedia tools? I guess this is a question of the day. So how can we do this? First, we can do this by pairing experienced volunteers with newer volunteers. This is the most common way to use mentorship. By pairing experienced volunteers with newer volunteers, mentors can pass on their knowledge and skills, helping to ensure that the next generation of Wikimedians has the skills they need to keep our tools running. Now, this is something we have tried in the Wikimental Africa program. Next slide. So for those who have not heard of Wikimental Africa, Wikimental Africa is a program that seeks to bring in more African, more African developers, more Africans into the technical space of Wikimedia. And one of the success stories I will be sharing today is for that of our biodiversity team. So the biodiversity team, which is headed by Andrea Wagner, who is the mentor of the team. Prior to Andrea coming on board as a mentor, he was able to, he has been able to create a script, to write a script that goes from iNaturalist that takes bio data from iNaturalist and creates Wikimedia, English Wikimedia stubs. For those who don't know what Wikimedia stubs are, stubs are incomplete articles. They're not necessarily bad, but they give, they're incomplete articles that one can develop. So they give you that starting point in an article. So what Andrea did was to write the script that takes from data, biodiversity data from a different app iNaturalist and creates English Wikipedia stubs. When Andrea came on board as a mentor in Wikimental Africa, he has been able so far to adopt these mentees. And now these mentees have been able to, because of the participation of these mentees, he has been able to not just create stubs for English Wikipedia, but also update the app, the script to be able to create stubs for both English, Ibo Wikipedia, as well as Diabani Wikipedia. So this is one success story I can tell you about what mentorship has done that we have tried. It has also been, so now you can see that if the stop builder was intended to last, for instance, the lifetime of Andrea. Now it's no longer just Andrea who is going to be able to fix any bugs that arise from the stop builder. You now have these other mentors who have been trained by Andrea who can now go ahead to sustain this tool, to sustain that stop builder. So which is one way of maintaining a particular tool. Next slide, please. So if you're wondering how, how can you get involved? If you're interested in getting involved in mentorship, there are a number of ways you can help. Consider becoming a mentor for Wikimental Africa. I mean, that's one way. If you have experience with Wikimedia tools, you can consider becoming a mentor. By experience, it could be either you are a tool developer or software developer or a technical writer on the Wikimedia space, you can come on board and be a mentor on Wikimental Africa. This is a great way to give back to the community and to help ensure the sustainability of our tools. Another way to get involved is so you can also get involved in mentorship advocacy. You can help us spread the word within the Wikimedia community. This can be done by talking to the other volunteers about the importance of mentorship just as you've learned today or by writing articles or blog posts about it. Next slide, please. Next slide. Okay. The third way you can also get involved is by adopting the Wikimental Africa approach. You can peer-season your, you or your community can, or your Wikimedia community can peer-season to developers with those still climbing the learning curve. This collaboration not only transfer critical skills like we've shared, but also ensures that emerging Wikimedians are equipped to carry forward the touch of tool sustainability. So I will leave you with, before we go to hand over the mic back to you, I want to leave you with this final word, that through mentorship, we sustain the heart and future of the Wikimedia community. So mentorship is a bridge between innovation and tool sustainability. Thank you so much. And yes. Thank you everyone. If you have any questions regarding what we've talked about, please feel free to ask. Hello. Can you tell me how long this program has been running and what motivated you to start it? Thank you so much. Yes. In terms of how long it's been running, so Wikimental Africa last year, April, so one year plus. And in terms of the motivation, basically, this came about from mentor Africa is actually meant to, is intended to bring in more Africans into the technical space of Wikimedia. And this was born from, ranging from the, what's it called, the hackathon that we attended. So I attended, I think it's the 2019 or 2020 hackathon, where we noticed that we had less Africans who were involved there. And so also when we attended the Wikidata conference, that is the Wikidata conference, of I think 2020 or 2021, also less Africans were involved there. And so the question now arose like, why are we not having more Africans involved in the technical space? And by technical space, I mean in writing software for Wikimedia or in writing, I mean, technical writing for Wikimedia, not just the usual editing. And so for us, it's born, that question kept burning, and we had to look for a solution. And being from the Igbo Wikimedia user group, and being from the Igbo culture, we know that one thing we have sustained so far is mentorship. One of our culture is mentorship. We call it apprenticeship down here. And so we felt how can we incorporate that, because we know that works, that works with other fields. Mentorship is not just for two sustainability alone. Mentorship can be applied in different fields, as you already know. And so we're looking forward to how do we bring this into Wikimedia. And so that was how the entire project was born. And yes, thanks to Wikimedia Dutchland, we've been able to have series of events, series of, yep, and series of events, and series of mentors come on board. And like I said, this, the Stop Builder is one of the success stories that I'm so passionate about. I'm so proud about because of the growth it has taken from just English Wikipedia to Dabani and Igbo, and even moving on to three and other languages. I hope that answers the question. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. I'm just checking if there's any more questions and wrapping up. I think we're at time. It looks like we don't have any more questions in the room. Thank you both so much for this lovely presentation. All right. Thank you. Thank you so much. Have a good day.