 Hello everyone and welcome to this session entitled Media at the Glam in the Global South. This session is dealing with the Glam movement in Africa particularly. And we will be showcasing several Glam projects in the Global South and in Africa. So I will share with you the program now. This session is jointly organized by the Wikimedia library user group and Wikimedia Nigeria user group. There will be five parts for this session. The first part is about Wikimedia heritage. It explains the activities that are ongoing by the Wikilower heritage user group to digitize the heritage on Wikimedia projects. Then we will showcase two contexts that are ongoing on Wikimedia Commons each year. The first one is Wikilower heritage that has the coverage and quality of intangible African heritage in Wikimedia projects. Then we will be showing the winners of Wikilower Africa Contest for 2021. Then Wikimedia Nigeria will show the project about documentation of indigenous languages called grassroots languages documentation in Nigeria. And then we will showcase several projects and efforts related to the use of Wikimedia projects in libraries. Finally, there will be a final discussion to explain how to move forward with Wikimedia and the Glam to sustain sustainability in the Global South and to answer questions related to this session. Thank you. So to begin, I will leave the floor to Nassima to present the activities of Wikilower heritage. The floor is yours. Thank you. Hello everyone and greetings from Morocco. So I will be going to present the activities of Wikilower heritage and how through these activities we can contribute in fostering the Wikimedia movement. Thank you. So as I said, this presentation is about fostering Wikimedia movements through World Heritage and how our activities in Wikilower heritage user group can contribute not only in documenting World Heritage, but also in fostering the movement all over the world. Next slide please. So last year we discovered and were surprised to know that many UNESCO World Heritage sites are still under documented on Wikimedia projects, either on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibata and so on. And also many countries with World Heritage sites have no Wikimedia affiliates. And there is the example from Africa and from Central Asia. So we decided to create Wikilower heritage user group. But our purpose was not only to document World Heritage, but to go beyond that and to see World Heritage as an opportunity to empower Wikimedians and foster the Wikimedia movement in many countries. And it will be done through three aspects. First of all, World Heritage is a very good opportunity for capacity building for Wikimedians because simply World Heritage is a very complex topic that includes many aspects and many components. Therefore, a successful documentation of this topic requires the good mastery of many Wikimedia projects and tools. Then we have World Heritage as a good catalyzer of dynamics within the movement because World Heritage is constituted of components of the same nature. For example, cities, archaeological sites, buildings, and these components are found in many countries at the same time. So they can be a good trigger to catalyze collaborations between different Wikimedia affiliates. And also to create collaborations between these Wikimedia affiliates and other powerful and potent organizations such as the UNESCO World Heritage Center, the ECOMOS, and so on. Finally, because World Heritage is found in many countries, even those without Wikimedia affiliates, it is a good occasion to catalyze partnerships in countries without Wikimedia affiliates through collaborating with other NGOs. And when we collaborate with other NGOs, we can create a good occasion for them to learn about Wikimedia movement, to learn about editing in the different projects, and to start the creation of their own Wikimedia community. Next please. So let's start with capacity building. In order to build the capacity for our members, we first started by doing a skills assessment to a survey that we sent to all the members in order to know what are their needs, what are their priorities, and what are the projects and the tools that they master in order to create an atmosphere and an environment where Wikimedians learn from each other. And as a result, we have here our capacity building program that you can see, and which targeted many tools on Wikidata, on Wikimedia Commons, and others. And in order to make all the Wikimedians benefit from this capacity building program, we didn't keep it for ourselves, but we tried to share it as possible as we can. So our capacity building program is available on Wikimedia Commons, on the middle page of the user group, and also on our YouTube channel to be accessible to Wikimedians and also to people from other backgrounds. Next please. Another example for creating dynamics within the movement is the thematic project of tall cities. As mentioned earlier, word heritage can be repartitioned into many groups, buildings, cities, archaeological sites, and so on. So we are working on creating thematic projects that work on order to sites of the same nature, but that do belong to different countries at the same time. And tall cities is one of them. And from the name we can deduce that it targets its cities and the urban quarters and towns that are listed by the UNESCO as word heritage. And here we have the example of a very successful collaboration that we had with the media Tanzania, and I will let my friend Anthony talk about this collaboration and its outcomes. The floor is yours, Anthony. All right. Thank you so much, Nasima. So my name is Anthony Mttavango. I'm a co-founder of Wikimedia community, user group Tanzania. And I'll be summarizing some achievements that we have made in the collaboration with the Wikimedia World Heritage. Around March this year, we had the Tall Cities 2021 in Tanzania project. This was a new project that we did focusing on recommending some buildings that are old, old buildings that are found on its own town. Sorry for interrupting, Anthony. Can you go back to the other slide, please? To the previous one. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much, Nasima. I can start over again. My name is Anthony Mttavango from Tanzania and I'm a co-founder of Wikimedia community, user group Tanzania. So I'll be summarizing some activities that you have been doing in Tanzania in terms of GLAM. The first project we did this year, around March 2021, was Tall Cities 2021 in Tanzania. This was the project that we aimed at documenting some buildings that are recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Site. So we had like 24 plus Wikimedians from Tanzania, 10 of them being the photographers. And we had to travel to the town of Zanzibar and we were able to capture like 400 plus photos that depict this building. These buildings that are old and they are, yes, recognized by UNESCO that they are World Heritage Site. Then we were able to collaborate with other Wikimedia editors on creating more than 26 articles that were not present on the Swahili Wikimedia, but they were on English Wikimedia. And this was all about the Zanzibar historical buildings. Also, we need to collaborate with the Wikimedia Heritage user group as Nassima Said. And specifically, we need to collaborate with Yemen from Tunisia and, yes, Nassima from Morocco. And we did add some content on Wikidata that was not there as a result of this project. So we are thankful for them for being so supportive. And we are looking forward to do more of this project each year to document more areas that are present in Tanzania that are not covered on Wikipedia. So we are inviting other communities that can feel like doing the same project in the communities or collaborate with us to do the same. Then the second project was Wikiharitage in Danger as you might be knowing already that due to climatic change in the world, some areas are added to the list that is a list of the areas that are in danger. So in Tanzania, we have Nyerere National Park, formerly known as Teluz Game Reserve. And this is the area that is in Tanzania listed as one of the areas that are in danger. So we were able also, between June and July, we need to organize some photo hunt to that national park. And we had like 326 plus photos and these are the photos that are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for the usage of different Wikimedia Foundation projects such as Wikipedia and Wikidata. Yeah, so in short, this is the summary of the glam activities that we did so far in this year from Tanzania. Thank you and back to you, Nassima. Thank you so much, Anthony. And besides Wikimedia Tanzania, we are collaborating with Wikimedia Ivory Coast and we are having a meditaton and a photography hint just next week. And we wish to collaborate with more affiliates that have cities in their countries listed as UNESCO World Heritage. Next slide, please. Another project we are working on this year is Windanger as introduced by Anthony. It's about World Heritage sites in danger. And many of these sites are found in countries without Wikimedia affiliates, which makes their documentation very challenging. So what we did is to start searching for partners in these countries and with targets and having focused on heritage-focused NGOs. Fortunately, we were being able to catalyze partnerships in three challenging contexts, which are Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen. So this year we are proudly collaborating with NGOs from these countries. And we are going through an approach that enables capacity-building from locals from these countries in order to adopt the project and implement it. So we started by sourcing volunteers. In collaboration with the help with these local NGOs, we selected volunteers from each country in order to charge them to implement the project activities. Suddenly, we started a capacity-building program. This month we are leading a training of trainers program for Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen in order to equip volunteers with the necessary skills to edit, to explain to others about Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, to know more about licensing, about the rules and also how to organize edit-a-thons. And in September they will organize an edit-a-thon, each one in each country, and a photography contest that will finish in October. Next slide, please. And the last thing that we should always remember that Glam communities, such as museums, were heritage professionals and other heritage activists and professionals, are not always or necessarily have the good mastery of new technologies. And they are not necessarily aware of how Wikibata works and how Wikipedia works, for example. So we had the idea to make the incredible possibilities offered by Wikidata accessible for these audiences, to create platforms that are user-friendly and that can allow them to use Wikidata queries and Wikidata-generated information without being obliged to go through learning how to do queries or how to learn Sparkle. So we are working on creation of a website for Wikibord heritage that will give access to all the maps, statistics, timelines, and other information related to these sites. Next slide, please. And we are working on fostering accessibility to Wikiconsent also by designing playful experiences that include the content we always produce on Wikipedia. And here I'm going to present you the example of Medina Stories, which is a project that targets the documentation of 10 word heritage sites in the migrant region through Organizing and Editing a Photography Contest. And when we collected all the content from the Editing and Photocontest, we created a playful digital application that gives the user a virtual visit to these word heritage sites with always the possibility of reading more on Wikipedia. Next slide, please. Finally, I would like to thank you and to invite every Wikimedia affiliate to reach out to us for collaboration. And here are all our social media platforms that you can follow us on and also our contacts. Thank you. Okay, so thank you, Nesima. Well, now we have to move forward. And so we will move forward to announcing the Wikilovs Africa winners for 2021 with Ayla. Hi, I'm Ayla Hadoflod. We are going to today announce the winners for Wikilovs Africa 2021. Wikilovs Africa 2021 took place in between February and April, the competition upload time, and the theme this year was health and wellness. We followed the theme health and wellness because we believe that after the last two years with COVID taking a very negative view of people around the world, it was also a good idea to concentrate on something not only the negative, but also to concentrate on the happiness or at least the more positive aspect, which is wellness and health, and something that people can do daily, but also ascribed to and can change. So Wikilovs Africa is about changing the narrative of how Africa is represented online and how Africa is represented both to us and to internationally. And so therefore, it's a very powerful medium and representing health and wellness was one way of doing that. We had 8,319 people who submitted entries. There were no submit entries that were submitted. There were 1149 people who entered photographs. There were 47 images from 47 countries, and there were also a number of events while 33 that were held by the Wikimedia user groups across Africa. Every year, this is the seventh year that we've held Wikilovs Africa, and every year the contributors are always within the top 20% of people on our, sorry, over between 75 and 80% of people who contribute to Wikilovs Africa are entirely new to the Wikimedia movement. And so that it's getting, it's a very high contribution rate, and there are the numbers are coming down every year, which means that more people are re contributing to the competition. So who won this year? This year, Ewen van Berken van Bergeck and Kwanth won with this amazing photograph from of a woman waiting with her son sitting vigil, waiting with her son at the hospital. And the photographer said this, this image of a mom spending time faithfully sitting next to her son day in day out just hit me. She had a certain calm and determination to her, despite hospital life being hard in West Africa, she envisaged a certain dignity, dignity and hope I could not take my eyes off her. And it is a startlingly heart wrenching but also quietly determined image. In the second is a woman who is learning how to look at through the microscope, and it's such an image of both the multitasking of women, but also this wonderful image of women with a very, that's a very, very universal form of carrying of carrying babies in Africa. So this is a particularly amazing image from Nigeria. Then this is a very cut image unfortunately the way that we have had to crop it just for this slide but it's actually a portrait image of a young girl who is just happily cleaning her hands. It's a very simple process. It's something that we've all learned how to do very thoroughly over the last two years, but it's beautifully captured and the colors and the smile and the kind of vibrancy. This is from Ghana. Gabriel Joe Amazou is a fairly well-known photographer within and supporter within the Wikimedia movement in Ghana. And his reaction to taking this was seeing a little girl washing her hands in this COVID-19 era without anybody telling her to do so, just made me understand how determined the girl is to live in this COVID-19 academic pandemic. So it was, again, a very nice, simple image. Then we had a best video, best video category, and this was from Cote d'Ivoire. Last year's winner, Bubakam's video compilation was of going into the canals of Abidjan, but in this case he took somebody's daily routine through the streets of Abidjan, and it's a beautifully shot video. It's a story. It's an entire story, but it also shows the daily routine, but it also shows the streets of Abidjan too. And the production quality is excellent. I really advise you to go and have a look. For the traditional culture prize, we chose an image from the sand that represented the sand in Botswana and about how dancing and their belief system is very much about being healing and about making people consistently healthy. The first three prizes were judged by a panel of 12 international photographers and communists. And the last two that you've seen, the video prize and the cultural prize, were the organisers. We decided that given the specifics of the prize category. And the third prize, the last prize, has gone to a, it's a special collection that came from the Norjadan training program that happened within Cameroon. And as you can see, there's a collection of three from three of the three photographers who together went on a tour of this hospital and it's absolutely sensational, the photographs and heartbreaking, but also amazingly professional and the daily representing the daily lives. Florence, I and Cesslas helped to organise, well, organise this year, but we couldn't absolutely could not do it without the help of the many Wikimedians and user groups across the Wiki Loves Africa, but also across Africa. It's not only established user groups, but also people, volunteers from across Africa who are just starting to build their own communities and their own spaces within Africa. So it's, it's amazing to see this. We had a lovely representation of Africa this year, and we're looking forward to doing it next year. And what have we achieved over seven years? We've had nearly 72, well over 72,000 images that have gone, have been contributed with over 9,000 people from 9,000 people. And these images have been viewed in total nearly 780 million times. And this is changing the, how Africa, the narrative is with consistent chain, sorry, consistently having images from Africa being represented on universal subjects. And along with competitions like Wikipedia pages, wanting photos, being able to use our images as well, the collective images. So thank you very much for everyone who takes part. And just to look forward towards the, the Wiki Africa hour that's taking place in early September and you can meet all the winners there. Thanks everyone. Thank you. So now we will move to Joy, who will be presenting the Wiki Loves Heritage Contest. Okay. Hello everyone. Good to see you from behind. And while we're waiting for the saying, okay, great. All right. I'm Joy from Ghana, and I'm here to touch on a bit from Wiki Loves Folk No Team under the institution Open Heritage Foundation. You can go to the next. Okay. So Open Heritage Foundation is a free knowledge advocate group that brings together diverse communities to assist with the coverage of tangible and intangible heritage sites onto Wikimedia Commons. But most of the projects or campaigns that we run is the Wiki Loves Folk Law and the new addition that's the Families in the Folk Law. Next, please. Can you please go to the next. Okay. So today I'm going to touch a bit on the intangible sites or artifacts that we've been covering through the Wiki Loves Folk Law campaign. And as most of us would already know, it's an international photo competition that brings together people from the underrepresented communities as well to sharing folk laws, tales, cultures, music, anything that has to do with folks and their tales, which is captured together and put on Wikimedia Commons. This year, the theme was on Families in the Folk Law, basically to Ghana contributions from artists who are females, as well as directors or movie directors or tale directors who are females as well. And not just about the tales, but then we also focus on capturing images on museums and heritage sites. Next, please. Okay. So the reason why my focus mainly is based on introducing more of the projects of Wiki Loves Folk Law to Africans is that we've had low rates of participation. And if you realize over the past three years, when it started as the Wiki Loves Love competition, which sought to bring together or capture images or let's say events of love activities, we realized that it was important to also introduce the artifacts and the tales that contributes or constitutes the, constitutes to the tales of the people who run the competition. So for example, when you look at the Philippines, they have so many festivals that has stories behind it. And without this competition, we will not be able to get information about what they do or will not be able to have a visual representation of what is done in their respective countries. Thankfully, we can look to the next slide. Thankfully, we've had good representation from the African groups that started from Ghana and Zambia that was last year 2020. Please go to the next slide. And now we've had about six institutions or countries participators. For example, we've had an increase with the name Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Tanzania participated in this year's competition. Although there has been an increase in communities participating, it's still on the low side. The percentage is not well covered. But the issue is that we realize that there are some groups or institutions that are facing challenges with the freedom of panorama. You realize that there are some heritage sites that is equally impossible for them to capture these images because there is no freedom of panorama, which we are trying as much as possible to introduce certain measures where communities or countries who are interested in participating in Wikilev's folklore would be able to discuss it with their respective governments to release or give them the free way to capture these images. Like Ayla said, some of these competition or performances helps us to have a good representation of the images on Wikipedia articles that do not have images describing or giving meaning to what the article talks about. And I'm excited to share that at least this year we've had a spot of announcements yet to be made. We've had one passing from one contributor from Nigeria who shared an amazing audio which captures a dance in the Hausa language for the very first time. Next. So as I was saying earlier on, we need to encourage more advocacy. We would want to have more an increase in participation from African communities. There are some two kids and resources that we have that we would share. And also we have some list of heritage sites and folklore activities that we would make available to anyone who'd be interested to join the campaign. And before next year comes, what I want to encourage you to start documenting images of festivals, videos of festivals that are already taking place in your respective countries. Next. I think I'm okay. So basically that's it. So just like any other Wikilev's folklore or Wikilev's projects that happens once in the Wikimedia Foundation, it would be great to have you all on board to support the initiative. Thank you. Thank you. So now we will move to Olishola who will be presenting the grassroots project. Hello everyone. Thank you for this amazing event. I am so glad to be here. I'll be talking about the Nigeria language oral history. My name is Ola Nio Olishola. I'm the president, the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria. Thank you. I can say this slide right now. So I'm the president, the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria, and also the chair of the Board of Trusty, the Wikimedia Nigerian Foundation Inc. So there are basic highlights of this presentation. One of them is what we would like to share with you all, one out of the 50 documented oral history with you so that you can enjoy the richness of our language. And also we're going to have a focus on the project focuses. And we're also going to look at endangered language and the classification system by the UNESCO. And lastly, quickly going to look at the some of the step-by-step documentation process of documenting a language oral history. Please next slide, please. Okay. The Nigeria language oral history is an initiative by the Wikimedia Nigerian Foundation Inc. which supports from the Wikimedia Foundation for enriching the Wikimedia project with freely licensed audio visuals, files, documentings, spoken languages, and dialects in Nigeria. Next slide, please. There are key focuses of the project. So the first project that the first challenge we have is that there are quite a number of languages in Africa that are only spoken but are not written. So we feel it is important for us to start from somewhere by documenting the oral history of some of this language. So our plan is to freely document the brief oral history of indigenous languages in Nigeria in a format that is easily accessible and searchable. So we also plan to promote the use of indigenous languages audio visuals on relevant Wikipedia articles. We also plan to bridge content gap on Wikimedia projects by creating awareness and also promoting content around indigenous languages on Wikipedia. And lastly, the project focuses on how to promote GLAM. If you look vividly in Africa, one of the key problems we're having is lack of focus on GLAM. So we think that this project is actually going to spur quite a number of affiliates into action by starting with this. And I think it's beginning to take shape. Can we go to the next slide, please? This picture is looking at endangered languages with a focus on Australia. And this is a photo is credited to UNESCO. We have over 108 languages in Australia with like 13 definitely endangered. We have also 10 severely endangered. This shows the extent at which languages are actually going into extinction. And the United Nations show the Digi also mentioned that every day at least two languages is bound to slide into extinction. So it is quite important from the side of Africa and globally to begin to look at how best we can preserve and digitize our languages. So with this experience from Australia and other things that is happening across the globe, we could see that it is quite important for us to take an urgent step in preserving our languages. Next slide, please. So there's a classification systems of endangered languages by UNESCO. We have languages that are vulnerable. We have some that are definitely endangered. We have the severely endangered and we have the critically endangered and the extinct. So for vulnerable languages are those languages where most children speak the language but may be restricted to certain domain. This is an example of what is happening in most of, well, I would say in Nigeria, where I came from, you see children only speaking a particular language within their domain but they don't speak it outside. The second one is a definitely endangered. The children no longer learn the languages as a mother tongue and rather than in the home. And that is actually happening everywhere at the moment. Then the severely endangered languages are the ones spoken by the grandparents and other generations while they penetrate. While the generations may consider it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves. This is a typical example of most of the indigenous languages in Africa and we have the critically endangered and those that has gone into extinct. So let's go to the next slide, please. Then this slide is going to give us a case study where we have a look at the Nigerian language oral history documentation. I think I have the pie in the case for you to eat. Let's go to the next slide, please. What are the problems that we plan to solve? At the beginning of the initiation of those projects, we observed that less than 10% of the indigenous languages and dialects were covered on wiki. So this is a major content gap and we feel that starting with this type of project will help to bridge this gap. Then the second problem is that most of the problems that we found in the A above as a result of lack of no commoner, lack of no commoner engagement or activities to promote other languages on Wikipedia. So if you look at some of the languages we have, well, I would say more of Africa. Somewhere yesterday, someone said that it seems African languages are not really important. And why? Because people don't actually use photos on African languages. Why? Because many of them, many of the speakers or many of the indigenous can't even speak the language. So when you can't speak it is difficult for you actually to contribute to it. And when the indigenous can't really speak the language, then it's more of a big problem. So this is a major problem. There are no commoner engagement. Then the last one is there is no digital archive of the identified languages on the open licenses. So this project is also is actually projected to ensure that this documentation are freely open and are accessible for education and for research purpose. Next place, solutions. The first solutions that we brought to the table is for us to, one, create a catalog of some of these likely endangered languages or probably the indigenous languages. Then afterwards, we also try to identify communities that are relevant to these languages. Then the second thing we did in providing solution is the research. So we look at within the Wikipedia movement, who are those people, organizations or individuals that are currently working on this project or perhaps have worked in the past or they're planning to work in the future. So we were able to get in touch to contact Wikitong and their contribution has been quite impressive in this. Then the next thing is to meet with the stakeholders. We discussed with the stakeholders to know some of their challenges, how we can help and what have been their challenges, how they can really help. So there are quite a lot of things that have gone into this. So I've discussed about designing the catalogs. They also define the scope, which is quite important. How many languages do you think you can document? How do you want to document? Who are the professionals that are needed to be brought into space? So those are some of the things that we're taking into consideration on this slide. Then the other one is to discuss your idea with potential donors or funding agencies. So since many of us don't really have the funding, so it's most important for us to look at funding by talking to major donors. We talked to the Wikimedia Foundation that were the ventures funding, I mean sponsors of the project. Then we have to look at how to draft your proposal and getting something done. It is also important to have a landing page that will showcase some of those things that you plan to do, your success story, your measure of success, what you have done so far, and what next will be done. Then second but the last is you need to look at the recruitment of the project team. This type of a project is more of a professional work that can just be given to anyone. So it was quite important and one of the success of this project is that we had to engage one of the best documentary producers in Nigeria to document the video so that we can get a very quality video. Then the last thing is community engagement. While it is important for us to have the videos, to have the content, the audio feature, it is also important for us to have them use on Wikipedia and different languages and that is also part of what we do. We work with the Yoruba Wikimedia User Group Nigeria and then going forward we're planning to work with other languages in Nigeria to be sure that people make use of some of these languages and they are properly documented. Next stage please. Outcomes, the first half of the project. This project is ongoing so we can only present what we have gotten at this point, which is the first half of the project. We've been able to produce a history of 50 indigenous languages for research and education purposes. We have also uploaded on commons these languages and by first week in October, the first batch of these languages will be archived on US Library of Congress. And lastly, the contents have been used on overnight related Wikipedia pages and that is quite awesome and large. And I can tell you by the second half of this project we are looking at going to over 500. Next stage please. So if you like to learn more about this project, you can click on this and I've also shared on the Etupad for you to check some of the metrics, what we have done, what we are yet to do, the learning patterns and quite a lot of things about the project that could be found on the landing page. Next slide please. As you sit back, listen and watch, I really want to thank you. I have my colleagues here. Isaac is also part of the project team. I wouldn't know if Isaac would like to say hi to others if you have time. If you still have time, some time left please. Thank you very much Mr. Ashola Olanio and everyone present here. I actually said it all and it was the project manager for that project. And I want to say congratulations to you Mr. Ashola Olanio for a job well done on that project. As you rightly mentioned, it's an ongoing project and we're looking forward to complete it before September and we share the final outcome with the entire community when it's ready. So without wasting much of our time, I would like to say thank you to everyone for attending this section and for listening to that brilliant presentation from Olishola. Thank you. Thank you. So now we will move to Clifford who will be presenting something about the use of libraries in the community of projects. All right. Thank you so much and thank you for the invitation to serve in this panel and thank you to the fellow panelists. We've been learning so much so far. And will you share my slides please? Okay. I will share. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. So I'll just get started because I know our time is running short. But in just a few minutes I want to talk about the Wikimedia and librarians user group of which Medini and I are a part and some of the initiatives that we're undertaking to foster connections between librarians worldwide. So the Wikimedia in libraries user group brings together librarians, information professionals, workers from other allied sectors with Wikimedians to serve the common cause of sharing reliable knowledge. And among other activities, the members of this user group supports international campaigns like One Lib One Ref and also seek to learn and to pass along information from successful library outreach programs in one region of the world so that they can be replicated in other regions. The steering committee of the user group comes from around the world from New York, California, Tennessee where I am, the United Kingdom, Israel, Tunisia, Nigeria, Goa, and Queensland, Australia. And the membership of the group numbers 329 at present representing librarians and information professionals and other interested parties from Buenos Aires to Cape Town and beyond. A recurring theme of the user group meetings is how we can generate and foster greater connections between Wikileberians. In particular, how may we strengthen ties between librarians in the global south and the global north. And in what follows, I highlight a few of the ways very quickly that we're trying to enhance those transnational relationships. Next slide, please. One of the things that we're thinking about a lot is scholarly communications. And for those of you not familiar with the lingo, scholarly communications is about removing the barriers to sharing and exchanging scholarly research, whether in the form of articles, data, clinical trials, or whatever else, with academics as well as the general public. And the potential application of Wikimedia projects to foster scholarly communications has become a focal interest for many Wikileberians. And here we're indebted to the work of Mary Lace Lamas-Royus, the Open Knowledge Librarian and her colleagues at the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis University Library, because she really spearheaded this effort to think about Wikidata and Wikisite for scholarly communications. One of the things that we're trying to do at Vanderbilt, and you can see this project Vandy site, is to think about how we can develop a kind of open knowledge platform based on the Wikimedia infrastructure that will replicate a lot of what you would have to buy otherwise from commercial providers. And that would be things like scholarly profiles, being able to do bibliometrics, thinking about institutional repositories, as well as measures of scholarly impact. Let's go to the next slide, please. Another project that we've undertaken is, and this was mentioned earlier, you know, to help Wikimedians and Wikileberians learn how to use Wikidata for this type of purpose. So my colleagues and I had a Wikisite grant that we got in 2020, and we developed this tool called Wikisite for Librarians. It's up online and I'll put it into the ethernet afterwards at www.learnwikidata.net. But what I think is really fun about this is we did this little robot, so we didn't sort of privilege any one particular culture or region. We had videos that are in this interactive learning pathways, and we've done them in four languages now. We've done them in English, French, then Spanish, and also Chinese. And so what we learned through that is that you simply can't do dubbing or subtitling. If you want to actually do these type of introductions, you need to contextualize them. I mean, that's an obvious takeaway, but when we did these pathways, we drew from those regions, for example, the articles that we talked about, or how to, you know, the different monographs and libraries we wanted to describe that was all contextualized. Last slide, please. And another thing that this is very practical, and we've just started doing this. This is a little bit embarrassing, a video image of me with Miley Joseph, a public librarian in Brisbane, Queensland. And we're trying to encourage a program of what we call Wiki Pen Pals. The idea is that we would have these short exchanges that we would record, and then we would share them online and sort of just connect one-on-one with a librarian from a different region of the world and share each other's stories about how we're engaged in Wikimedia projects. So if anyone is interested in that, please get in touch. And just a final thought, which concerns language. You know, I'm speaking very fast here, and I'm sorry because I want to get everything in. But I also recognize that one of the greatest barriers we have is just kind of a privileging of the English language. And so we continue to think about how to do that with both within our user group, but also I think there's a lot of thought on that in Wikimedia projects in general. And I will say that Husmedini and I virtually attended the Grammatical Framework Summer School in Singapore this summer. And it was a wonderful opportunity to think with others who are looking at ways to translate between languages automatically and make Wikimedia more accessible to others. So I'm going to stop there in the interest of time and see it back to you, Husmedini, and thank you so much for your attention. I will just share my screen again. Okay. Well, okay. So I will talk briefly about how to use Wikimedia resources to enhance library catalogs. And I haven't catalogs about glands in the global south. First, you have the categories in Wikipedia and in other projects that can be controlled keywords to annotate catalogs. Second thing, you have the softwares that are running the Wikimedia projects, media wiki, or Wikibase that is running Wikidata. So we can use it and build your own database. Third, you can do some topic modeling and some analysis of the text of Wikipedia articles and use that for the implementation of the regular labeling. And finally, there are patent bots, user scripts, Lua Mudes that can be used for creating library information systems. Thank you. So think about that. That's what I have to say. So now I will be moving forward to Alice, who will be talking a little bit about Wikimedia and African libraries. Yeah. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Sumedin. Wa-Gwa and everybody, welcome to the session. If I am cut off, I have a table in the community village. Sumedin, please share my slides as I talk about the Wikipedia in African libraries project, which is a result of a partnership between Affleah and the Wikimedia foundation. And we are using our revised OCLC curriculum. Are you able to share the slides? Yes. And we're using the revised OCLC curriculum. And how this came about is Affleah is a continental body that unites African library associations and institutions. And they have a network that is spread over 30 countries. And out of these 30 countries, we have English speakers, French speakers and Portuguese speakers. And when we run a survey, we found out that this is the third slide, second or third. We found out that, yes, from over 330 respondents, over 54% were not aware that there were any user groups in their countries. But 65% had experience with online learning. So the course is delivered virtually. And then a big number spoke English. So a big number of the participants we have so far speak English. Some French, the Portuguese, I do not know what happened to them. And there were also more female than male respondents and they are more female than male students. And this addresses the gender gap as well as the age issue because most of them are between 31 and 50 years old. Next slide, please. So how did we do this? We got the original curriculum, the original OCLC curriculum. And then we customized and expanded it to include five course sections that address information literacy. And librarians get to know why they should be engaging with the resource that is Wikipedia. And then we look at Wikipedia editing. And because not everybody is good at editing, we also look at community engagement because very many of them are in positions where they can leverage their influence to make things work. And then we also expanded the curriculum to acknowledge and address community realities, specifically local language and offline access, especially with this epileptic internet and electricity supply. And the course is delivered virtually in both English and French. And to foster community connections because over 50% said they did not know they had user groups in their communities. We enlist the experience, sorry, we enlist experienced African Wikimedians. There are very many practicing Wikimedians who are also librarians and they are able to share their experiences depending on the theme of the day. Share the community campaigns that they are working on and just their presence alone is able to motivate participants. Next please. So right now I can confidently say that as a collective we are able to organize and participate in global campaigns. And we have a flagship African librarians week every May, so look out for it. And we have also been able to get resource persons in areas that have no affiliates. And what comes to mind right now is Zambia, Namibia and Zimbabwe but there are other communities. There are deeper working relationships with user groups that we thought would never reach out to. Benin comes to mind but then there's also increased confidence with the individuals who have been in this course and they also participate a lot in their local communities. And they have been able to submit plans of engagement, community engagement at the end of the course. And a number of these have actually been sponsored through a rapid grant by the Wikimedia Foundation. Next and last. So yeah, proving it is really not provoking you but we do have some numbers to speak to the success of this engagement. We have trained four batches of students so far. 524 students have been enrolled and we've been able to create 619 articles. Some of them are on Wikidata, French Wikipedia and English Wikipedia. We have 2,279 images of specifically African information institutions that have been contributed. So perhaps Ayla this is something we should be talking about. And then also we've made Wikipedia a much better place by adding that number of references that you see. Next please. So thank you very much. That is the Wikipedia in African libraries project. If you look for us at our official hashtag is hashtag wiki athletes and I thank everybody on this panel because everybody on this panel has been part of that campaign. Some have been guest speakers, some have volunteered their expertise. Some have told me to be in this forum. Some have really broken their backs for me to be in this forum. So thank you very much Sumedin. Back to you. Thank you. So Ayla, can we speak for one minute or something about the Wikidata? Okay. Hello everyone. We're running out of time. So even if the presentation is not coming on board, I will just quickly wrap it up. My name is Ayla Comey and I'm a member of the strength committee of the user group as well and also from Nigeria. So basically I just want to probably just talk about campaigns and how we can use campaign to be able to launch into the grassroots, to be able to get more people involved with the community project. And quickly I'm just going to make an emphasis on using the tool that we have, especially for professionals. So quickly please next slide. So why do we have to use campaign most times, you know? Reference campaign, when it has to do with professionals, it allows more professionals to get involved. It makes contribution what's right. Because while you're doing the campaign, you're making it much more easy for people to be able to access the project. You're making it look fun. You're making it look entertaining. And the truth is, when it comes to referencing, when it comes to having a Wikipedia, a quality Wikipedia article, what's a Wikipedia article without reference? So it's a potent to lunges campaign. So quickly let's move. I'm trying to... Okay, so easy way for reference campaign. Now we have the beautiful project called One Librarian. And I'm sure a lot of us know about it already. So it's just saying, imagine a world where every Liberian had one more reference to Wikipedia. So imagine a world where every Wikipedia had at least one reference to Wikipedia article. So this is an example of a campaign that you can use to... That we use, we've adopted and also kind of work to be able to enter into the grassroots, to talk to Liberians, to talk to people, get them involved with the Wikipedia project. And this is something of a time that we've done over the years. I live from my own country, Nigeria. And I've been able to bring in a lot of professional Liberians into the project. So talking about the One Librarian, moving on. So One Librarian, it's a project of the Wikipedia library. The essence of the KLIB team is to access the use of source of free, easy, collaborative and efficient information. It's run by a team of the Immigrant Foundation staff. So now let's move to the tool of the One Librarian. Now we have the important to call Citation on. Now Citation on is the tool being used for the One Librarian campaign. So what that means that... What that means is that it allows us to be able to add Citation to each Wikipedia article. And this tool has been proving very, very important to use in Wikipedia project. Because when you get involved, people get to add content, they get to add Citation into Wikipedia article, and it allows them to enter into the grassroots of videos with Wikipedia projects, as the case may be. So it's next slide, please. I'm trying to wrap up. Next slide. Now, results for previous campaign. I'm using Nigeria as a case study. Now using this One Librarian web campaign, it has produced a lot of results. Using this One Librarian web campaign has been able to allow the user to be able to have partnerships with more than five libraries in Nigeria. We've been able to train more than 500 libraries in the hearts of editor Wikipedia. We've been able to have partnership with Citation. So really, it supports our users.