When it comes to empowering the younger generation with valuable knowledge and skills, W4SAfrica stands at the forefront.
Did you know that Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites? By contributing information on climate change to Wikipedia, you’re reaching a worldwide audience, ensuring that crucial insights and knowledge are at the fingertips of people across the globe.
One of W4SAfrica’s digital skills initiative aims at empowering the youth and women with digital skills like wikipedia to promote sustainability. Their recent collaboration with the Center for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies (C3SS) at the University of Ghana engaged and empowered students on Wikipedia. The students enthusiastically delved into exploring Wikipedia’s extensive knowledge base, discovering how to effectively use the platform to document information on climate change and sustainability specific to their region
This workshop captivating experience not only introduced the students to a vast ocean of information but also instilled in them the importance of collaborative knowledge sharing.
The W4SAfrica team started the Wikipedia introduction session by highlighting the knowledge gap that exists on Wikipedia in relation to information from Africa and emphasizing on the need to address these knowledge gaps to ensure that many people have easy access to content about Africa especially in relation to climate change. They highlighted that only 5% of articles that exist on English Wikipedia are about Africa, according to them even the city of Pari has more written about it on Wikipedia than Africa. They highlighted the fact that the lack of awareness and skills amongst other factors could be a contributing factor.
They also emphasized that anyone can and is welcome to contribute and edit articles on Wikipedia. To ensure that the students had a comprehensive understanding of how to navigate Wikipedia, the W4SAfrica team guided them through the platform’s interface and features.
Some of the exercises the students were taken through includes creation of a Wikipedia account, adding sections and references to existing Wikipedia pages and showing them that their knowledge and voices matter.
From account creation, representing the global nature of Wikipedia, to the search bar, students were introduced to every element necessary to kickstart their exploration.
Thanks to Dr. Yaw and the faculty for making this collaboration a success.