Building Wiki community all across Africa

Some people have the rare talent of making connections. The Wikimedia movement counts itself incredibly lucky whenever people with this skill join our ranks. Today we’re proud to present an interview with not one but two such individuals: Benedict Udeh and Tochi Precious Friday of the Igbo Wikimedians User Group. They’re also co-founders of the Arcadia-funded Wiki Mentor Africa program, part of the Software Collaboration for Wikidata program. Both are based in Abuja, Nigeria; Tochi handles outreach for the mentorship program, and Benedict is the program coordinator.

We spoke with them recently about the many successes and challenges they’ve met with as they’ve grown and tended the burgeoning African Wiki community over the last nine years.

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Wikimedia Deutschland: Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the Igbo Wikimedians User Group?

Tochi Precious Friday: The user group started unofficially in 2016 through an editathon that Blossom Ozurumba organized, an Igbo women editathon. The essence of it was to add more women into the Igbo Wikipedia, like translating articles of notable Igbo women. That’s how we found out there even was an Igbo Wikipedia.

That event was funded by a Rapid Fund grant for six months. By the end, we had set up a community of mostly women. Then I had to apply for another six-month grant and coordinated another project on Nigerian women in politics.

Towards the end of the project in 2018, we realized that we had built a community of people and didn’t know what to do with them. We started researching on Meta to find out how user groups work, and we decided to take that step. We launched as a formal user group in Nigeria on the 5th of May, 2018.

WMDE: And the people in the user group participate in the [Wiki Mentor Africa] program?

Benedict Udeh: Yes, but the program in itself isn’t for the Igbo speaking communities alone — it’s for the entire African continent. The core goal of the program is to introduce the African community as a whole to the technical space of Wikimedia, and hopefully the entire open source movement: technical documentation, programming, design…

WMDE: Can you talk a little bit about Wiki Mentor’s mission, and how it’s changed over time?

Benedict: We started with a mentorship model. We invite folks who are experienced in a particular field or in building a particular tool to come on board and talk to the general community about it. The mission is still the same. We want to at some point be self-sufficient — for Africans to be able to solve our own code and technical problems, and also to address the issue of sustainability of tools. We are hoping to build communities such that it’s not just one person who knows about a tool, so that if there is an issue, we can have other people fix it. And it’s not just about African tools — we’re also looking at the global Wikimedia tools.

We changed because we had a constantly growing community who were enthusiastically coming on board, learning about the technical spaces at Wikimedia. We had a session where we had over seven hundred persons joining. Sometimes a big fraction of these want to be mentored [one on one].

And of course, we don’t have that many mentors available. We always had in mind that at some point we’re going to grow, but we didn’t expect we would grow this fast and this big. So we thought, okay, how do we take care of this number of persons and still be more impactful? Not just for sessions, but also the impact of actually seeing that work in the tools.

The initial plan actually was to make the whole program more like an online course, a MOOC, like Coursera and the rest. We are planning on leveraging the WikiLearn platform that we already have.

Tochi: Also, instead of the individual mentors, we also incorporated peer mentoring sessions. So we have participants who are savvy in the tools that they’ve been trained on and the hackathons that have been hosted — now they get to mentor their peers as well. That has also helped to multiply our reach and impact as well as sustainability.

Benedict: We’re now focused on building capacity for the people who actually join a call. So instead of just having a call about a particular tool — linking a mentee with a mentor and then leaving them to it — our events will get people to actually do things while on the call. We started introducing more things like hackathons, and that got people excited. For most people it was their first hackathon.

We also did a partnership program with a local community group, the Kali Academy, to train some of our community members who wanted to learn how to program. The partnership allowed them to learn how to write code from scratch — just an introductory program, not necessarily taking them to the mastery level of how to write code.

One of the very obvious challenges we faced was mentor retention and getting more mentors. It was and is still very tricky. The community kept growing and growing.

Tochi Precious Friday

WMDE: Do you find that there’s more commitment, more interest that you can only get in person, as opposed to online?

Benedict: Online engagement is still fine, but we felt the need to do more in-person in order to reach out to even more communities. Online and in-person, they both have their pros and cons. Some mentorship online might not be as interesting as when you’re seeing the person, that is true. But mentorship online can also provide advantages. Let’s say you’re coming on the platform [to be a mentor], and you’re not in Nigeria, maybe you’re not in any African region. It’s impossible for you to be doing a physical mentorship with someone in Africa. Online you can have that mentorship with people beyond the shores of your current location.

We introduced physical events because we wanted to expand more to the Francophone regions. We wanted to have more Francophones learn about this program and its benefits, and we wanted the advantages that come with physical events as well.

Tochi: I don’t think one was in any way better than the other. Inasmuch as it was for Africans, we also wanted to have as much diversity in mentors as possible, so online or virtual mentorship was also a very good part of it. Having hybrid [events, in-person and online] was like having a catchment area where people can easily relate with others and know they are not the only ones, there are other people contributing. This also helps us avoid burnout — you have other people who give you moral support. We didn’t leave out one for the other; they complement each other.

WMDE: That makes sense. You’ve got to use every advantage you have, because there are so many obstacles to building community. So what’s it like now that the focus has changed? How is the work different? Do you still have as much contact with people?

Benedict: Now it’s more intense, as you would imagine, with all the things we added. When we started, the program was trying to cover the entire African region, so it was best to have online sessions. Most of our activities were online. But this new approach, planning physical events, is more demanding than online. You need a local organizing committee [handling] things like the venue and all of that.

Things have really changed in the work itself. A lot more thought has gone into, say, hackathons we plan: how do we want it to be, how to best approach it, how to make it so that everyone in the community and beyond can participate. And the hackathons are usually not just one-day things, they’re multiple days.

We’ve also had what we call satellite hostings — in Ghana, in Cameroon, in DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], in Côte d’Ivoire, in Benin. It was the first time they had a program such as that in Benin. Having the satellite hostings lets us take advantage of people coming to a physical location, drawing energy from each other and learning from each other.

WMDE: Could you talk about some of the problems that you faced, now or in the past? What’s one of the toughest things about the current form of the mentorship program?

Tochi: One of the very obvious challenges we faced was mentor retention and getting more mentors. It was and is still very tricky. The community kept growing and growing. The geographic spread across Africa means also having to accommodate diverse times zones and schedules — one of our hackathons was in daylight for some African countries, but for other people it was way late in their own time zone.

When we started, we thought we’d have a maximum of like 100 people. And then we saw 400 registrants for events, 500, 700… we realized just a few days before the event that we’d have to change our Zoom package, it was funny.

Benedict: To clarify, that 700 number was for a single session where we had 700 persons, but right now we are at over 1,300 members on our Telegram space. A lot of people.

Some challenges are basically infrastructure challenges that are almost beyond our control. I’m talking about things like [electrical] power, which is still one of the major challenges plaguing Africa as a continent.

At the three-day hackathon we did last year, day two was meant to be the “hacking day proper”, but people were already complaining that their laptops were dying, they were running low on battery. All we could do to help them was just recording the sessions — but the hackathon was meant to be a way for them to get hands-on practice in what they’ve been learning and doing.

We tried to mitigate that in our own way, which was what led to the introduction of satellite hosting. It’s seen a lot of success, but we are limited with how much satellite hosting we can have. We can’t have satellite hosting across all 54 African countries.

WMDE: What are you most proud of in the work that you’ve done?

Tochi: Personally, apart from the program itself, I’m proud of the fact that the number of Africans who participate in general Wikimedia hackathons has increased. Previously, people who attended our hackathons… a lot of them didn’t even know that, apart from Wikimania and Wiki Indaba, there are actually other Wikimedia hackathons. We were really feeling ourselves at some point. (laughs) Also the way the community grew so fast, that was something that I didn’t envision, I’m also very proud of that.

Benedict: For me, looking back now to when we started, with the issue of just stumbling into technical rooms and not finding a single African, and where we are now… I sit back, and I’m just proud of the program in itself. These hackathons are places where people actually come to learn. You have people who are first-timers attending not just a Wikimedia hackathon, but any hackathon whatsoever. Creating that space where a lot of first-timers had the opportunity to come aboard in the technical space — yeah, I’m most proud of those moments and of the people we have been able to mentor up through the ranks. I can’t stop counting. I start thinking of the different achievements and I’m like, I’m proud of all of it.

WMDE: You’ve seen a lot of success, and you’ve said that it’s all grown faster than you expected. What do you think is your “secret sauce”? What is it that you’re doing right? If you could give advice to the people who are building a community who are five or 10 years behind you in that work, what advice would you give to them?

Benedict: Consistency. And not only that, but lower the barrier of entry. What I mean by that is assuming the person joining is coming from ground zero — you want to assume this person does not know what you’re talking about, and then start from there.

Tochi: One of the major things is being open to change. Projects do not always go as planned. When it requires a change, you have to change. When it needs to be tweaked, then you have to tweak. Another thing: just be hopeful. I look forward to the future. And like Ben mentioned, lowering the barrier — I’ll call it empathy. So being empathic enough to know that not everyone is on the same level with you. People are on different levels in life and in educational training. You’re working with people, and it can never be just you alone.

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We’re grateful to Tochi and Benedict for their insights and inspiring words. To hear more from Benedict, you can listen to the interview he gave on our WIKIMOVE podcast last year (along with another Arcadia project leader we’ve interviewed on this blog, Raisha Abdillah). As for Tochi, in addition to her ongoing work with the Igbo Wikimedians User Group, she founded the Smarter Language Hub in Nigeria and is also involved in the Wiki Loves Women project.