Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili/Report 23-2024

Annual Report of the Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili User Group This report gives the overview of the activities and milestones of the Jengwa Wikipedia ya Kiswahili User Group for the year 2023—2024. The group continues to advance Wikimedia's goal of spreading free knowledge to everyone, and this report consists our main activities, the challenges we faced, and our future plans.

Main Activities

1. Workshops and Training Sessions (Online)

This year, we conducted several workshops and training sessions:

Editing Workshops: We held Wikipedia editing workshops attended by both new and existing members.
Writing Standards Training: These sessions aimed to improve the quality of existing articles and ensure high standards for new articles.

2. Community Events

Wikimedia Day: We celebrated Wikimedia Day by organizing a social event that brought together our members and other Wikimedia affiliates. We were able to be in contact with Dar User Group. Our time well spent on giving one another some editing techniques.
Monthly Meetings: We conducted monthly meetings to discuss the group's progress and plan upcoming activities. Again, it online.

3. Partnerships with Institutions

Women’s Day: Jenga Wikipedia & Dar User Group teamed up to teach Toyota Tanzania staffs how to edit Wikipedia. They have put a tremendous effort to make sure everyone understands what Wikipedia is and the goal behind its creation.
Universities: We have planned to collaborate with universities to provide special training for students and lecturers on using Wikipedia for research and teaching. However, for some an unexplained reason we couldn’t be able to do it. We are planning to do it later this year.

Achievements

1. Membership Growth

We continue to see new editors coming to Swahili Wikipedia. Some of them are experienced editors already.

2. New Articles and Edits

New Articles: Daily we continued to add a number of new articles to the Swahili Wikipedia.
Edits: We have improved some existing articles, making better templates, patrolling quite often a special new page’s area. Improving the quality and accuracy of the information.

Challenges

1. Resource Availability

We have faced so many financial obstacles and difficulties in accessing essential resources for our activities. This has utterly limited our ability to execute many of the planned activities. Sometimes we don’t have proper internet sources. If we could get a WI-FI routers it would be great.

2. Engagement and Participation

We tried our best to encourage new participants and maintaining a fully participation of existing members was a challenge, especially in areas with limited internet access. Not only, some of them said they don’t have bundles to perform the task in question.

Future Plans

1. Boosting the Swahili Wiktionary We plan to help increase number of words on the Swahili Wiktionary. Also planning to assign special people to look after the project. Basically we need to have a s small active community to look after the project. We are planning to engage a partnerships with more educational institutions and libraries to increase awareness and add more words on Swahili Wiktionary.

2. New Projects

We aim to launch new projects focused on increasing the participation of women and youth in Wikipedia editing. This we will travel all over Tanzania. Especially on the Universities.

3. Social and Online Training

The idea is to make sure everyone on board understands pretty well how to use the Wikipedia tools. Doing so, we will conduct more social and online training sessions to enhance the editing skills of our members and their use of Wikimedia projects. Thanks for all.

Muddyb of Swahili Wikipedia

27-05-24 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.