The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group has held Wikidata’s 10th anniversary with sister Wikimedia communities in Tamale, Ghana.
The event brought together some members of the Dagbani Wikimedia, the Gurene Wikimedia, and the Moore Wikimedia communities in one place for the first time.
Over 80 participants, from all three communities, embarked on a 5-kilometre health walk on the principal streets of Tamale, the northern regional capital of Ghana.
The Executive Director of Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, Shahadu Sadik, applauded participants for continuously digitizing their indigenous languages on Wikipedia and its sister projects.
The Program Coordinator, Yussif Abdul Rasheed, thanked the three community members, “especially those who travelled several miles from other regions across Ghana to participate in the event”.
The Communications Manager, Mohammed Awal Alhassan, shared a solidarity message stating that “the job is always easier to execute when there is a team of selfless and committed people who work with more good hands”.
Newbies or community members with little knowledge were taken through an overview of Wikidata, basic Wikidata editing skills, and an introduction to some tools via toolforge.org that they can use to edit with ease and in a more fun way.
This was to get participants to understand and appreciate Wikidata, how it is done, what it does, and why it is worth celebrating. The facilitator, Dnshitobo, after showing participants how to edit on Wikidata, tasked each participant to create at least one item and add labels, descriptions, and statements.
The last part was the celebration of the birthday with a cake cutting, playing indoor games, and dinner.
Some of the indoor games played were a singing competition between one representative from each of the three language communities, a pick-and-act competition among the communities, and a chair dance competition.
The final round of the celebration was the party or dinner, where participants were served different local dishes and drinks.
About Wiki Data
Wikidata is one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s multilingual projects that everyone collaboratively edits.
Like any other Wikimedia project, such as Wikipedia, it is a common source of open data that anyone else can use under the CC0 public domain license. “Wikidata is a wiki that runs on the MediaWiki software and the Wikibase set of knowledge graph MediaWiki extensions.”
Wikidata went live on October 29, 2012, and has since become one of the most important projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Turned ten years old in October 2022, and after bringing new energy into the open source system, there are various celebrations across different parts of the world where people are brought together to appreciate the achievements of their communities and also to talk about Wikidata to the rest of the world to get more people to contribute to it.
These get-togethers and birthday events take several forms in different parts of the world, such as meetups, workshops, discussions, live streams, and editing campaigns. It is a new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.