Submissions/How to raise awareness for Wikipedia: lessons from Iraq & Nigeria/notes

• People liked the video :)
• How do you describe Wikipedia?
  • Free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
  • Encyclopedia open for everyone's contribution

IRAQ

• Question: how did localization work? Was it just the articles and titles shown?
• Answer: due to budget and direction from community, we shot 1 video and swapped out articles and titles to cover 2 languages

Story: guy in the room saw the video and shared it with Russian (with new subtitles) and it was very popular :)

NIGERIA

• Shola
  • Challenges:
    • lack of technical know-how
    • Literacy
    • Poverty level (access)
  • How are you working to raise awareness?
    • WMNG is very focused and ready to push
    • Working with non-wiki organizations
    • Very few contributors, most are just readers
    • Wikipedia Fan Club
  • What makes this good?
    • Just like in NR projects, you need to understand where challenges come from
    • Figure out where low awareness is coming from, take care of those problems. Example: Fan Clubs are people who could be advocates
    • Showing that User Group in such countrie are empowered. Also need for them to be ale to recruit more volunteers
    • More partnership