Wikipedia artwork
For the first time, Rwanda will host the international Wikipedia conference which will bring together various communities commonly known as Wikimedia.
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The three-day conference dubbed as Wiki Indaba, will kick off this November 4-6, 2022 bringing together more than 30 countries on the African continent and various other Africans, who write for Wikipedia from different continents of the world.
And all Wikipedia communities are grouped under WikiMedia Foundation and it is now more than two years since the Wikipedia branch in Rwanda, known as Wiki Media Community User Group Rwanda, opened shop.
The Head Wiki Media Community Group Rwanda, Derrick Ndahiro, says that the main reason they decided to write on Wikipedia is that they found that Rwandan and Rwandan information written by foreigners, is sometimes written wrongly.
“A foreigner who comes and writes about Kigali, can write whatever they want, because he has nothing to lose, and when I read news about Kigali that is not well written, it hurts me as a Rwandan. This requires us to work twice as hard to find the news about Kigali more than a foreigner,” Ndahiro said during a pre-conference press briefing on November 1, 2022.
Private Sector (PSF), says that the performance of Wikimedia Community Group Rwanda put the country on another level of technology development thus hosting the conference helps to disseminate technology knowledge among Rwandans.
Felix Nartey, the Chief Program Officer of Wiki Indaba, says that Wiki Indaba started in 2014, and was held in South Africa, because it was the only country on the continent that had Wikimedia but later witnessed growth in other countries.
“For us, this was a platform to bring Africans together, to tell their stories, because they are important and valuable to the people of this continent,” Nartey said.
