Wikimedia Ghana User Group

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Program 1 – Increasing and Sustaining Participation

From Clicking “Register” to Clicking “Publish Changes”

01. The Ghana Edits Wikipedia Roadshow Project

The Ghana Edits Wikipedia Roadshow continues as a decentralized outreach and capacity-building initiative that brings beginner-friendly in-person Wikipedia training to communities across Ghana. The project is designed to recruit and train new editors from diverse regions across the country and reduce barriers to participation by bringing Wikimedia training closer to communities.

As part of our decentralization strategy, we began transitioning the responsibility for organizing these workshops to volunteer-led regional nodes. This shift empowered local communities to take greater ownership of Wikimedia outreach and accelerated our outreach efforts. This approach enabled the project to expand its geographic reach from 5 administrative regions in the previous grant year to 8 administrative regions by hosting 13 workshops across Koforidua, Tamale, Takoradi, Ho, Bolgatanga, Cape Coast, Kumasi, and Accra, creating new entry points for contributors from diverse communities across Ghana.

The roadshows achieved 78.3% of the annual target for newly registered editors. New contributors were integrated into their respective regional node groups, providing a pathway for continued participation and long-term community retention.

The engagement of three new node leads, who took full ownership of planning in their regions, marked a meaningful step toward a community-led model and generated valuable operational lessons for future decentralized outreach.

A comment from one of our regional participants stood out. Audrey Amoah (User: Audrey.esi) said, “I used to think you had to go to [some] headquarters to write a Wikipedia article. Now I can contribute knowledge to Wikipedia from the comfort of my home.”

02. Bi-Weekly Editathons (Sustaining Active Editing)

The Bi-Weekly Editathons were recurring online editing sessions (sometimes held in-person depending on participant needs). They are held at least twice a week and are designed to retain existing Wikipedia contributors while improving Ghanaian-related content on Wikipedia, particularly current affairs and breaking news content.

The project sought to keep editors actively engaged through regular opportunities to edit, collaborate, and contribute to Wikimedia projects. In terms of content impact, across the grant period, 44 sessions were held.

More significantly, Ghana’s average active-editor count as recorded by stats.wikimedia.org increased from approximately 100 active-editors at the start of the grant year in June 2025 to 110 active-editors by July 2026, and this met the project’s target of 10 additional active editors by 100%. While the available data does not establish that this increase was directly caused by the editathons, the sustained frequency of the program and its focus on existing editors suggest that it served as one mechanism supporting continued editor activity in Ghana.

03. Product Feature Exploration

Our Product Feature Exploration project sought to create an organiser-independent pathway for newcomers to self-onboard onto Wikipedia using built-in tools such as the Newcomer Homepage, Newcomer Tasks, and the Help Panel. Due to funding restrictions we settled for having an exploratory workshop to primarily understand how Ghanaian newcomers interact with the Growth Features in practice.

The workshop engaged 9 participants, who independently navigated the Growth Features and collectively edited 26 Wikipedia articles. While interactive features such as Suggested Edits successfully drove participation, 100% of participant feedback identified usability friction points including overly broad topic suggestions, confusion between Suggested Edits and Suggestion Mode, and unclear task difficulty selection, providing direct evidence of where the tools require improvement.

They were also encouraged to engage in Wikipedia reading through the mobile app and signed up for the Global Reading Challenge, broadening the session’s scope beyond editing alone.

04. Wiki Loves Places

Wiki Loves Places was a photography and geolocation campaign undertaken in collaboration with the OpenStreetMap community in Ghana to engage contributors in documenting places across Ghana through geotagged photography. The campaign also built practical skills across Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap, providing an alternative pathway into Wikimedia contribution beyond traditional Wikipedia editing.

The campaign exceeded its primary content target by a significant margin, recording 783 geotagged photograph contributions to Wikimedia Commons against an initial target of 500, achieving 156.6% of the intended output, and 177 Wikidata contributions.

The campaign was further extended through a photo walk partnership with Kukun Ghana, a local workspace and café in the Osu Ako Adjei area of Accra. Kukun proactively reached out to Wikimedia Ghana User Group. The photo walk attracted 12 participants and generated 86 additional uploads to Wikimedia Commons, bringing total campaign contributions to 869. Beyond the content output, the Kukun partnership demonstrated the potential of local businesses or residents with the proper engagement can take ownership of how their locality is represented online, and this also helps to introduce the movement to new and diverse audiences, including professionals and creatives who may not have previously encountered Wikimedia projects, creating a replicable model for future community growth through non-traditional partnerships.

05. Participation in Wiki Green Conference

The Wiki Green Conference 2025 brought together stakeholders from academia, civil society organizations (CSOs), youth-led organizations, and Wikimedia communities to explore how open knowledge can support climate action and sustainability. The conference sought to demonstrate how Wikimedia platforms can be used to document knowledge, improve access to information, and strengthen advocacy through collaboration.

Wikimedia Ghana User Group’s “Wikimedia & Wikidata for Advocacy” workshop, helped participants gain a better understanding of how Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons can support the work of organizations by making content accessible. The strong interest expressed during and after the session highlighted a growing recognition of Wikimedia platforms as valuable resources for knowledge sharing and public engagement.

A key outcome of our participation was the development of the Wikimedia Toolkit for Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). The toolkit transforms the learning from the conference into a practical resource that organizations can continue to use beyond the event, supporting sustained engagement with Wikimedia projects.

06. Wikipedia Highlife @ 100 Project

In late 2025, UNESCO inscribed Highlife music and dance, a popular form of music and storytelling from Ghana, on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, coinciding with the genre’s 100th anniversary. Following this milestone, the Ghana Tourism Authority launched a year-long initiative to celebrate, preserve, and reposition Highlife music as a key pillar of Ghana’s cultural identity and creative economy. In support of this national initiative, Wikimedia Ghana User Group sought to establish a working group of stakeholders and partners to identify documentation gaps ahead of the launch of the Highlife@100 campaign in August 2026.

The working group reviewed the Highlife category on Wikipedia and identified several areas requiring attention, including missing biographies, articles lacking citations, limited multimedia content, and the underrepresentation of notable Ghanaian women associated with the genre. These findings informed the campaign’s content priorities and implementation approach.

As an early outcome, the group identified the underrepresentation of notable Ghanaian women on Wikipedia as an immediate gap that could be addressed ahead of the main campaign. This led to the launch of the Notable Ghanaian Women on Wikipedia Campaign in March, which focused on improving, expanding, and creating biographies and related content about women’s contributions to Highlife music across Wikimedia platforms. 

The planning process established a clear direction for the Highlife@100 campaign while enabling Wikimedia Ghana User Group to begin addressing priority content gaps ahead of the campaign’s official launch. The initiative also received additional visibility through a press release published by MyJoyOnline, helping to raise public awareness of the campaign and its objective of improving the online documentation of Ghana’s Highlife heritage. The experience and lessons from the March campaign further informed preparations for the broader Highlife-focused contest scheduled for August.

In the News

07. Wiki Loves Monuments 2025

Wikimedia Ghana User Group partnered with Wikimedia Kuwait, Wikimedia Sudan, and the Islamic Civilization User Group for Wiki Loves Monuments 2025 (5–15 November 2025), a multilingual campaign to improve monument-related content on Wikipedia.

Our contribution focused on preparing and publishing lists of monuments that were missing English Wikipedia articles, required improvement, or were suitable for translation into Arabic. We added these lists to a Meta page, enabling editors to reserve and develop the articles. We also collaborated with partner communities to coordinate contributions and supported participation through three online edit-a-thons.

The partnership expanded monument-related content, strengthened international collaboration, and contributed to the preservation of cultural heritage through free knowledge.