Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/140

Rh of Buea Library and Information Services. Her many years of experience in curriculum development as a university teacher is evident in her positions and involvements in many teaching modes. As the CDC and alongside the WIR, she will adapt the OCLC existing curriculum on Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together, used to train American public librarians, to design an instructional module that will be suitable for training African librarians who will participate in the pilot testing and the two different cohorts of the Wikipedia in African Libraries project. is curriculum will equip participants with the skills to aid different user communities in using Wikipedia for learning, give life to their individual stories, and create contents in their native languages (AfLIA, 2020e).

The Wikipedian-in-Residence, Alice Kibombo is a practicing librarian at Goethe-Zentrum, Kampala, a member of Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda, and has coordinated many Wikimedia campaigns and projects locally and internationally. The WIR was signed to facilitate the WikiAfLibs training and work remotely with Prof. Rosemary Shafack, the CDC for the success of the project. Future participants will have three opportunities to partake in the course, that is, in the pilot testing or in any of the two cohorts. The pilot aimed to test the adapted curriculum took place from November 16 to December 20, 2020. The first cohort will be admitted from February to April, 2021, and second cohort from May to July, 2021 (AfLIA, 2020d, 2020g). Benefits of the course include training of librarians on how to assist their users to use Wikipedia, to create the opportunity for global communities to amplify their stories, and to nurture Wikipedia community and African libraries’ relationships, leading to future collaborations and mutual benefit (AfLIA, 2020f). As she said in her tweet discussion with AfLIA on August 29, 2020, “It has the potential to positively influence information creation and dissemination in a number of ways. . . for starters, individuals will be in a position to identify and create content that would ll knowledge gaps.” is surely is a mutual benefit to AfLIA and Wikipedia.

Moving Forward: Challenges and Opportunities

Wikipedia is a multilingual online encyclopedia, which maintains an open collaboration with the community of volunteer editors using a