Dagbani Wikipedia Goes Live

Dagbanli, the language of the Dagbamba in the North-Eastern part of Ghana been recognized by Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. This milestone follows the migration of hundreds of Dagbani articles from the incubation stage to Wikipedia’s mainstream.

The language, which is spoken by approximately 3 million people, has now joined Twi and Eʋegbe as recognized Ghanaian languages by the open data platform.

A co-founder of the Dagbanli Wikimedia Group, Sadik Shahadu, in an interivew with citinewsroom.com, said “what it [language addition] means is that people who speak Dagbanli can now access Wikipedia content in their own language which is Dagbanli and also more content will now be available in Dagbanli on the internet.”It also means native speakers can now access information through the wiki portal dag.wikipedia.org.Until recently, the Dagbani Wikipedia has been incubating for several years.The effort to revive the Dagbani Wikipedia incubator started early last year as the brainchild of the Global Open Initiative Foundation, a young nonprofit organization based in Ghana.

It’s founders, Sadik Shahadu and Mohammed Sadat Abdulai, led the initiative in February 2020 by recruiting language experts and enthusiastic speakers to form a group called Dagbani Wikimedian User Group (DWUG).Since then, DWUG has undertaken a number of projects to encourage volunteers to add Dagbani content to Wikipedia.These include regular editing sessions and the My Northern Achiever Challenge in October 2020 – which was a competition that was aimed at adding content about notable Ghanaian personalities to Wikipedia.Members produced more than 200 articles which went into the incubator but were eventually migrated onto the mainstream Wikipedia on July 1, 2021.

The Project Manager of DWUG, Abdul Rashid Yussif, obviously elated that more than a year-long efforts have paid off, paid tribute to his team for their dedication to the cause, but was quick to add that more work lies ahead in order to sustain the gains. He indicated that there will be a need to improve existing articles and to add more. Abdul Rashid appealed to Dagbamba to own the project by being constant visitors and contributing more articles to the Dagbani

Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in Ghana Organized by Dagbani Wikimedia User Group

Wiki Loves Monuments is an annual international competition held in September, organized worldwide by Wikimedia community members with the help of local Wikipedia affiliates across the globe. The purpose of this competition is to document and disseminate interesting places that depict the culture of a group of people, historic sites, or happenings. Individuals can take pictures of these things and places and upload them to Wikimedia Commons.

On September 25th, the Dagbani Wikimedia user group embarked on a photo walk to Yendi, a community in Northern Ghana, to visit some historical tourist sites. The team had their first stop at the Mion Palace, where they were given a brief history of the community. One of the interesting things about the community is that there are two baobab trees that were planted so many years ago. The trees are very close together, so one would assume it’s a single tree. The elders in the community have studied the trees and have come to know when they will have a good yield or not. The name Mion was carved from the name of an animal called “Meenga” – a Giant Tortoise. 

The next stop was at the Gbewaa palace. In the palace, the team was shown to different areas, including the security checkpoint. Moving on, was at the Naa Dataa Tua. This is a place where men who were accused of having an affair with Yaa Naa’s wife were executed. The victims’ execution was done on a big stone, and the victims’ heads were cut off, thrown in a hole in the baobab tree (Tua), and the bodies buried. Gundo Naa’s palace was the next place to visit. Gundo Naa is a title given to female chiefs in Dagbon. The current Gundo Naa was enskinned on June 14th, 2012. She has elders just like a male chief, but she also has female subordinates who serve her when the need arises. Other places visited are the German cemetery and Adibo battle yard.

Visit Wikimedia Commons for more information about Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in Ghana.

WIKIDATA BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

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.

The Tamale version of the celebration by the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group and its two sister communities was a combination of the meetup, workshop, discussions, and editing campaign in three parts. The first part involved the participants from all three communities, numbering over 80, embarking on a mini float with a team of scouts following and directing traffic so participants could walk freely in one of the principal streets of Tamale, the northern regional capital of Ghana. The float was in the form of a health walk from the event center about 5 kilometers away and back. The walk started at 6:00 a.m. and ended at 8:00 a.m. It was fun and meant to prepare, energize, and make participants stay fit and active for the remaining planned activities of the event for the day, as well as to announce and create awareness among the public about the anniversary. After the mini-float, the Executive Director of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, Sadik Shahadu, led participants to do some stretching exercises before taking some rest and preparing for the other planned activities.