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WikiChallenge African Schools

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This page is a translated version of the page WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique and the translation is 100% complete.
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Presentation of the writing competition

The WikiChallenge African Schools is a writing competition organized by Wiki in Africa and Fondation Orange. It is a competition dedicated to pupils aged 8-13 and which takes place in several French and English speaking African countries such as Botswana, Burkina-Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinée Conakry, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Niger, RCA, RDC, Sénégal, Sierra Leone and Tunisie.

The objective is to learn how knowledge is constituted by contributing through the Vikidia platform, the Wikipedia for children. Pupils from participating schools are invited to write encyclopedic articles on a subject relating to their immediate environment. The competition is open to organizations that are part of the Network of Orange Digital Schools and using (WikiFundi), a platform of Wiki editing in offline mode. Indeed, one of the peculiarities of these schools is… that they are not not connected to the Internet! [1] Their participation therefore implies the presence of an on-site digital facilitator (and possibly the help of Wikimedians and Vikidians) responsible for training, facilitating and ultimately collecting the content produced by the students.

The articles submitted by the children are all published on the Vikidia encyclopedia, less known to the general public than its big sister Wikipedia. Better known in educational circles, Vikidia has been developing for 12 years on principles similar to those of the well-known encyclopedia, but aimed at a younger audience, 8-13 year olds. It is distributed in the same way as Wikipedia, under the same license, and is open to the participation of young and old, according to rules co-constructed by the community of editors.

  • 20%
  • Quality education
  • Decent work and economic growth
  • Reduced inequalities

The competition is open to schools in the Digital Schools network of the Orange Foundation. It is aimed at students from around 9 to 13 years old, and fits into the pedagogical and educational framework. A teacher or school staff as a team can supervise and support it, with the local support of the Orange Foundation. Orange's support is expressed through the presence and support of a digital facilitator.

The theme of writing is free...but it is strongly suggested to create an article concerning the environment close to the school: its city, its village, a geographical point of interest, a museum located nearby or a local curiosity. The writing style should be suitable for an encyclopedic publication.

The main elements of the competition:

  • improve teachers' ability to learn, understand, contribute and foster contribution to Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) within their school;
  • an illustrated article by Vikidia about the village of each school (or about the city, neighborhood, local industry or geographic feature nearby);
  • a friendly, inclusive and transdisciplinary project, generating satisfaction for the participants;

Links

Tags
Education, Offline, WikiFundi, Vikidia, Writing competition, Francophonie, Africa

Project impact?

9 years of WikiChallenge, presented at Wikimania Paris 2026

The project is a training and writing program designed for schools. It is targeted at the education community towards using wikimedia tools to acquire and share knowledge to develop skills of the youth and of their teachers.

The program help the kids to gain new skills, such as digital skills (using technology), collaborative writing, knowledge sharing, or information searching.

Additionally, they experience critical thinking and peer review. It is also the opportunity to get an initial understanding of intellectual property rights and open source. It is hoped that this project will participate in helping the students grow up as informed and active e-citizens.

The project team provide training the trainers activities, hence bringing new skills to the teachers as well.

Finally, the project result in the production and publication of information on the Internet, under a free license, for use by the greater public. This participate to the visibility of Africa on the Internet, and bring a feeling of pride to under-represented and poorly-served communities.

The program is equally for young boys and young girls.

The project uses, just to mention but a few:

  • Vikidia: the children encyclopedia. Whilst not a wikimedia project, this is an active project in our ecosystem.
  • Wikimedia Commons: The children contribute pictures (and possibly videos) onto Wikimedia Commons
  • WikiFundi: schools have access to an offline operational platform including the use of Raspberry Pis, Wikifundi and Kiwix resources.

Benefits for the children

The competition encourages students to work together to create an article related to their environment. It can be an article about their village, a notable person, a point of geographical interest...

The competition is created to give students the opportunity to acquire practical research and synthesis of information experience, for a collaborative activity to contribute to the improvement of Wikipedia. The competition will more particularly:

  • facilitate the training of students in the practice of writing on Wikipedia;
  • give students essential skills such as information research, navigation, citation of sources, etc.
  • facilitate acquisition of editorial skills on Wikipedia itself (building articles, using categories, taking photographs to illustrate the articles submitted to the competition)
  • contribute to enriching Wikipedia with articles written by Africans about Africa;

The WikiChallenge was recipiendary of the Open Education Awards for Excellence in the Open Pedagogy category.

Key figures 2017-2026

  • 16 participating countries (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Conakry Guinea, Jordan, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Niger, RCA, DRC, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Tunisia)
  • 1729 school entries
  • 1074 texts submitted by children and published on Vikidia
  • 5922 photos, drawings and videos published on Commons
  • 158 schools awarded, for the direct benefit of hundreds of students and staff attending them
  • 3 participating languages: French, English and Arabic
  • Skills acquired for all participating students
  • https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiChallenge_African_Schools

Numbers by year

Jury Doc
2025-2026
2024-2025
2023-2024
2022-2023
2021-2022
2019-2020-2021
2018-2019
2017-2018

The WikiChallenge, a multi-partner system

The WikiChallenge African Schools was designed by Florence Devouard (user:anthere) and Isla Haddow-Flood to support the WikiAfrica movement and participation in Wikimedia projects in Africa. It is intended to facilitate the acquisition of digital skills by children attending school at the end of primary school. It also aims to give them a voice and thus ensure that African cultures and stories have an existence on the Internet. It is also an approach to work with children on notions of intellectual property, research of information and sources, collaborative work and writing in "encyclopedic" style. The hope of the project members is that many of the WikiChallenge participants will eventually train future competitors...and that they will join the Wikipedians community within a few years.

The WikiChallenge is organized by Wiki In Africa organisation in partnership and with the support of Orange Foundation .It is implemented with the help of several other organizations, such as Ynternet.org, Wikimedia Tunisia and many Wikipedians and Vikidians.

The competition is open only to establishments that are part of the Orange Digital Schools network. It may sound strange, but there is a pragmatic reason for this choice. Indeed, one of the peculiarities of the targeted schools is...that they are not connected (or poorly connected) to the Internet and poorly equipped with computer equipment. Their participation therefore has two prerequisites:

The first is the presence in schools of a digital device based on a mini Rasberry PI server making available not only the offline version of Vikidia (and Wikipedia), but also the wiki editing platform in offline mode. WikiFundi, published by the Wiki in Africa organisation and developed with the help of Kiwix. The digital device in question (mini server and tablets) is offered by the Orange Foundation, one of the WikiFundi distributors as part of its Digital Schools program. With this, children can learn to use a wiki platform to collaborate in small groups and write their articles, while having access to information via offline resources available on tablets.

The second prerequisite is the on-site presence, in the countries, of a digital mediator who, possibly with the help of Wikimedians, is responsible for mobilizing and informing the management and the faculty, then training, animating and finally collecting the content produced by students, to ensure their publication online. Obviously, it was also necessary to train and support the facilitators...which was done remotely thanks to Wikimedia France's WikiMooc in Spring 2017, but also during face-to-face sessions with Afek from Wikimedia Tunisia in 2017 and 2018. In 2018, face-to-face training was also facilitated in Senegal by Georges from Cameroon with the help of Nfana from Mali.

People and structures involved

A leaflet on the Vikidia project was produced as part of the project.
Organizations
People
Persons previously involved

The proposal, documentation and results of the project are published under the CC BY SA 4.0 license.

See also

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