The Wikimedia Deutschland has invited 2 Wikdata volunteers from Ghana to attend the 2nd edition of the Wikidata conference. The conference, popularly known as WikidataCon, is a biannual conference around Wikidata and Wikibase that brings together a diverse community of Wikimedia volunteers, current re-users of open data and software, as well as interested potential stakeholders to build a networking and learning space for the Wikidata community.

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited open knowledge base that acts as central storage for the structured data of Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Two co-founders of Global Open Initiative (GOI Foundation), Mohammed Sadat Abdulai (Director) and Sadik Shahadu (Director, Communications ) were awarded full scholarships by the Wikimedia Deutschland to attend the conference in Berlin, Germany, from October 24 to 28.

Early this year in February, the GOI Foundation started the Parliament of Ghana Editathon campaign to improve available political data of Ghanaian parliamentarians by updating Wikidata entries about Ghanaian legislators, beginning with members of the Seventh Parliament of the Fourth Republic of Ghana. After engaging 98 participants (including 29 new editors) in three editathon sessions, 323000 words about the MP’s education, occupation, date of birth, gender, etc. were added to more than 1000 Wikidata items and Wikipedia pages. As a result of organizing this structured data, lateral queries of knowledge properties about Ghanaian MPs can now be made and reused by everyone.

Mohammed and Sadik will join over 250 participants to brainstorm ideas and learn new skills around Wikidata tools to further develop new projects and help their communities to thrive.

More About the scholars

Mohammed Sadat Abdulai

Mohammed is a co-founder and director of Global Open Initiative. He has contributed to Wikimedia projects as User:Masssly for the past 8 years, and is involved in various structure groups of the Wikimedia Foundation, including the Wikimedia Foundation Board Election Committee, WikidataCon 2017 Program committee, coeditor of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter and member of the Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team.

Sadik Shahadu

Sadik (User:Shahadusadik) is an inspiring energetic open leader who works to build open educational practices (OER) in Ghana. He is a co-founder and Director of Communication/Partnerships for Global Open Initiative, a young non-profit organization working internationally to promote data access and open educational resources. He is a Mozilla Open Leaders X (OLˣ) organiser working with Greg Mcverry, an associate professor from Southern Connecticut State University. He is currently receiving movement-building training and will be working closely with Mozilla staff and fellows to design new open leadership programs in Ghana.

Sadik has been involved in several projects to support education in Ghana, including:

A project to build and distribute “Internet-in-a-box” devices that enable people in Ghana to use rich online resources like Wikipedia even when their access to the Internet and electricity is missing or limited.
An OER Network to provide no-cost websites for teachers in Ghana to create and share open educational resources designed specifically for local teaching and learning needs.
He volunteers in facilitating/coordinating Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia commons in Ghana.

Click here to learn more about the conference.