Things are not the same. This feature is changing the game. – Diff

I’ll love to quickly tell you about the very first time I built a Wikipedia community from a campaign and the last time I thought I would.

I started the Wikimedia Fan Club at the University of Ilorin in 2017 in a very funny way. I had made an edit on a Nigerian topic and User:Jamie Tubers left a cookie on my talk page. I went into his User Page and I discovered there was a community of Wikipedians in Nigeria. I found Olushola Olaniyan from there, then the user group, I attended an event and after more lone edits and keen following of the Nigerian usergroup, I pasted “WIKIPEDIA NEEDS YOU” on notice boards all around my school with a QR code to a WhatsApp channel. The Wikimedia Fan Club in University of Ilorin was born.

We would share edits with each other on WhatsApp. “I found this needs reference. Would you like to fix it?”, I found 20 articles that should be added to this category, I think I will like to assign it to someone who has less than 50 edits. This was how we grew from 100 to 1000 to hundreds of thousands of valuable edits. I would love to commend the efforts of Haylad, Timilegend and Bilijin for making that happen. It was only years after these that the Outreach Dashboard became prominent. Sure, this was not without a wonky user experience.

When I resumed my very first residency in 2022 at The Africa Narrative, I was setting the foundations of AfroCreatives WikiProject to make African cinema articles more visible and the focus was on Nigeria (Nollywood), Rwanda (Hillywood) Egypt, and Sengal. The Outreach Dashboard was a very useful yet difficult part of managing the work we had to do. Today, it’s overstating the figures. Tomorrow, you are manually extracting data from what should be a dashboard. There were times the director of the host institution would ask me if the Outreach Dashboard could do a thing or not and I could not provide confident answers. 

The Outreach Dashboard wasn’t my friend. Newbies got stuck halfway through, people mistyped passcodes, stats were either lagging or unreliable. This had to be one more thing you had to add to your prayer list asides IP restrictions when organizing an event. I nearly could say I preferred assigning articles on WhatsApp as I did in university.

After the end of contract in 2022, I thought I was blacklisted. I tried to get into any Wikipedia roles while advancing my career as a consultant in finance, operations and military engineering. Then gratefully, I got a residency at Africa Wikipedia Alliance’ Digitalize Youth Project in February 2026.

As soon as I got in, I started plotting out how to recruit editors since it had been a while. This was my simple strategy and with over 50 editors swinging in, it turns out my organizer engines were not rusty.

I was in for a surprise when one feature knocked me over. I had to seek permission for this feature and it allowed me to create events in Wikimedia Meta where people could sign up seamlessly, get absorbed into the Outreach Dashboard and I can even bulk message them.

Whaaaaat?!!!

The Event Organizer feature solves a huge chunk of my problems as an organizer. I used to need to make people fill a Google Form, join the Outreach dashboard and send the Meta, meeting link and all separately. All that chaos is now being solved in one place.

Being away from the event organizing space for about 3 years, it’s great to come back to see a feature like this create efficiency for organizers, participants and program managers without the friction of third parties.

Well, there is still more to be done. For example, It would be great to be able to format the text that gets dispatched from the tool to make the interface richer to readers. It would also be great for me to get notifications as people register. I am sure many editors would have one or two they can add to this.

Nevertheless, it’s a gamechanger and this version is incredible. Wikipedia needs it and it’s sure more efficient than WhatsApp for event organizers.

Related