WikiFundi has been conceptualised, developed and launched by Florence Devouard and Isla Haddow-Flood, in collaboration with Kiwix and Ynternet.org.
The software project is supported by the Orange Foundation (that has an ongoing commitment to digital education in Europe and Africa, especially through the “Digital Schools » Program), the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia CH.
WikiFundi is designed to support the WikiAfrica movement and Wikimedia volunteers across Africa. WikiFundi and its documentation is licenced under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Administrative suppport and product owner
Wiki in Africa
Wiki in Africa is a non-profit organisation that is based in South Africa, was founded in November 2016 as a financial and legal structure that operates global initiatives in support of the WikiAfrica movement. Our objective is to empower and engage citizens of Africa and its diaspora to collect, develop and contribute educational and relevant content that relates to the theme of Africa under a free license; and to engage in global knowledge systems by encouraging access to, awareness of, and support for open knowledge, the open movement and the Wikimedia projects, working in collaboration with like-minded organisations. Wiki in Africa is the editor (= publisher) of WikiFundi.
Technical support
Kiwix
Kiwix is a Swiss non-profit.
The world has a connectivity issue. In many places internet can be slow, unreliable or even censored. Kiwix is an offline solution that allows people to access educational content like Wikipedia, the Wiktionary, TED talks and many others on any computer or smartphone – without the need for a live internet connection.
Kiwix was responsible for the tech development of WikiFundi V2.
MediaWiki: The software platform
MediaWiki is free server-based, open licensed software that is designed to run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. It is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation that uses PHPto process and display data stored in a database, such as MySQL. Pages use MediaWiki’s wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily.
When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software. Wikipedia and all the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are run on Media Wiki, as is WikiFundi.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
Offline Projects Planning UserGroup
The goal of the Wikimedia movement at large is to make knowledge freely available to all of humanity; currently, however, the content knowledge available via the Wikimedia projects is mostly confined to those who have access to a broadband Internet connection – or less than 5% of the developing world. It is critical for the reach of the movement to proactively consider ways to make the information available to the offline majority of the global population. In order to achieve the greatest scale of impact possible, Wikimedia must intentionally focus on the largest demographic segment of the world in order to address the steadily increasing “digital divide.” The offline work is geared to expand the reach of the collective knowledge and broaden participation in the project.
The Offline Projects members have provided support and inspiration.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects/About_Offline
Financial and human support
The Orange Foundation
The Orange Foundation is at the heart of the Orange Group’s philanthropic activities and social responsibility. From its inception in 1987 to the present day, it has been proactively involved in a natural extension of the company’s mission: helping everyone to communicate better. Since 2005 the Orange Foundation has supported philanthropic projects across Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, mainly focusing in the countries where the Orange Group operates. This work is done through 16 local foundations that work in close proximity with the local population. Currently the Foundation is concentrating on digital solidarity, by implementing major programmes in health, disability, education and culture. WikiFundi and WikiChallenge African Schools is part of the Orange Foundation’s Digital Schools programme. The Orange Foundation distributes digital tablets to schools, that have no books and no internet connection, in Africa. Those tablets include educational contents such as school books, khan academy lessons, the Wikipedia encyclopaedia, Wiktionary, the Gutenberg digital library, MOOC on live teaching etc. In 2016, more than 130 000 children have access to essential educational content using those tablets.
Link: Orange Foundation : http://www.fondationorange.com/en
The Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, a top-ten internet property.
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.
http://www.wikimediafoundation.org
Wikimedia CH
Wikimedia CH is an officially recognized non-profit organization and the official Swiss Chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The association exists to promote the free dissemination of knowledge in Switzerland and beyond. It aims to support and promote Wikimedia projects, such as the free online Encyclopedia Wikipedia, the multimedia database Wikimedia Commons, the offline version of Wikipedia Kiwix and many more open-source projects. In partnership with different educational and cultural institutions. They are focusing our activities on three main areas to reach as many people as possible: Education, GLAM and Community and Outreach.
Wikimedia CH was founded on 14 May 2006 and was officially recognized as a national chapter by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007. We nevertheless remain a financially and legally independent entity, obeying Swiss rules and leadership. Wikimedia CH does not host any of the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation and has no special publishing rights on them.
