Dear Wikimedians,

In response to expressed needs of the communities in sub-Saharan Africa to help achieve growth of the editing communities in the region, the Wikimedia Foundation is working on an experiment-based project dubbed the Africa Growth Project. The project seeks to enhance already existing community efforts by creating a more effective online learning component, which would allow in-person efforts to focus on already-engaged newbies who have obtained a solid foundation in Wikipedia policies and collaboration norms, maximizing the return on investment of human volunteer effort. The hypothesis guiding this experiment is that providing high-quality training to new and existing Wikimedians covering the basics of contribution to Wikimedia (including introducing the many ways to contribute beyond article writing) can double the retention rates of active editors in the region. 

For the pilot, we will be developing four modules, and we are inviting you to share feedback on outlines for these training modules, which are:

• Module 1: Preparing to participate in Wikimedia projects

• Module 2: 101 Ways to Contribute to Wikimedia

• Module 3: The Voice of Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View

• Module 4: Sourcing knowledge: Verifiability on Wikipedia

We hope to benefit from your experience as a Wikimedian in sharing your input on these module outlines, to ensure that they capture what is needed to support community understanding of those policies. 

We are interested to hear your thoughts on what's missing, what's good, what could be improved, and any suggestions on the modules' and sections' order and pace, great illustrative examples and helpful exercises that would be useful to incorporate.

We await this input and will take it all into consideration as we develop the full modules based on these outlines (including whatever change suggestions we accept). We will also be publishing the complete modules on the WikiLearn platform when they are ready. 

See the details of each module here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Africa_Growth_Pilot/Live_Tutorials_on_Core_Policies

And share your comments here; https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Africa_Growth_Pilot/Live_Tutorials_on_Core_Policies

For your input to be useful in our module development, please share your feedback by July 21st, 2023.

Thank you,
From the Africa Growth Pilot team (Dumisani Ndubane, Veronica Thamaini, Asaf Bartov)

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Veronica Thamaini | Manager of Regional Programs, Community Resources