Capacity-Building Workshop Equips Northern Ghana Wikimedians with Essential Communication and Technical Skills

Introduction: Strengthening Community Impact Through Skilled Communication

In a concerted effort to enhance the effectiveness and professionalism of volunteer-driven knowledge sharing, the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group (DWUG) organized a pivotal capacity-building workshop in Wa, Ghana. This training session brought together over 20 team leaders from five distinct language-based Wikimedia communities: Kusaal, Gurene, Dagaare, Waali, and Dagbani. The core objective was to address a fundamental yet often overlooked aspect of their mission: the art and science of efficient, respectful, and impactful verbal exchange in digital spaces. For these volunteers, who serve as vital bridges between their linguistic heritage and the global Wikimedia ecosystem, mastering online communication is not a supplementary skill but a foundational requirement for sustainable community growth, accurate content creation, and the successful digitization of Ghana’s rich linguistic diversity. This article provides a comprehensive, pedagogical breakdown of the workshop’s aims, content, and broader implications for open-knowledge movements in multilingual regions.

Key Points: Core Lessons from the Workshop

The workshop delivered a concentrated curriculum focused on both interpersonal “soft” skills and specific technical tools. The primary takeaways for participants included:

• Strategic Digital Communication: Understanding that every public post, private message, and collaborative edit shapes the public perception of the entire Wikimedia movement. Emphasis was placed on clarity, tone, and cultural resonance.
• The Perils of Digital Miscommunication: Learning to avoid common pitfalls such as using all-caps (which can signify anger), ambiguous language, and overly formal or bureaucratic jargon that alienates audiences and distorts meaning.
• Audience-Centric Messaging: Tailoring communication to resonate with the specific intended audience, ensuring that information is not just transmitted but correctly interpreted and valued.
• Technical Skill Integration: Gaining hands-on experience with the Mozilla Common Voice platform to record speech datasets, a critical step in digitizing and preserving Ghanaian languages for use in technology and AI.
• Professional Project Management: Developing abilities to edit Wikimedia templates, manage community projects, and coordinate remote teams with increased professionalism and efficiency.
• Community Sustainability: Recognizing that 60% of the training focused on soft skills like venture management and media communication, highlighting that technical editing skills alone are insufficient for long-term community vitality.

Background: The Wikimedia Landscape in Northern Ghana

A Mosaic of Language Communities

Northern Ghana is a linguistically vibrant region, home to dozens of languages belonging to the Gur and Oti-Volta language families. The five communities represented—Dagbani (the largest), Kusaal, Gurene (also known as Frafra), Dagaare, and Waali—are each central to the cultural identity of their respective areas. Their participation in Wikimedia projects (like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikivoyage) represents a profound act of digital preservation and knowledge equity, aiming to create and expand content in these local languages.

The Challenge of Remote, Volunteer-Led Activism

These communities operate almost entirely through remote collaboration. Volunteers, often students, teachers, or local enthusiasts, coordinate via social media, messaging apps like WhatsApp, and community forums. This mode of operation presents unique challenges: building trust without face-to-face interaction, maintaining engagement across distances, and representing their languages and cultures accurately to a global audience. Previous capacity-building workshops, with this being the third iteration organized by DWUG, have identified communication breakdowns and a lack of structured project management as significant barriers to growth and retention.

The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group (DWUG) as a Catalyst

The DWUG has emerged as a regional leader in nurturing these communities. Its Executive Director, Sadik Shahadu, framed the workshop as part of a strategic investment: “It is to empower our volunteers and we have seen great impacts from these trainings.” The group’s model focuses on creating a multiplier effect—training team leaders who then cascade knowledge and best practices back to their local language chapters.

Analysis: Why Communication is a Cornerstone of Wikimedia Mission Success

Beyond Information Transfer: The Interpretive Model of Communication

Facilitator Abdul Rafiu Fuseini articulated a critical shift in perspective: Wikimedia work depends not merely on sending information but on ensuring it is correctly interpreted. This aligns with modern communication theory, which posits that meaning is co-created by the sender and receiver within a shared context. For a Wikimedian, a poorly phrased edit summary, an aggressive tone on a talk page, or an unclear recruitment post on Facebook can lead to misinterpretation, causing community friction, discouraging new contributors, and ultimately harming the project’s reputation. The workshop trained participants to see themselves as communicators first, editors second.

Decoding Digital Tone: The Case of All-Caps and Formality

A powerful example came from participant Felicia Amoramah Ayeti of the Gurene community, who previously believed writing in ALL CAPS was a legitimate way to emphasize important points. The workshop corrected this misconception, explaining that in global digital vernacular, all-caps is universally interpreted as shouting—conveying anger, urgency, or hostility. This small but pervasive habit can make a community seem unwelcoming. Similarly, the use of excessive “accomplishment letters” (likely referring to overly formal, bureaucratic language or titles) was discouraged for creating distance and unclear expression. The lesson was to adopt a tone that is professional yet approachable, clear yet respectful.

The Remote Work Imperative

As Rukaya Hamidu from the Dagbani community noted, “Most of our communications are remotely done and therefore it is important to pay attention.” In the absence of non-verbal cues (body language, tone of voice), written digital communication becomes the sole carrier of intent and emotion. This makes every word, punctuation mark, and emoji choice profoundly significant. The workshop provided frameworks for crafting messages that build rapport, clarify expectations, and prevent conflicts in a fully virtual environment.

Bridging Soft Skills and Technical Solutions

The workshop’s structure itself was analytical: it interwove “soft” communication skills with a concrete technical tool—Mozilla Common Voice. This is a strategic pairing. The technical skill (recording voice samples) requires community outreach to find speakers, clear instructions to ensure data quality, and collaborative project management to organize the recordings—all tasks demanding the very communication skills being taught. As programme coordinator Musah Fuseini explained, since Dagbani is already on the platform, other communities must learn to leverage this tool. This creates a practical, immediate application for the communication training: to successfully mobilize volunteers to contribute speech data, they must first be able to communicate the project’s value and process effectively.

Practical Advice: Actionable Strategies for Wikimedians and Community Leaders

Based on the workshop’s curriculum, here is synthesized practical advice for any volunteer or community leader in a similar context:

1. Master the Tone of Digital Public Spaces

• Avoid All-Caps for Emphasis: Use bold, italics, or careful wording instead.
• Assume Positive Intent: Read messages from colleagues and newcomers generously before responding. If tone is unclear, ask for clarification politely.
• Use Clear Subject Lines and Summaries: In emails and edit summaries, be concise and specific. “Added references to article” is better than “Did some work.”
• Emojis and Informal Language: Use sparingly and appropriately. A well-placed smiley can soften a critique in a talk page discussion, but overuse can seem unprofessional.

2. Design Audience-Centric Messages

• Identify Your Audience: Are you addressing existing editors, potential new volunteers, or the general public? Tailor your vocabulary and examples accordingly.
• Lead with the “Why”: When recruiting or announcing, always state the purpose and benefit first. “Help us record 100 hours of Dagaare speech to enable voice technology for our language” is more compelling than “We need voice recordings.”
• Use Local Analogies: Connect Wikimedia’s global mission to local community values—preserving oral history, supporting local education, or promoting cultural pride.

3. Leverage Mozilla Common Voice for Language Digitization

• Step 1: Claim Your Language: Check if your language is already on the Common Voice platform. If not, follow the process to add it.
• Step 2: Organize Recording Sprints: Use your improved communication skills to organize community events (online or offline) where volunteers can record validated sentences in a social, supportive setting.
• Step 3: Ensure Quality and Metadata: Train recorders on technical requirements (quiet environment, clear speech) and encourage them to add demographic metadata (age, gender) to help build diverse datasets.
• Step 4: Advocate: Communicate the impact of this work to local institutions (schools, radio stations) to build partnerships and sustain the effort.

4. Implement Professional Remote Project Management

• Use Standardized Templates: Learn to use and customize Wikimedia project templates for tasks, documentation, and coordination to maintain consistency.
• Establish Clear Communication Channels: Designate primary channels for different purposes (e.g., WhatsApp for urgent coordination, a wiki page for documentation, a mailing list for announcements).
• Hold Regular, Focused Check-ins: Short, structured virtual meetings with clear agendas prevent miscommunication and keep projects on track.
• Document Everything: Decisions, task assignments, and progress should be recorded on a wiki page or shared document accessible to all, combating information loss in remote settings.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is the primary goal of such capacity-building workshops for language communities?

The primary goal is to move beyond basic editing skills to build sustainable, professional, and welcoming communities. This involves training leaders in both “soft” communication/management skills and specific technical tools, ensuring communities can retain volunteers, collaborate effectively remotely, and execute projects like language digitization successfully.

How does improving online communication directly help preserve a language on Wikipedia?

Effective communication is the engine of community. Clear, welcoming, and well-organized outreach attracts new contributors. Constructive, respectful talk page discussions improve article quality and resolve conflicts. Professional project management ensures translation and article creation efforts are coordinated and sustained. Without these, even the most motivated volunteers can burn out or leave due to frustration, stalling preservation efforts.

What is Mozilla Common Voice and why is it important for Ghanaian languages?

Mozilla Common Voice is an open-source initiative that collects diverse, publicly available voice data to build speech-to-text technology. For Ghanaian languages, which are largely excluded from commercial voice assistants and dictation software, this is revolutionary. Recording a large, validated dataset in languages like Dagbani or Kusaal enables the development of voice technology that can be used for accessibility tools, language learning apps, and preserving spoken heritage, thereby bringing these languages into the digital age.

Can individuals outside the five mentioned communities benefit from this training model?

Absolutely. The model—combining communication best practices with a hands-on technical project—is replicable. Any Wikimedia user group or language community, anywhere in the world, can adapt this curriculum. The core principles of audience-centric messaging, avoiding digital missteps, and managing remote projects are universally applicable to volunteer coordination.

How can someone get involved with or support these Northern Ghana language communities?

You can contribute by: 1) Editing in these languages on Wikipedia (even small corrections help), 2) Donating recordings of your voice to the relevant Mozilla Common Voice language if you are a speaker, 3) Translating interfaces or documentation for