opportunity for African librarians to collaborate creatively with Wikipedia to drive inclusiveness and more open sharing of knowledge on the global platform” (AfLIA, 2019). The week-long event hosted 241 editors who actively participated in the event out of the record number of 844 editors on the AfLibWk dashboard. In the end, 660,539 words were added with 27,846 edits made on 3,946 articles and 10,055 missing references were added. The edited articles gained over 33.6 million views during the African librarians’ week campaign. Most articles about Africa in English and French Wikipedia were edited, though edits on English Wikipedia constituted 96 percent of the overall contribution made during the campaign. However, other local African-language Wikipedias, user groups, and communities, such as Igbo, Hausa, among others, were discovered in the process by African librarians. Librarians from the five regions of Africa; North, East, Central, West, and Southern Africa, from different library types were represented. At the end of the campaign, the top fifty contributors were awarded a certificate of contribution, while the top five also received a prize from AfLIA during the AfLIA 2021 conference in Accra, Ghana. African countries with the most editors, most edits/references added, and most innovative publicity about African librarians on social media were each awarded a plaque (AfLIA, 2020b).
After the AfLib week, AfLIA received a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to hire a Wikipedian-in-Residence (WIR) and a curriculum development consultant (CDC). In August 2020, Alice Kibombo emerged as the WIR and in September Prof. Rosemary Shafack as the CDC (AfLIA, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e). Both appointees are librarians from Africa who are knowledgeable on the best integration of Wikipedia into African library system. The grant forms further partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation and AfLIA to collaborate in the Wikipedia in African Libraries Project to produce a suitable curriculum for training over 300 African library and information science professionals of at least ten LIS professionals each from thirty African countries (AfLIA, 2020c).
Prof. Rosemary M. Shafack, the appointed curriculum development consultant (CDC) for the Wikipedia in African Libraries’ project is a professor of library and information science and the director of the University
