Youth-led Wiki Workshop Held at Nawaat HackerSpace

In an effort to increase the level of Tunisian participation in wiki-media, a workshop was held on Saturday, March 17, at Nawaat’s “Hackerspace” – a space designed to hold community events – to discuss the concept of wiki-media. The workshop was led by Yamen Bousrih, a young Tunisian cyber-activist.

Around 15 people attended the workshop. Bousrih first discussed the concept and benefits of Wikimedia. “Although there are relatively few Wikipedia articles in Arabic, the language is enjoying the greatest amount of growth,” Bousrih explained. In the past year, the number of articles in Arabic increased by 3% – whereas as the number of French and German articles increased by a mere 1%.

Workshop participants then proceeded to create wiki-accounts, and went through a simulation of how to create a wiki-page on Wikipedia. The Tunisian wiki project, started on April 21, 2006, is led by Tunisians inside the country and abroad. A total of 3,599 Tunisia-related articles are written in Arabic, and a small group of 10 English language contributors have written 1,508 articles in English.

The workshop also discussed the concept of Creative Commons licensing and how information can be shared and edited for non-commercial purposes.