2022/23 ICT 4014 Capstone Projects | Facebook Plugin for Motivating Contribution on Wikipedia

Project Title
WikiMotivate: A Facebook Plugin for Motivating Content Creation and Contribution to Wikipedia
Project Description
The world is experiencing an immense amount of data, with an estimated 40 trillion gigabytes of data existing by 2020 and doubling every two to three years. However, data generation is not uniform across all nations. The Global North, particularly urban, English-speaking, and prosperous regions, continues to dominate the global data landscape. This data imbalance may contribute to digital and data colonialism taking new forms. For instance, only a small portion (5%) of contributions to Wikipedia entries on Africa were reportedly made locally, indicating low participation from the Global South in creating and updating content. Content creation plays a vital role in the digital age, allowing individuals and organizations to share their ideas and perspectives with a global audience. Unfortunately, there is often a significant lack of participation from the Global South in content creation. This can be attributed to various factors, including socioeconomic and cultural barriers, limited access to technology and resources, and a lack of representation and visibility in the global media landscape.Wikipedia, being one of the largest repositories of human knowledge, suffers from outdated content about Zambia compared to other countries that show great interest in editing and updating information about their own countries. As a non-profit organization, creating software to improve the platform can be a way to give back to the community and support this valuable public resource. The proposed project aims to address these issues by implementing a Facebook plugin that motivates Zambians to contribute and edit content on the Zambian Wikipedia. The implications of WikiMotivate a facebook plugin will be carried out using PHP and JavaScript for backend development and JavaScript, HTML and CSS for frontend development.
Project Team
C. CHISANGA · C. CHALWE · J. MWAPE · L. MUZYAMBA
Supervisor
Lighton Phiri
About ICT 4014
ICT 4014: Project in Information and Communication Technologies [1] is a fourth-year course for the Bachelor of Information and Communication Technologies With Education (B.ICTs Ed.) programme, at The University of Zambia [2]. The course provides an introduction to the production of high-quality software solutions to large tasks.
ICT 4014 Learning Outcomes
* Write a research proposal
* Conduct data collection
* Analyse data collected
* Write a research project report
* Disseminate research findings
[1] moodle.unza.zm/course/edit.ph...
[2] www.unza.zm

[@redingtonramos8791]

This is a great idea although how would we be vetting contributers to ensure the validity of the information that is uploaded?

[@lightonphiri]

Great question! The simple answer is: the validity/quality of content is outside the scope of this Capstone Project. The specific focus is merely to explore the use of motivation as an incentive to encourage pepole to contribute content.
Incidentally, this is the initial step towards our much larger goal of experimenting with techniques that will not only increase the number of Wikipedians from Zambia but also explore how we can improve quality.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment!