In university computer labs and borrowed halls across Ghana’s Upper East Region, a small team of volunteers is working to save an entire culture from digital extinction, one Wikipedia article at a time.
The Gurene Wikimedia Community, led by project coordinator Felicia Ayeti, represents a grassroots effort to document and preserve the language, customs, and cultural artifacts of the Frafra people before they fade from collective memory. Speaking on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show this week, Ms. Ayeti painted a picture of a language community in crisis and the volunteer-driven solution attempting to address it.
From Facebook to Formal Organization
The organization’s origins trace back to informal conversations on social media. What began as online discussions eventually materialized into in-person meetings and formal partnerships.
“I don’t know how, I think they met on Facebook,” Ms. Ayeti recalled. “So they were planning it over there before it came to physical.”
The group’s first formal meeting took place in Cape Coast, where they connected with University of Cape Coast students. The initiative then moved to Ejumako campus, where one of the leaders was pursuing his master’s degree and Ms. Ayeti was completing her undergraduate studies. The language faculty at the University for Development Studies provided early support, with students and lecturers joining the effort.
The community operates under the umbrella of the Dagbani Wikimedia User Group, led by . The group recognized the need to expand preservation efforts beyond Dagbani to include other Mabia languages — the linguistic family encompassing northern Ghanaian languages.
“They realized that they were endangered languages,” Ms. Ayeti said. “When I say endangered, it means we’re going extinct.”
Multi-Platform Preservation Strategy
The Gurene Wikimedia Community employs a comprehensive digital preservation strategy across multiple Wikimedia platforms. Their central hub, gur.wikipedia.org, hosts articles translated from English Wikipedia and original content about Gurene culture, including profiles of schools, political leaders, and explanations of traditional names.
The Wikicommons platform serves as a visual archive for cultural artifacts. Photographs document traditional items including clay cooking pots, handmade brooms, and locally forged farming tools — objects increasingly absent from contemporary Gurene households.
A particularly innovative component involves Wikidata, where community members create detailed linguistic records. Through an organized program, participants input their names along with pronunciations, spellings, meanings, and origins — creating a living database of Gurene nomenclature.
“We write in our language about items that relate to us,” Ms. Ayeti explained. “Names of people like this. That one was a Wikidata program that we organized and our people key in our names. When they say, how is it pronounced? We pronounce it in there.”
Confronting Cultural Erasure
The urgency driving the project stems from observable patterns of cultural abandonment that Ms. Ayeti and her colleagues have witnessed firsthand. She described a concerning phenomenon where community members, particularly younger generations, have begun distancing themselves from Frafra identity.
“Some people didn’t want to be addressed as Frafras,” she said, noting the implications for intergenerational transmission of language and culture. “So if someone like this has a child, 10 years to come, 20 years to come, how would this child get up to know that he’s a Frafra?”
This cultural retreat threatens not only linguistic diversity but also traditional knowledge systems. Ms. Ayeti described documenting a Tendana in Bolgatanga, capturing his explanations of traditional religious practices and photographing sacred sites including Sirugu Pottery Art.
“He took his time to tell us how he became a Tendana and all that,” she said. “He was just fantastic.”
Without digital preservation, such knowledge risks disappearing when current practitioners pass away.
Technological Innovation and Partnerships
The community has leveraged its Wikimedia connections to develop practical language tools. In partnership with Dr. Paul Azunre, a musician and technologist, and his brother Richard Azunre at Bolgatanga Technical University, they created the Khaya app — a mobile application enabling English-to-Gurene and Gurene-to-English translation.
The app employs Natural Language Processing technology, trained on thousands of Gurene sentences compiled through the community’s preservation work.
“Through Wikipedia, we got them,” Ms. Ayeti said of the partnership. “When we were at our schools and our homes, we didn’t know anything like this.”
She credited Richard Azunre with patient training in computer skills, noting his dedication to teaching volunteers proper technical procedures.
For Ms. Ayeti personally, Wikipedia participation has provided unexpected educational benefits. “The only time I learnt ICT was when I went to university, our first semester. That was all,” she said. “But through Wikipedia, I’ve been able to learn a lot. If you put a PC before me right now, I can maneuver my way out.”
Contest-Based Engagement Model
Sustaining volunteer participation in an unpaid initiative presents ongoing challenges. The community addresses this through periodic contests with gift vouchers as prizes, creating structured opportunities for contribution while recognizing quality work.
“We have founders who help us,” Ms. Ayeti explained, referring to grant support for contest prizes. “When they invite participants for a contest, we come. We put up a prize in the form of gift vouchers. We don’t give out cash.”
Contest participants write articles, contribute to Wikidata, or upload photographs of cultural artifacts. Organizers evaluate contributions against Wikipedia’s editorial standards, selecting winners based on quality and relevance.
The model accommodates contributors with varying skills. Technical assistance, photography, and ICT training all constitute valuable contributions, allowing participation even from those who cannot read or write Gurene.
“It’s not just about writing,” Ms. Ayeti said. “We have technicians too. You don’t understand the language but you can also participate by taking pictures and uploading.”
Currently, the organization is working to train contributors in 3D documentation technologies, which could enable more sophisticated preservation of three-dimensional cultural artifacts.
Institutional Partnerships and Community Support
Educational institutions have provided crucial support for the initiative. Beyond early backing from the University for Development Studies at Wa, the community has established partnerships with Ejumako campus, University of Cape Coast, and Pusiga’s Gbewaa College.
Professor David Millar founder of the Millar Open University in Bolgatanga received specific recognition from Ms. Ayeti for providing facilities at no cost for training programs.
“The last time the community wanted a training program, we contacted him and he truly supported,” she said. “He gave one of his halls out for usage for some number of days and he didn’t take a pesewa.”
Such institutional backing enables the organization to conduct workshops where new contributors learn Wikipedia editing procedures, including creating usernames, understanding Wikipedia’s five pillars, publishing articles, adding references, inserting images, and linking content across Wikimedia platforms.
Persistent Obstacles
Despite progress, significant barriers impede the community’s work. Technology access remains the primary challenge, with many potential contributors lacking smartphones or computers necessary for editing. Even those with devices often struggle to afford internet data.
“If you don’t have a phone, you cannot edit in Wikipedia or even any of the related aspects of Wikipedia,” Ms. Ayeti said. “But if you have a PC and you don’t have a data, how do you go into the internet?”
The volunteer structure creates retention problems. While many join with enthusiasm, interest often wanes when they realize no financial compensation is available.
“People are willing, some are not,” Ms. Ayeti acknowledged. “They will come and if it is that you are motivated intrinsically, you will stay. But if you want cash, because we can’t give you cash, people are not able to stay and learn.”
These challenges directly impact the community’s ability to expand into additional Wikimedia platforms. The organization aspires to launch Wikimedia in Classrooms programs, contribute to Wiktionary for comprehensive word archiving, and establish Wikibooks repositories for Gurene-language texts. However, reaching these milestones requires progressively larger contributor bases.
“We are not able to get enough contributors to fill up, we are not able to get to where we want to get to,” Ms. Ayeti said. “That is our challenge.”
National and Regional Context
The Gurene initiative exists within a broader movement of Ghanaian language preservation efforts. Ms. Ayeti noted that the community recently participated in a meeting of 13 language communities in Kumasi, discussing preservation strategies and sharing best practices.
Other Mabia languages have made significant progress. “When we pick Akan, for example, they also have theirs,” she said. “Dagaare too is on Wikipedia. They too have gone far.”
This progress creates both inspiration and pressure for the Gurene community to accelerate their efforts.
Urgent Call for Participation
Ms. Ayeti issued an emphatic appeal for additional volunteers, emphasizing that time is running out for effective preservation.
“We want people. We need you,” she said. “The more hands on deck, the more work is done.”
She stressed that contribution opportunities extend beyond language fluency. “If you don’t know how to read or write Gurene, you are still welcome,” she said. “There are so many aspects that you can help us with.”
Interested individuals can contact the organization at 0247 486167 or connect through Facebook and Twitter by searching “Gurene Wikimedia Community.”
Ms. Ayeti framed the preservation work as a matter of cultural identity and intergenerational responsibility.
“We should take pride in who we are,” she said. “We have the Frafra blood in us. We cannot run away from it. And what we can do to show that we are Frafras is by helping to preserve and continue the culture and our language.”
Source: a1radioonline.com|101.1Mhz| Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Bolgatanga
