I will like to highlight peculiar challenges in Nigeria that make the abuse or misuse of Wikipedia, seemingly easier here, apart from making Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation have one of smallest content footprints relative to our population and the age of the media industry in our country.

The first newspaper in Nigeria Iwe Irohin, a Yoruba language newspaper, was published on November 23, 1859. The English language version was added on March 8, 1860. But to date, no Nigerian newspaper has a complete digital archive of its publications. I should know. I have been involved directly or indirectly in virtually every major digital archiving effort by Nigerian media organisations since 1988.

I will like to make some suggestions for robust discussions, just so that Wikipedia remains a reliable online library resource for the world. We in this part of the world, will also like to be able to continue to contribute and add value to Wikipedia, even as we benefit from the enormous value it adds to humanity. The earlier part of this presentation focused on the possible abuse of the Open Source concept in the compilation of articles on the #EndSARS protest in Wikipedia. But, I should hint generally at the danger posed here by the absence of digital archives of major secondary information sources in Nigeria.

An example will make for a better understanding. Until recently, our Wikipedia still published that the mother of the late Afro-beat musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was “assassinated”. Google still carries that information which has now been edited out of Wikipedia to correctly indicate that the late woman activist and foremost educationist, died 14 months after soldiers threw her down from her son’s single-storey residence named Kalakuta Republic in Lagos. But Wikipedia today still records that “1000 soldiers” were involved in the destruction of the musician’s residence on the day his mother was thrown down from the first floor of her residence. Yet, we all know that the less than an acre of land on which Fela’s residence was built, can never contain a battalion of soldiers which 1000 soldiers is.

In the lyrics of his song, the musician said his mother was “killed”. That must have been the source of the belief and subsequent writing that his mother was “assassinated”. Fela Anikulapo also sang that “1000 soldiers” invaded his house. His exact words were “Dem kill my Mama… 1000 soldiers”. The line is most likely the source of the sourced untruth now published in Wikipedia, because of the lack of readily accessible digital archives of Nigerian newspaper publications of eras earlier than 2010. Younger Nigerians readily “sourced” information on the death of Fela’s mother and the number of soldiers who laid siege on his residence from the lyrics of his song.

Almost 20 years ago when I first came across the English language Wikipedia, I put it on a DVD and I thought it was the best thing to have happened to libraries in this part of the world. The Internet here then, was pitiably slow. Also, the idea of the “whole world” contributing knowledge to an encyclopedia was particularly attractive compared to the encyclopedia models that existed then. We should, and must continue thanking the Wikimedia Foundation for insisting knowledge must be spread free. The whole concept of freedom in the Open Source world was meant to diminish any goal for personal profit at the expense of the possibility of greater benefit to the world and humanity. More specifically, the goal of the Open Source software movement is to guarantee greater and more impactful beneficial use by a greater number of persons than the fewer persons who normally mostly create commercial software. The fewer persons who create commercial software, essentially by their origination or initiation and conclusion of the early phase of software development, really only initiate a discussion as it were, to improve the quality of delivery from a particular set of delivery instructions that software code is.

Throwing open to the world and for free use, the contributions by software developers, led to such as the Media Wiki software, which I think created and delivered to the world, one of humanity’s greatest knowledge tools, now with more than six million articles on some 60 million pages. Any threat to the future reliability of this most useful global information source must therefore be confronted with the strongest counter tools possible.

References on Wikipedia Article #EndSARS here cited 15. Endsars (https://www.endsars.com) Archived (https:/ /web.archive.org/web/20201210102612/https://endsars.com/) 10 December 2020 at the Wayback Machine www.endsars.com
18. Loudtips (11 October 2020). “A HISTORY OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN NIGERIA. A CASE STUDY OF SARS 1992-2020” (https://eduprojecttopics.com/product/a-history-of-police-brutality-in-nigeria-a-case-study-of-sars-1992-2020/). Edu Project Topics. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20201013235004/https://projectstore.com.ng/brief-history-of-how-endsars-campaign-started-in-nigeria/) from the original on 13 October 2020. Retrieved 13 October 2020.

64. Aisha Yesufu [@AishaYesufu] (10 October 2020). “Good evening everyone. I am okay. I refused to run. I walked with my fist high up. @PoliceNG were all shooting at me as I walked away. I came out of the fence they cowardly built around themselves and about four of them came at me at the junction throwing bottled water this time”#t.co/r0AjnI0Osx” (https://twitter.com/AishaYesufu/status/1315022295379963904) (Tweet). Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20210421162730/https://twitter.com/AishaYesufu/status/ 315022295379963904) from the original on 21 April 2021. Retrieved 11 September 2021 – via Twitter.

Recommendations:

Among other recommendations, this pre-workshop conference may want to suggest the following to the Wikipedia community:
1. The Wikipedia Foundation may want to institutionalise source fact-checking as a bulwark against the misuse of any of its media assets for misinformation and disinformation. This may entail encouraging the setting up of fact-checking groups for different countries. This is desirable because locals are in the best position and most empowered to identify and separate facts and fallacies from the seemingly most innocuous stories and articles on local subjects.

2. The Foundation may want to encourage the compulsory digitisation of analogue sources or the capture of already digital sources used as references in Wikipedia articles and their permanent storage on Wiki Server because online sources regularly timeout where they already exist and media organisations and owners of many online secondary sources can fold up. We have that experience in Nigeria where there is no digital record at all of some of our biggest analogue-era newspaper publications. The situation is not much different in most of Africa.

3. The follow-up to 1 above, maybe the introduction of notations which will indicate that particular references in Wikipedia have been verified, once they have been fact-checked and digitally captured and stored permanently on Wiki Server. 4. I propose the hosting of a first-ever international workshop on Preventing the Weaponisation of Open Source Media libraries for misinformation and disinformation. In the case of Nigeria, such a workshop may execute the fact-checking of at least 100 major Nigeria-centred Wikipedia articles, including the upload of their sources to determine and fine-tune all that needs to be done to be fact-checking Articles in Wikipedia. This can be in the last quarter of 2023.

Concluded.

Ogunseitan is an investigative journalist and specialist writer. He is also a software programmer and digital media archivist. He delivered this (excerpts) as Keynote Address to WikiFact-Checkers, Lagos, on “Preventing the Weaponisation of Open Source Media Libraries for misinformation and disinformation;” a review of the #EndSARS article in Wikipedia.