GLAM/Newsletter/May 2025/Contents/Nigeria report
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Architectural Folklore Campaign Series
Forgotten Material Science in Architecture
The monthly webinar aimed at creating awareness and bridging knowledge gaps in the heritage sector in Nigeria has been very impactful; conversations around forgotten heritage in the country have been discussed by professionals and non-professionals. This campaign has not only educated your GLAM professionals but has challenged everyone who has been a part to document these interesting parts of Nigeria's rich heritage and see how we represent them on global scenes. We covered the eastern architectural folklore with an Mbari case study, which led to the culmination of the Mbari House article now on Wikipedia. There is only one surviving Mbari house out of over 150 that were in existence, as captured by Herbert M. Cole. We went ahead to talk about Northern Architectural Folklore, where the speaker explained its revival as a pathway to sustainable architecture, discussing motifs and symbols and its integration in modern structures and why these motifs and styles need to be preserved and practiced more often. The conversation moved on to Western architectural folklore. Here we talked about sacred signs and symbols from palaces to public spaces, and we had our speaker on Yoruba symbolism, and we learned of the Queen of Ife folklore, where she, well after torrential rainfall, ordered the whole of Ife to be potsherded to prevent future occurrences. We will be discussing the Southern Architectural Folklore to discuss the architecture and heritage of the great Benin kingdom.
Training GLAM Professionals to contribute on Wikimedia Commons during restorative Projects
The webinars for this campaign included Wiki professionals for every stage, one Wiki professional and one heritage/GLAM professional—a great fusion to achieve the mission of the HCI proposed Wikimedia Heritage user group. The idea behind the short 30-minute to 40-minute presentations and training was to teach the GLAM professional off-wiki how they can contribute to wiki projects and to create awareness for the need of a wikimedian in restorative heritage projects to help document history and heritage through article writing, audio recordings, photography, and video recordings to ensure continued preservation of these processes. For the Eastern Folklore, the Igbo Wikimedian Community User Group co-founder Tochi Precious was the trainer and speaker. We tried to merge language user groups and oral histories into the GLAM and Heritage line of the webinars and also to ensure coherence during the conversation. For the Northern Folklore, we had a Wikipedian administrator, Muib Sheifu, take the trainings on how to contribute to Wikipedia. For the Western Folklore, we had the Yoruba Wikimedian Community User Group co-founder train our participants how to contribute to the commons during heritage projects. It has been an interesting and eye-opening series for everyone.
The proposed Wikimedia Heritage User Group Nigeria is focused on Nigerian heritage preservation, conservation, and its integration into regional and global discourses. Focused on policy advocacy, knowledge equity, knowledge gap bridging, skills development, etc., the group handles archive curation and seeks to digitize and document archives from libraries, museums, and galleries that can help Wikipedia articles or improve them and contribute to underrepresentation of Nigerian GLAM globally.
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