Ugandan Wikimedians urge govt action against misinformation, cultural erasure

________________

As Wikipedia marked 25 years as the world’s largest online encyclopaedia, Ugandan members of the Wikipedia community used the milestone to urge government to play a stronger role in safeguarding national knowledge, countering online misinformation and protecting young internet users in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

The appeal was made on January 31, 2026, during celebrations organised by the Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda at Namugongo, where contributors, technologists and educators reflected on what Wikipedia’s future means for Uganda’s digital and cultural space.

While millions of Ugandans rely on Wikipedia daily, the country remains largely a consumer of digital knowledge rather than an active producer, a gap that continues to fuel misinformation, cultural distortion and data misuse.

Geoffrey Katerega, the acting executive director and board chairperson of the Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda, warned that Uganda’s limited presence on global knowledge platforms has serious consequences.

“Wikipedia has over seven million articles globally, but many Ugandan stories are still missing or poorly represented,” Katerega said. “If we don’t write our own history, culture and achievements, someone else will and often inaccurately.”

He explained that Wikimedians, volunteer contributors to Wikimedia platforms, are mobilising Ugandans to document local knowledge ranging from politics and health to tourism and culture using verifiable sources. However, Katerega stressed that volunteers alone cannot shoulder the national responsibility of knowledge preservation.

“Wikipedia has closed many knowledge gaps globally,” Katerega noted. “Today, you can search for information about a Ugandan woman Member of Parliament and find her work, history and contribution. That visibility exists because volunteers put it there.”

Willy Ssemanda, community manager of the Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda, urged government to move beyond rhetoric and actively support open knowledge systems.

“Misinformation is growing faster than our ability to counter it,” Ssemanda said. “Volunteers are doing their part, but the scale of the problem requires state intervention.”

He called on government to prioritise digital literacy programmes, open access to public data and formal collaboration with Wikimedia Uganda on fact-checking and knowledge verification.

“When official data is locked away, misinformation thrives. Open, verifiable information should be treated as a national resource, not a privilege,” Ssemanda said.

According to Ssemanda, empowering citizens to distinguish fact from falsehood is no longer optional, particularly as elections, public health crises and social debates increasingly play out online.

Katerega also warned that the rise of artificial intelligence has raised the stakes.

“We are now in the AI age,” he said. “AI systems learn from existing information. If that information is wrong, biased or missing, AI will reproduce those errors at scale.”

He argued that Wikipedia’s relevance has grown rather than declined because it provides verified, secondary source knowledge that artificial intelligence systems depend on.

“This is why contributing accurate Ugandan knowledge is no longer just about visibility; it is about shaping how AI understands Uganda,” Katerega said.

One of the most urgent gaps, Wikimedians say, is the misrepresentation of Uganda’s communities online. Katerega noted that online searches about indigenous groups often return outdated or offensive descriptions written decades ago by outsiders.

“You will still find portrayals suggesting some communities live in caves or are ‘backward’,” he said. “That is not who we are today.”

To address this, Wikimedia Uganda is documenting contemporary Ugandan life through articles, photographs, videos and structured data using Wikidata. The organisation is also expanding content in local languages, which Katerega described as central to preserving cultural heritage.

“Language is culture,” he said. “If future generations cannot find Lusoga or Runyankore online, then we have failed them.”

Currently, Uganda has Wikipedia editions in Luganda and Runyankore, with plans underway to introduce others, including Lango, Acholi and Lugisu.

Gilbert Yiga, a software engineer at Sunbird AI, which works with Wikimedia Uganda on local language development, explained that his organisation collaborates with Wikimedia to build artificial intelligence translation tools that convert English Wikipedia articles into local languages at no cost.

“Our models are open source and publicly accessible,” Yiga said. “But Wikipedia needed tools that could handle larger volumes of text, so we designed custom solutions for them. Misinformation in local languages is dangerous because it spreads faster and is harder to correct, so that’s how we came in.”

To mitigate this risk, Sunbird AI and Wikimedia rely on standardised, community-approved language forms, often developed in consultation with cultural institutions and traditional authorities.

“We don’t train models on street slang or unverified dialects,” Yiga said. “We use approved language standards to avoid distortion.”

With parents increasingly concerned about children accessing harmful online content, Yiga emphasised that safeguards are now a central part of responsible artificial intelligence design.

“AI systems today are very different from when they first emerged,” he said. “We test our models and filter harmful outputs before releasing them.”

He added that Wikipedia’s verified content provides a safer foundation for artificial intelligence tools designed to simplify information for young users without altering its meaning.

“AI can explain complex topics to an eight-year-old without introducing harmful material,” Yiga said. “But parents still have a role. Technology cannot replace guidance.”

Ugandan Wikimedians say the issue is no longer whether Wikipedia matters, but whether the country is willing to invest in it. The acting executive director called on Ugandans from all professions to contribute verified information that reflects the country’s realities and experiences.