City librarian wins Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon
JOBURG – When not winning international competitions, the librarian initiates and implements e-Learning programmes to educate library users of all ages and writing storybooks for children as a hobby.
Randburg Municipal librarian crowned the Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon champion.
The Wikipedia’s Edit-A-Thon was designed with the aim of encouraging ordinary people such as librarians, writers and editors of online communities to edit, update and improve the quality of content on Wikipedia. The City of Johannesburg was proud to celebrated Randburg Municipal Library’s Matete Lesele for coming out on tops in the biannual event. Five librarians from the City’s libraries took part in the African Librarians Week during the hard lockdown, where Matete was named the official winner. Lesele also had the honour of being the only South African among top 50 librarians to edit a high number of articles during the virtual editing marathon.
The event was hosted by advocacy group, African Library and Information Associations and Institution (AfLIA) in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. It covered topics such as women’s history, art, feminism, cultural heritage sites, museum collections, narrowing Wikipedia’s gender gap and social justice issues. This comes as the chance to add content and missing references to articles about these topics on the world’s most famous online encyclopedia. Edit-a-Thon aims to create reliable African content on Wikipedia for the benefit of its global readers.
Matete holds a Bachelor of Information Studies degree, majoring in information science from the University of Limpopo and has been a part of the City’s team since November 2016. When not winning international competitions, Matete initiates and implements e-Learning programmes to educate library users of all ages and writing storybooks for children as a hobby. He expressed, “We live in a technological era. I’m all about e-Learning and empowering young people through e-Learning.”
He described himself as someone that still believes in the traditional use of the library but also advocates for the usage of technology to assist to easily retrieve information remotely. Matete is also currently constructing a website for the Brixton Library stating, “I feel a website is a faster and convenient way to market the library to the public and it can be used to make announcements to users if needs be.”
