WIKI MENTOR AFRICA (wma)2025

An unforgettable experience.

*i* had never participated in a hackathon before until I did it last March. The competition ran from March 28th to March 30th, 2025. I was so excited to see what the projects we were going to create would look like, and I was so curious about how the event would unfold. The long-awaited moment arrived on Friday, March 28th, 2025, the first day of the hackathon. Everyone was there, getting into position to prepare for the event. Arriving at our campus where our hackathon was to take place, everyone was there, just waiting for the hackathon to begin.**

A few minutes before the start of the event, we had a small online meeting on “ZOOM” with some managers and members of WIKIPEDIA. It was my very first time to hold an online meeting and even to participate in one. We met several people who are members of the Wikipedia group and it was very interesting.

During our online meeting, we were presented with the projects we were going to work on and it was interesting but complex to achieve. After the meeting was over, we had dinner Fried rice with chicken after eating we divided the different groups to be able to start working. We were divided into 03 groups such as:

• UI/UX Design: the group of designers for the beauty and presentation of a site.

• Documentation: Those who wrote articles and did the documentation.

• Code: Those who wrote lines of code for the functionality of the sites.

Here are the three groups that comprised our base, and I was part of the design group. We had to work on figma design, which is simply a website that allows you to organize your design styles more easily, with everything at your disposal.

That’s how we began the hackathon. We spent three days in our base without seeing our families. The first day passed, and the second day began. Everyone got up, took their baths, and then we had breakfast.

After breakfast we had our first meeting of the day with our different mentors and the follow-ups they provided. We also collaborated with participants from other countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Congo and many other African countries as this program was only open to African countries.

The second day went wonderfully and the collaboration between the different teams was just synchronized, it wasn’t 100% easy but the simple fact that everyone tried to help the other so that we finished quickly made the work less heavy after the first session finished, we moved on to dinner to try to rest our eyes a little and relax a little on the menu there was Kati-Kati with couscous but and chicken with a bottle of juice each of us was just taking care of each other and comfortable.

After eating, everyone returned to their room to their respective groups and continued their work, and thus ended the second day of the hackthon. The third day arrived on Sunday, March 30, 2025, which was actually the big day of this competition. It was on this day that we were to see the team that would win this competition. The pressure mounted and each group doubled their efforts before the big presentation began. At 3:00 p.m., the presentation began. Each group presented what they had done as work, and it was very busy. Once the presentation was over, the group that won this competition was the coders group. With a good presentation, they won.

Here is the group that won the victory. I can’t say that I regret this hackathon even though we didn’t win, at least participating in this great event was a great pleasure for me because I met several other people besides my usual teammates. And I also wanted to thank “REBASE CODE CAMP” for the T-shirts, it really encouraged us more.