Hi all,
Now that we're incorporated, we need to grow our membership so as to
achieve critical mass.
According to the consititution, "Any person who makes a written
application to become a member of the company and whose application is
accepted by the directors shall be and become a member of the
company."
Dumisani has expressed interest and been welcomed on the email lists,
but I'd like to get confirmation that he has been formally accepted as
a member. I support his membership.
Maarten has asked how he can become a member, which I take to be a
written request, and I also support his membership.
I am sure that if we ask Douglas whether he wants to be a member,
he'll join, and I'd like to ask pre-emptively whether anyone has an
objection to his membership.
I'd also like us to agree on a membership process. One reasonable way
to approach this would be to require a prospective member to contact a
board member or post directly to the WMZA list. A director can then
approve his or her membership tenatively with a posting to the board
list - with no objections within two weeks, or with all directors'
agreement, that director should then be allowed to approve the
membership request formally. Please give me your feedback on this
proposal.
In terms of getting new members, we urgently need to get more
Wikimedia project people into the organisation. We can do this by
advertising on the wikis.
Wikiproject South Africa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_South_Africa The
Wikiproject South Africa is quite active, and I think we should all
join it, and announce any meetups on the project page.
We should try to get banners on South African language Wikis ASAP:
The only really active one is Afrikaans:
http://af.wikipedia.org . We
have none of the more active af-wiki editors in our membership, which
is a shame. I'm sure we can fix this soon by simply approaching them
and letting them know who we are and what we're doing.
Registered but less active:
http://nso.wikipedia.org - Sepedi Wikipedia has 568 pages, but not
very many active editors. I see Mohau has been editing a bit there.
http://zu.wikipedia.org - isiZulu Wikipedia has 543 pages, and a
relatively similar state to Sepedi.
http://tn.wikipedia.org - Setswana Wikipedia has 491 pages, but not
very much seems to be going on there since the Google challenge
finished.
http://ss.wikipedia.org - siSwati Wikipedia has 361 pages, slightly
less active than Sepedi and isiZulu
http://ts.wikipedia.org - Xitsonga Wikipedia only has 193 pages, but
seems to have more activity recently, and has a nicer-looking front
page than many similar-sized minor language Wikipedias. I see
Dumisani (Thuvack) has been active there, maybe he can help connect
with the community.
http://ve.wikipedia.org - tshiVenda Wikipedia has 190 pages, but
doesn't seem active at all at the moment.
http://st.wikipedia.org - Sesotho Wikipedia has 145 pages, but doesn't
seem very active.
http://xh.wikipedia.org - isiXhosa Wikipedia has 136 pages, but is not
active lately.
If we can manage to connect to active users in these Wikipedias, we
might be able to get them to write a note on the front page asking
users to connect with us, to build community connections.
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nr/Main_Page - Southern Ndebele
has one article, about the National Language Service, so I doubt
there's a community to work with.
I think we should also ask for a geolocated banner ad: this way anyone
who uses Wikipedia in South Africa can be alerted to our existence,
and hopefully we'll get some traction.
Kind regards,
David
--
David Richfield
[[:en:User:Slashme]]
+27718539985