[Wikimedia ZA] Northern Sotho Wikipedia needs help

[Ian Gilfillan]

Northern Sotho is the only official South African language without an 
active Wikipedia. The project sits in the incubator, where it 
interestingly has far more articles than all other SA languages bar 
English and Afrikaans (540 vs Swati on 187).

Mohau Monaledi has been driving the project, and has contributed 1310 
edits, more than everyone else put together, and was one of the original 
proposers in 2007. It's unfortunately quite difficult to get a project 
out of incubator these days, and the project needs some help to become 
an official Wikipedia.

The proposal is struggling to meet the following criterion: "develop an 
active test project; it must *remain active* until approval. It is 
generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, 
not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months."

Mohau needs more support!

This would be a great project for our fledgling Wikimedia South Africa 
chapter to drive, and it would be a significant milestone to have all 
official South African languages represented by their own language 
Wikipedia. Northern Sotho has over 4 million speakers, and is the 4th 
most spoken language in South Africa. If you speak Northern Sotho, 
please help out! And if not, try recruit some Northern Sotho speakers. I 
will try to focus some work with my template translation tool on 
Northern Sotho as well.

To help:
- go to the Northern Sotho site on the incubator - 
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nso/Letlakala_la_Pele - and 
create an account.
- start editing some articles!
- add your name to the list of people interested in forming an editing 
community at 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Sepedi

A key tracker is at: 
http://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/catanalysis/?cat=0&title=wp/nso&wiki=incubatorwiki_p
There needs to be at least 3 active (not grayed out) editors 
contributing for 3 consecutive months (there was in late 2009, but not 
recently).

Once this has been done, and it's probably the most significant 
remaining hurdle, we can start on the next stage of the approval process 
- see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Status/wp/nso 
for the details.

I've also posted this on my blog - http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=741 
- to spread the appeal a little wider.

-- 
Ian Gilfillan
www.greenman.co.za

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