Hello, and happy Africa day!
[ crossposted to African Wikimedians list, general Wikimedia list, and
mediawiki-i18n ]
To celebrate this, I am announcing the completion of a little pet project
that I started a year ago: it is now easy to type in all the languages of
Africa in which there is a Wikipedia or an active Incubator.
This is available in all Wikimedia projects and in translatewiki.net. This
release is intended for desktop and laptop computers. For mobile phones and
tablets, I strongly recommend trying apps such as Gboard, SwiftKey, or
African Keyboard.
For full details and project description see this blog post:
https://aharoni.wordpress.com/2019/05/25/happy-africa-day-keyboards-for-all…
Or jump straight into the (easy!!!) technical documentation here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector/Inp…
These keyboards were tested by myself, and some of them were also tested by
a few other people who speak these languages, and as far as I know they are
easy to enable and disable and the work correctly. However, it's possible
that some things are missing: I could have missed some letters, I could
have made mistakes in documentation, I could have missed some languages.
Please contact me if you find any problems.
Thanks!
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Dear community members,
I am proud to announce to you that we have concluded the elections of our new board members.
Our newly elected board members are:
1. Bolaji Alabi: Bolaji, popularly known as BeeJay is currently an undergraduate student of Sociology at the University of Ilorin. She is passionate about learning, gender equality and ensuring that everyone has adequate access to knowledge and learning materials. At her leisure, she loves to read books and/or solve puzzles. A member of the Unilorin Wikimedia Fan Club, Bolaji has helped to organize meetups, train new editors and has gotten new people interested in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
Bolaji, popularly known as BeeJay is currently an undergraduate student of Sociology at the University of Ilorin. She is passionate about learning, gender equality and ensuring that everyone has adequate access to knowledge and learning materials. At her leisure, she loves to read books and/or solve puzzles. A member of the Unilorin Wikimedia Fan Club, Bolaji has helped to organize meetups, train new editors and has gotten new people interested in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
2. Livingstone Imonitie: Livingstone is a recent graduate of Civil Engineering from the University of Benin, Edo State, Nigeria. He is a Google Certified Online Marketer, Public Speaker, Writer, ROI Africa Ambassador, ROI Africa open Knowledge Advocate/Educator and Global Peace Ambassador. He is a member of the Junior Chamber International (JCI Uniben), Young African Leaders Initiative ((YALI NETWORK) and Edo Wikimedia hub. He is passionate about serving the Community and he believes that service to humanity is the best work of life.
Livingstone is a recent graduate of Civil Engineering from the University of Benin, Edo State, Nigeria. He is a Google Certified Online Marketer, Public Speaker, Writer, ROI Africa Ambassador, ROI Africa open Knowledge Advocate/Educator and Global Peace Ambassador.
Please join the board of trustees to welcome the newly elected board members.
Kayode Yussuf
for:Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation Board of Trustees
Dear fellow Wikimedians, dear Florence,
as the Wiki loves Africa 2019 competition is coming to its close I would
like to bring back the question which I raised already in December 2018:
*1. Do others share my impression that images from the competition are
hardly ever used in wikipedia articles?*
*2. Do others have the impression that the present approach for Wiki
Loves Africa does not help much to close the knowledge gap about Africa? *
When I posted in December some participants here voiced interest but
wanted to wait for a feedback fom the organizers. Such a feedback I have
not seen. So allow me to repeat some lines from my first post:
/I was an early fan of the idea of "Wiki Loves Africa" but I have to
confess that my fan status has cooled over time. I cannot claim to have
done a comprehensive reseach but did some checks here and there.//
////*So I have the impression that
a) the competition has brought a number of really beautiful photographs
b) the competition has brought lots of images which are not used
anywhere in wikipedia articles (my short checks give me the impression
that could be the case for the vast majority of images produced)*//
////
//and//*I ask myself if the reason may be that a lot of these mages is
frankly unusable.*//
////
//I remember that prize selected image showing some beautiful ladies in
Massai attire knitting under a tree (the year of adornment) which was
selected in a winner category but is unusable for any purpose (unless
you want to document fake stereoptypes - the motive was fake...)//
////
//There is a lot of nice looking images which I do not know how to use
because of their not clear labelling, unhelpful categories and useless
explanations. It helps me as author nothing to see an image and a text
like "traditional tools of Ghana/Malawi/etc". *This is unusable and
useless*.//
////
//I write this not from the point of view of a lover of beauty (my taste
is poor) but just simply from the view of a wikipedia author. I would
love to have some thousand images (not necessarily beautiful) which
just show African villages. We know the criticism about the white spots
on the African maps of knowledge. Villages back home in Germany may have
less than 1000 inhabitants but 3 articles about the village, about its
church and about the sports club. Images are available and people look
for them.//
////
//*I do not want to denigrate Wiki loves Africa but i would love to hear
from others how they see the value of the results as they have been so
far. Why do we do it - what do we get from it? *//How can images about
"play" be useful for closing the white spaces on the African map of
knowledge?/
Cheers, Ingo - "Kipala"
Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili user group
Hello all,
I am on a Telegram group named African Wikimedians. I raised a question if
it is a complementary group to this mailing list we have here. I was told
it wasn't related to this group, but it came from the AfroCine project.
Now, Telegram groups are trending in the community. Even on the ASBS
platform, someone appreciated the fact that user groups had come under one
'digital' roof. So, for me it's not a bad thing that Africans have our own
Telegram as well.
However, I am also aware of our community's tendencies for duplicates,
triplicates etc of things.
As a recruiter who encourages new editors to join these platforms to expand
their understanding of the movement, I want to know if that Telegram
platform has our collective buy-in or will be getting our collective
buy-in. After all, it bears the official name that this mailing list has.
Thanks!
––
Regards
Sandister Tei | Curator Media & Journalism, re:publica Accra | Citi
FM/TV | Wikimedia
Ghana UG representative + co – founder | Purple People
m: +23320266290 tw: @SandisterTei <https://twitter.com/SandisterTei> ig:
@s.andister <https://www.instagram.com/s.andister/>
re:publica – The most inspiring festival for the digital society.
See you in Accra December 14-15 2018!
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Hi all,
As you all might know, the world is celebrating african heritage this month. That's why my friend Lea and I are organizing an editathon on the 15th of May to enrich the wikipedia content related to this heritage and make it more visible world wide.
This in an invitation to participate remotely or physically in the Wikimedia France HQ in Paris if you'll be around.
The page is french but all languages are welcome to contribute. Feel free to reach out to me or to Lea the main organizer (in CC) for more details.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Patrimoines_africains?fbclid=IwAR3jbsB…
Looking forward to see your contributions on the 15th.
Have a nice sunday;
HoussemUser: Kawayashu