On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 5:13 PM, Nkansah Rexford nkansahrexford@gmail.com wrote:
The challenge I faced was the fact that, contributors to the language were just a couple, plus people don't read it that much so spending time writing wouldn't get that patronage of reading except for the fact that its a way to document our Akan language.
Interesting. I just found out that Akan has 11 million native speakers according to Wikipedia. So if the Akan Wikipedia becomes a success there is a much higher chance that your work will be read by people from your own country, right? Of course this is a chicken/egg problem. You need a limited number of articles to attract readers and e.g. get the press interested in the project.
I think a Wikipedia needs to have at least 1000 articles and probably more than 10000 to become somewhat useful and it's a struggle to get there if there is no attention for a project. Limburgish is a regional language that I speak, somewhat between Dutch and German. I wanted to practice my spelling and preserve the language for future generations and back in 2004 I decided to work hard on the Limburgish Wikipedia until we had 1000 articles at some point in 2005, with only 3 active contributors. Now there are 8100 articles and some more contributors - I personally stopped contributing back in 2005, and I'm very happy the project is there. I think African languages are much more important though than regional European languages
Do you think it would be feasible to create local or international groups of active contributors in African languages? Possibly with a very specific goal, such as reaching 1000 or 10000 articles. Or translating important medical articles, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ebola_translation_task_force and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_Tas... What would be required to make that happen? This is a question that we will also discuss this week in Douala.