Thanks again. Various other ideas have been suggested over the years,
such as star-power (collaborate with selected celebrities about some
aspect of Wikipedia in an African language they speak, write in, perform
in, etc.), education (generally projects to use Wikipedia in education
in Africa focus only on Europhone editions, esp. English and French, as
these have a lot of material, but ignore African language editions - it
would be easy to expand the scope), problem-focused (for instance health
- the WikiMed project aims to expand coverage of basic medical topics in
many languages, but African languages have not had as much attention as
others worldwide). There could be others.
It would be interesting to try to coordinate several efforts such as the
above on a small number of smaller African language editions for a
period of a few years to see how they develop.
Another model which is controversial is that of paying local students or
experts to author articles for African language editions. The Bambara
Wikipedia got an important start this way (though it hasn't grown much
in the years since). I think it is worth exploring how this approah
might be productively used while also minimizing potential longterm
disincentives to voluntary contribution.
Don
On 5/18/2016 4:23 AM, Asaf Bartov wrote:
Yes, Aliwal2012's work is impressive. But toiling
on one's own often
leads to burnout, after a while.
"Recruitment of individuals with skills and interest", as you say, is
indeed the key. It has proven a quite formidable challenge, for the
non-colonial African languages. Even Swahili, the largest of the
African language Wikipedias, has been largely cultivated by
non-native-speaker (but fluent) Europeans (Three of the four very
active editors of that Wikipedia are Europeans.)
In other words, for various reasons it has proven much harder to
attract native Swahili (and Zulu, and Sotho) speakers to edit
Wikipedia in those languages. It seems to me that over and beyond the
objective infrastructural difficulties (Internet access, availability
of source material in those languages, etc.), the key obstacle is
self-motivation: volunteering to create and curate encyclopedic
knowledge -- a bit of a weird hobby *everywhere* in the world -- is
even less appealing in Africa. It is anyone's guess what might be
done about that. Perhaps some videos focusing on the *why* more than
the *how* could be attempted.
A.
On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Don Osborn <dzo(a)bisharat.net
<mailto:dzo@bisharat.net>> wrote:
Thanks. This is one of the ongoing challenges for small
Wikipedias. It helps to keep the focus on them, but also needed, I
think, is recruitment of individuals with skills and interest
(that's a long discussion). For small projects, one or a few
individuals can have tremendous impact - a current example is the
Northern Sotho (aka Sepedi) Wikipedia
https://nso.wikipedia.org/
Don
On 5/11/2016 8:06 PM, Asaf Bartov wrote:
Whoever it was, they seem to have given up.
There have been zero
active editors in the past few months. :(
A.
On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 6:14 PM, Don Osborn <dzo(a)bisharat.net
<mailto:dzo@bisharat.net>> wrote:
FYI, the Kikuyu (Gĩkũyũ) Wikipedia
https://ki.wikipedia.org/
has passed the 1000 article milestone, currently with 1321
articles. At the end of January it had only 847.
A quick look at random pages, however, shows many of the
pages are single sentence articles on cities. Still, it would
be interesting to know more about who has been doing the
recent editing, and their plans.
One evident gap is that the interface (commands) has not yet
been translated into Kikuyu.
Don Osborn
*
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https://donate.wikimedia.org
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