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> 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> 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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