On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Ingo Koll ikoll@gmx.de wrote:
Short entries with basic information are just fine. And less tiring for you who tries to build a base.
Yes! I think 100 smaller articles are much more useful than 10 complete translations of big English (or French) articles.
Referencing I often (mostly) do by copying the ref-sections from English because for East African readers who are looking for referecing English is the language of choice if there is no Swahili literature (as it is most of the time).
And for real African on-the-ground knowledge where there are no references: just add it anyway. On African language Wikipedias there is no army of deletionists. It would be hard to get the information translated (and keep it) into the English or French Wikipedias but for this I think Wikibooks could be a solution. Does anyone have experience with this? https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:What_is_Wikibooks doesn't exclude information that doesn't come with references.
It could be an interesting project to turn oral information from video uploaded to Commons, which can then serve as a base for a multimedia style book (or more) about African knowledge. For things that will not be accepted on the English and French Wikipedias until new scientific research appears or another respectable source with information about it comes up - which can take a long time in Africa, possibly too much time before the knowledge is gone. What do you think?