FYI, a recent blog post looking at African language editions of Wikipedia that may be of interest:
"Wikipedia at 15 and African languages" (31 Jan 2016) http://niamey.blogspot.com/2016/01/wikipedia-at-15-african-languages.html
Am interested in feedback on accuracy, as well as observations or comments from people active in any of the African language Wikipedias or other Wikimedia projects about their experience and hopes.
Thanks in advance,
Don Osborn
On 2016-02-01 16:18, Don Osborn wrote:
Am interested in feedback on accuracy, as well as observations or comments from people active in any of the African language Wikipedias or other Wikimedia projects about their experience and hopes.
Thanks in advance,
Don Osborn
I was following Hausa Wikipedia a couple of years back for two months. (I do not remember why, I do not speak Hausa; probably detected vandalism and stuck around to see how regular it is). It was essentially dead, not a single native speaker regularly edited. Now checked it back - I see a number of edits apparently by a native speaker who has an account but not a regular editor (less than 20 edits in total). I am afraid it is still dead, which is a pity, since this is one of the biggest languages in Africa in terms of the number of speakers.
Let me add an (unsolicited) comment about the general coverage of Africa on the English Wikipedia. We just had 15 days contest on African women, organized by Florence (that was fun), and I decided to write three papers on a Central African first female minister of defense, a Nigerien academic and former development minister, and a Malagasy former justice minister and the first ever female president of parliament. (To improve the links, I also started the article of the National Museum of Niger). I knew that in principle, but I was really astonished to learn that even the basic subjects are not covered at all or are covered extremely superficially. As an anecdote, the national museum of Niger was a redirect to the national museum of Nigeria. As a more troubling story, we do not have articles on a couple of prime ministers of Madagascar (and it has been independent for not that long, since 1960), and we have for most of the African countries absolutely zero connections in politics - it is very difficult to figure out who followed whom and who were the ministers (the Central African government is still listed from 2005 or smth). Most of the subjects of human and physical geography have two-line stubs. We obviuosly have a long way to go.
Cheers Yaroslav
It's quite true, sadly.
One thing that that blog post doesn't mention is that the periods of growth in Yoruba and Malagasy happened mostly thanks to bots :(
There is some hard-to-notice, but real and organic growth in the number of articles in Xhosa in the last year. I know it because I traveled to South Africa and I had the privilege of meeting Nozibele Nomdebevana, the woman responsible for it; see http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/07/new-wikipedia-translators/ . And it's hard to notice, because almost all of it was done by that one woman, and as great as her work is, it's too small to be noticed in the statistics graphs, although I do hope that she will find other people and teach them the Wikipedia writing craft.
I also noticed some growth in Somali in the last couple of months, also as a work of one person; more on that further down.
For the most part, it's an unfortunate mix of several factors: * very low usage of African languages in education: English, French and Arabic are far more prominent in education on all levels, so most people don't even imagine that their language can be used for a reference work or that something useful can be found on Google in their language. Afrikaans is an exception, but not a surprising one given that the government of South Africa promoted its use in education for many decades. * low penetration of Internet connectivity * of the people who are connected to the Internet, many are connected through phones, and Wikipedia editing doesn't work on mobile phones as well as on desktops (though it's important to note that it works far better now than it did three years ago) * poverty and lack of free time to dedicate to volunteering
As a shameless plug, I'll suggest the project I'm working on—Content Translation—as one solution that could help. In many cases, creating articles by translation should be relatively easier than writing them from scratch. Over 30% of the articles created in the Somali Wikipedia in the last couple of months were made using Content Translation, which makes many of the article creation and formatting steps much easier. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CX for more info, and contact me personally if you're interested in more details.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2016-02-01 17:18 GMT+02:00 Don Osborn dzo@bisharat.net:
FYI, a recent blog post looking at African language editions of Wikipedia that may be of interest:
"Wikipedia at 15 and African languages" (31 Jan 2016) http://niamey.blogspot.com/2016/01/wikipedia-at-15-african-languages.html
Am interested in feedback on accuracy, as well as observations or comments from people active in any of the African language Wikipedias or other Wikimedia projects about their experience and hopes.
Thanks in advance,
Don Osborn
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Couple of notes and pointers
I have added the link to the blog post here : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statistics_related_to_Africa#Use_and_knowled... Please do not hesitate to drop information related to Africa in those pages. Thank you Don for the info.
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The writing contest closed this week-end. More info on that later, but I am glad to say we collected 121 new biographies in French and about 70 in English. Yeah rock !
But whilst the contest was in English and French... a team went on translating articles in Armenian language. They managed 41 additional articles : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Women_Writing_Contest#Articles_in...
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One of the articles (in English) was rejected for notability issue. It has been resubmitted and needs further review. If anyone can have a look... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Onel5969#Draft:_Theo_Sowa
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I think the translation approach is an excellent one. I am a bit perplex as well as how little productive edit-a-thons with new users are. But the struggle to learn how Wikipedia operates on top of understanding an article structure on top of looking for relevant information is a bit... too complicated for a newcomer. It may be that starting with translation might make things easier ? Path worth to explore.
In that prospect, I love this page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Loves_Women/Writing_Contest/Art... and I discovered recently that page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Missing_art... created by created by @Emijrp and Edgars2007
We need more of those.
Flo
Le 01/02/16 17:24, Amir E. Aharoni a écrit :
It's quite true, sadly.
One thing that that blog post doesn't mention is that the periods of growth in Yoruba and Malagasy happened mostly thanks to bots :(
There is some hard-to-notice, but real and organic growth in the number of articles in Xhosa in the last year. I know it because I traveled to South Africa and I had the privilege of meeting Nozibele Nomdebevana, the woman responsible for it; see http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/07/new-wikipedia-translators/ . And it's hard to notice, because almost all of it was done by that one woman, and as great as her work is, it's too small to be noticed in the statistics graphs, although I do hope that she will find other people and teach them the Wikipedia writing craft.
I also noticed some growth in Somali in the last couple of months, also as a work of one person; more on that further down.
For the most part, it's an unfortunate mix of several factors:
- very low usage of African languages in education: English, French and
Arabic are far more prominent in education on all levels, so most people don't even imagine that their language can be used for a reference work or that something useful can be found on Google in their language. Afrikaans is an exception, but not a surprising one given that the government of South Africa promoted its use in education for many decades.
- low penetration of Internet connectivity
- of the people who are connected to the Internet, many are connected
through phones, and Wikipedia editing doesn't work on mobile phones as well as on desktops (though it's important to note that it works far better now than it did three years ago)
- poverty and lack of free time to dedicate to volunteering
As a shameless plug, I'll suggest the project I'm working on—Content Translation—as one solution that could help. In many cases, creating articles by translation should be relatively easier than writing them from scratch. Over 30% of the articles created in the Somali Wikipedia in the last couple of months were made using Content Translation, which makes many of the article creation and formatting steps much easier. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CX for more info, and contact me personally if you're interested in more details.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2016-02-01 17:18 GMT+02:00 Don Osborn dzo@bisharat.net:
FYI, a recent blog post looking at African language editions of Wikipedia that may be of interest:
"Wikipedia at 15 and African languages" (31 Jan 2016) http://niamey.blogspot.com/2016/01/wikipedia-at-15-african-languages.html
Am interested in feedback on accuracy, as well as observations or comments from people active in any of the African language Wikipedias or other Wikimedia projects about their experience and hopes.
Thanks in advance,
Don Osborn
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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