Northern Sotho is the only official South African language without an
active Wikipedia. The project sits in the incubator, where it
interestingly has far more articles than all other SA languages bar
English and Afrikaans (540 vs Swati on 187).
Mohau Monaledi has been driving the project, and has contributed 1310
edits, more than everyone else put together, and was one of the original
proposers in 2007. It's unfortunately quite difficult to get a project
out of incubator these days, and the project needs some help to become
an official Wikipedia.
The proposal is struggling to meet the following criterion: "develop an
active test project; it must *remain active* until approval. It is
generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active,
not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months."
Mohau needs more support!
This would be a great project for our fledgling Wikimedia South Africa
chapter to drive, and it would be a significant milestone to have all
official South African languages represented by their own language
Wikipedia. Northern Sotho has over 4 million speakers, and is the 4th
most spoken language in South Africa. If you speak Northern Sotho,
please help out! And if not, try recruit some Northern Sotho speakers. I
will try to focus some work with my template translation tool on
Northern Sotho as well.
To help:
- go to the Northern Sotho site on the incubator -
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nso/Letlakala_la_Pele - and
create an account.
- start editing some articles!
- add your name to the list of people interested in forming an editing
community at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Sepedi
A key tracker is at:
http://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/catanalysis/?cat=0&title=wp/nso&…
There needs to be at least 3 active (not grayed out) editors
contributing for 3 consecutive months (there was in late 2009, but not
recently).
Once this has been done, and it's probably the most significant
remaining hurdle, we can start on the next stage of the approval process
- see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Status/wp/nso
for the details.
I've also posted this on my blog -
http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=741
- to spread the appeal a little wider.
--
Ian Gilfillan
www.greenman.co.za