Dear members of Wikimedia ZA,
Living outside South Africa, I was unable to attend either of the recent
Capacity-Building workshops (meet-ups) with Asaf Bartov. Now it's June and
Wikimedia 2018 is fast approaching - so I'm writing to you all via the
mailing list in hopes of forging a bond of inclusion with Wikimedia ZA, at
least to apprise you of my activities.
For over ten months I've contributed daily to the Zulu Wikipedia, also for
the past two months in the Xhosa WP. Neither WP has an administrator, and
their few veteran or new editors are active only occasionally. My own
language resources are sparse and I haven't succeeded in developing
contacts who can evaluate my provisional translations. (I work prudently
with Google Translate and avoid creating wrongly named pages and especially
categories.)
Nonetheless I've made constant progress based on the Special pages:
resolving red links, categorizing, linking with Wikidata, adding bio
data, identifying
duplicate pages, clearing inappropriate content, etc. I do create
stub-quality pages, mainly biographical based on WIkidata and the EN WP.
Even if other Wikipedians aren't available for consultation, the process of
building these small WPs would benefit from South Africans' input. I'd like
to participate in discussions of developing Afrocentric content and
avoiding cultural bias - e.g., the current eurocentric "Vital articles"
and "Vital 100" have already generated dozens of stubs and hundreds of red
links, while many valid topics in the subcategories of :en:Category:South
Africa are largely absent.
Ideally these discussions will take place within WP on Talk pages, and not
in listserved or private emails or on Facebook (useful as those channels
are). And board members: I encourage the Wikimedia ZA page on meta be kept
up, particularly as an archive documenting chapter events, and please have
someone regularly review activity on the Talk page there. (Two of my posts
await reply...)
I'll send this now, with thanks for your having read thus far :- )
I welcome your responses and am looking forward to our future
collaborations and efforts to improve the Wikipedia projects.
Sincerely,
Deborah (User:Deborahjay)
orchata(a)gmail.com