Good day Wikimedians of ZA,

I'm sharing with you some of the esoteric, behind-the-scenes yet exciting stuff happening within the Wikiverse. I believe we in SA have a particular duty to engage with it because of our situation where there are such huge imbalances between our languages and their Wikipedias (and related projects). The texts I will link to explain better than I can, some of the seemingly eccentric proposals I've previously made.

Abstract Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2020-10-07 (a provisional name for a still-new project) aims among other things to improve the functionality of "voice assistants". These have the potential to make Wiki content more accessible to many people. Imagine if all South African languages had something like this. http://techiaith.cymru/packages/macsen/?lang=en Such apps are making their way to cheaper "smart feature phones".

I'm not a web developer but understand enough of the issues involved to urge our community at large to facilitate appropriate web development processes https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/10/developing-semantic-web/. For example, by using Wikipedia's Content Translation tool (even when we personally have no need for it), or translating labels on Wikidata (which I suspect is one of the reasons this year's Wikimedian of the Year is from Ghana; Wikimedia Ghana has held "label-thons") we are creating metadata links that enable semantic tools to do their magic. Of course if anyone reading this *is* a web developer, we look to you to take up the baton!

Best regards,