Hallo,
I was just looking at meta, and while the page on the South African chapter has a list of names of people who are interested in the chapter, my feeling is that it is incomplete. For instance, many of our colleagues who attended the chapter meeting in August in Joburg are not on that list. In other cases, I went to look at Northern Sotho Wikipedia after Ian brought it up - or any number of other South African language Wikipedias, and there are several users listed there (many of who appear to reside in South Africa) who are similarly not reflected.
Under the circumstances, would it be a good idea to carry out some mild online outreach in parallel to chapter startup efforts?
- For community members in the free software/ free knowledge space who are not yet registered Wikipedians, could someone volunteer to help start this up, so that they are signed on, hopefully to continue editing, and so that their interest in the chapter is reflected on meta? - For community members who are active Wikipedians but are not yet signed on to the chapter effort, would it make sense to compile a longlist and put it up on meta? (As potentially interested in the chapter). And for someone to contact these Wikipedians, to see what the chapter can do to interest them?
The reason I suggest this is that, given the Indian experience, three things seem to happen that are worth taking into account: (1) Not all Wikipedians are automatically interested in or aware of chapter efforts, (2) Not all Wikipedians or potential Wikipedians get to know about organised chapter efforts, and (3) For free software/ free culture allies, often all it takes is just some help to complete the first step of registering in order to become more familiar with the process of editing and for participating in the process generally.
Some kind of outreach would seem in order, and this might be the ideal time to do it.
Enjoy the summer! (As Bangalore becomes more grey and cold, progressing towards winter) Achal
wikimediaza@lists.wikimedia.org