Hi Lourie
Yep, I'm with you. I think this is a great project, and - as you mentioned
to me offline - really accessible for people to take part in and
contribute. Some cool ideas also around it - we could organise an upload
party where we could have a stall somewhere (at a university or shopping
centre on a certain day) where we could help people upload their pics there
and then.
I'm also happy to chat - maybe we could get together on skype even?
Kerryn
* * * *
Kerryn McKay
The African Commons Project
082 334 6165
skype: kerrynmac
twitter: kerrynmckay
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Lourie Pieterse
<louriepieterse(a)yahoo.com>wrote;wrote:
Hello Maarten
It is nice hearing from you again! It sounds to me like a wonderful idea,
and I am sure that there will be some South Africans who would like to
participate in this competition. What do the others from Wikimedia ZA
think? I would definitely be interested to meet up with you and discuss the
possibilities. When are you again in the Cape Town area?
Kind regards
Lourie
------------------------------
*From:* MADe <MADe(a)wikipedia.be>
*To:* wikimediaza(a)lists.wikimedia.org
*Sent:* Tuesday, February 14, 2012 9:23 AM
*Subject:* Re: [Wikimedia ZA] Pictures from Saturday's Xhosa Wiki Workshop
Hi all,
Very nice to see all the activities on the smaller South African language
wikis! Hopefully this means a start for those projects. I have another idea
to get some more things happening.
In Belgium I started the "Wiki Loves
Monuments<http://www.wikilovesmonuments.be/>"
competition. The goal for the participants was to take a picture of a
heritage site and to post them on Wikicommons. The best images were
selected and they could win a variety of prices (Belgium: iPad). It was
part of a bigger European contest <http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/> (18
countries). The goal was to attract new contributors to the wiki projects,
and for Belgium to gather some wikipedians to start our own Belgian wiki
chapter.
The competition itself was fairly simple to organise. The European
organisers provided tools, a website, logos, a dedicated Wiki Commons
upload
tool<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&u…entsbe>,
... and also funding (10,000 ZAR). We made the translations (Belgium alone:
five languages), we searched for our own jury, we searched for Belgian
prices, and we got into contact with government organisations that helped
us with a venue for the price ceremony and some more practical things.
The result was fantastic. 170.000 new images in Europe, of which 6000 in
Belgium. Lots or media attention for the competition. At least 50 (!) new
Belgian members that started working on Wikicommons or Wikipedia itself. A
solid group of people that wanted to work on our own chapter. We
established good contacts with government organisations that suddenly
understood Wikipedia is not a black box but made by real people. Nice media
coverage on the competition.
The European competition will be organised in September of this year. They
would really enjoy SA to join in, and I'm sure WMF can help us with most of
the funding. I think this is an easy way to get the attention of new
people, especially from poorer regions (if we provide the necessary
translations).
Who is interested to get more information, or to help with the
organisation? We can meet in Cape Town, Durban or Johannesburg (I'm almost
everywhere for my current job)
Grtz,
Maarten
BE: +32 475 21 38 35
ZA: +27 71 491 31 38
Skype: mdeneckere
2012/2/14 Douglas Scott <douglas.i.scott(a)gmail.com>
Hi,
Ian is absolutely right. Although the workshops them selves tend to create
a number of articles creating a community of dedicated editors for
Xhosa language Wikipedia will be a very big challenge that I think will
take a long time. On the up side people are very eager and interested but
on the down side, as Ian has mentioned, there are still problems with basic
computer literacy and access to computers/internet. I suspect that it will
take a number of workshops followed by some sort of program such as one
(and this is only an idea right now) whereby teachers use Xhosa Wikipedia
to test their students translating abilities thereby creating a self
perpetuating process that continually exposes new people to editing that
wiki.
As I mentioned to Ian on Saturday I think that a big part of creating a
healthy community of editors on Wikipedia is finding enough people with the
right type of personality that is at home using a computer. I think that
is as much a numbers game as anything else which means spending a long time
exposing as many people as possible to the idea and process of editing
Wikipedia. A process that is made harder by relatively low rates of
computer literacy. But then again we must start from some where I suppose.
Either way, more work and support is needed and so long as I have free
time and am in Cape Town I am happy help.
P.S. Thanks for checking the stats Ian. To be frank I am delighted that
one extra substantial edit was made since the workshop on Saturday. That
in its self is a 0.7% increase! :-D
On 14 February 2012 00:02, Heather Ford <hfordsa(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you so much, Ian. Appreciate it.
On Feb 13, 2012, at 1:15 PM, Ian Gilfillan wrote:
Great :) I'd be really interested to know whether people continued to edit
after the workshop if you could share.
To try answer Heather, the article count went from 125, which it has been
stuck at since at least November 2011, to 131 during the class, and there
has only been one substantial edit from any of the participants on the
weekend (a new article, increasing the count to 132) since the workshop, so
the answer seems to be no.
The workshop was 2 hours, and, briefly, we hoped to teach creating a user
account, creating or editing (via translation from English) an article,
adding links, adding a picture, and I wanted to add interwiki links to the
list as well. Everyone created or edited an article, and most, if not
everyone, added links, though only some could create a user account due to
IP limits, and very few got to adding an image or interwiki links. Douglas
goes into more details in his post.
It's more complicated to add links in Xhosa than in English due to the way
prefixes are used in the language, so quite often an article may exist, but
the link doesn't point to it, and there are already duplicate articles for
this reason.
There is still such a barrier with basic computer use, that I found a
substantial portion of the class was showing people how to maximize and
minimize windows, how to open a new tab or window, etc, and I got the sense
that there wasn't always a real understanding of why the various steps were
being performed, which reduces the chances of them being repeatable outside
of the class.
The one article that was created afterwards is an orphan, with no incoming
or outgoing links.
There was a lot of enthusiasm, so hopefully having a followup quite soon
will keep the interest and momentum going, but I would expect there to be
not much sustained activity as a result of the workshop alone.
--
Ian Gilfillan
www.greenman.co.za
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@hfordsa on Twitter
http://hblog.org
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司道格
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