May 2013 African language Wikipedia update

May 10th, 2013 in · 3 Comments

There’s a current proposal to close the Xhosa Wikipedia for lack of activity, so I thought it’d be a good time to see the progress of the African and South African language Wikipedias.

Heading the list of African-language Wikipedias by article count, Malagasy is still racing ahead in creating new articles, mainly thanks to articles automatically created by bots. These articles aren’t always ones that you’d imagine would be high priority. There are currently over 200 galaxies with their own article, some with broken templates, for example the one on the NGC 953 elliptical galaxy in the constellation Triangulum. But no article on Nelson Mandela, or Omer Beriziky, the prime minister of Madagascar.

So it’s a somewhat artificial indicator, but there is still a reasonable level of activity, and it would be interesting to measure whether bot-activity helps encourage human activity.

Second is Yoruba, where the huge burst has slowed (again, many are bot-related, and the first random article I clicked on was minor space body 3011 Chongqing), but there’s still steady progress. Afrikaans in third continues well, and is probably in the best shape of any African-language Wikipedia. After being overtaken by Swahili, it has seen consistent activity, has a healthy community, and is growing far faster than Swahili.

Swahili and Amharic are still growing steadily, while Egyptian Arabic is growing quickly, and is on track to pass Amharic. Of the others with more than 1000 articles, only Kinyarwandahas has stalled, while Kabyle and Shona have seen good growth.

Language 1/1/2007 11/2/2011 13/4/2012 16/11/2012 9/5/2013
Malagasy   3806 36767 38753 45361
Yoruba 517 12174 29894 30158 30585
Afrikaans 6149 17002 22115 24821 26752
Swahili 2980 21244 23481 24519 25265
Amharic 742 6738 11572 11806 12360
Egyptian Arabic     8433 9341 10379
Somali   1639 2354 2525 2757
Lingala 292 1394 1816 1951 2025
Kinyarwanda     1501 1807 1817
Kabyle       1144 1503
Shona       1272 1421
Wolof   1116 1814 1129 1161

So overall, in Africa, some good progress.

Of the South African language Wikipedias, outside of Afrikaans, the state is as dismal as ever. Three have actually lost articles (usually due to removing spam), while a proposal has been made to close the Xhosa Wikipedia. Xhosa is the smallest-remaining African language Wikipedia still open. A number of smaller languages have already been closed. Growth in Zulu has slowed, Venda has shown flickers of activity, while Sotho has grown by 37 articles, although it’s still second-smallest, ahead of Xhosa.

Let’s not forget Ndebele, which as the least widely spoken official South African language, still has no representation.

South African Language Wikipedias

Language 1/10/2007 19/11/2011 13/4/2012 16/11/2012 9/5/2013
Afrikaans 8374 20042 22115 24821 26754
Northern Sotho 0 557 566 686 685
Zulu 107 256 483 568 579
Tswana 40 240 490 497 495
Swati 56 359 361 363 364
Tsonga 10 192 193 243 240
Venda 43 193 190 194 204
Sotho 43 132 145 151 188
Xhosa 66 125 136 141 148

Neville Alexander, a champion of multi-lingualism in South Africa, recently died, and there don’t seem to be prominent leaders taking up the mantle. While there are eleven official languages, English seems to be becoming ever-more dominant, there’s a dearth of local literature and language departments are shrinking in the country’s universities. A recent Wikipedia workshop at the University of Cape Town was co-ordinated by one of the Wikimedia South Africa board members, Douglas Scott, and in spite of being a standard lecture as part of the curriculum, not a single native-speaker turned up. The article-counts reflect this situation, so it seems unlikely there’ll be a change anytime soon.

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South Africa slumps in the 2013 World Press Freedom Index.

February 18th, 2013 in and

The 2013 World Press Freedom Index came out recently, and sadly, South Africa has slid alarmingly since I last blogged about it in 2007, and even more so when compared with its peak rating in 2003. Note that a lower score is better.

Year Score Ranking
2013 24.56 (-12.56) 52 (-10)
2012 12 (0) 42 (-4)
2010 12 (-3.5) 38 (-5)
2009 8.5 (-0.5) 33 (+3)
2008 8 (+5) 36 (+7)
2007 13 (-1.75) 43 (+1)
2006 11.25 (-4.75) 44 (-13)
2005 6.5 (-1.5) 31 (-5)
2004 5 (-1.66) 26 (-5)
2003 3.33 21 (+5)

Although the country still has a robust and critical press, it’s mainly the threat of the “Protection of State Information Bill” that sees South Africa slump well away from “good” to deep into the “satisfactory” category.

Sadly, things are even worse for the other BRICS countries, with Brazil (108th, -9) falling after a number of journalists were killed, India (140th, -9) also seeing increasing violence against journalists and increasing censorship, China still oppressively imprisoning many journalists (173rd, +1) and Russia (148th, -6) down too after an increase in repression.

Finland remains top for the fourth consecutive year, with a number of other Nordic and European countries filling out the “good” category, along with New Zealand and Jamaica.

Among African countries, Namibia and Cape Verde top the charts and are rated “good”, with Ghana, Botswana, Niger, Burkina Faso and the Comoros all ahead of South Africa with satisfactory ratings.

A number of other African countries saw big gains, including Malawi up 71 and the Ivory Coast up 63. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, recovering from its crackdown on the Occupy Movement, gained 15 positions up to 32nd in the world, while Canada lost ground after its obstruction of journalists during the “Maple Spring” student movement, and increasingly oppressive legislation, leaving Jamaica as the freest country in the hemisphere.

The gains are offset by a number of countries seeing worsening situations. Mali, after the coup and insurgency there, fell 74 positions, and Tanzania 36 positions after the murder of two journalists. The other big faller was Japan, down 31 positions after restricting all access to information about the Fukushima disaster.

Here’s hoping that, wherever you are in the world, 2013 will see you a little freer to have your say.

Read the full report on the Reporters Without Borders site.

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MySQL, MariaDB and relative asymptotics

February 14th, 2013 in and

In 2002 I wrote a book on MySQL. At the time, I was working crazy fulltime hours for IOL and I was exhausted by the end of the process. I’ve been approached quite a few times since to write an update, or to write other related books, but have never had the energy, time or interest. The most recent approach, by a publisher I won’t mention, was for a hilariously obscure topic. I’ve deleted the email, so can’t recall the exact topic, but it was along the lines of “Asymptotic Relative Efficiency in Python”. Not only have I hardly used Python, but I’m relatively inefficient in asymptotics. It did make me wonder about the quality of the rest of their books.

It’s obviously taken 10 and a half years for the memories to fade because although I’m as busy as ever, I’m considering an update to the book. I’ve been watching MySQL’s progress with interest, from the company’s purchase by Sun to the Oracle takeover.

With concerns about the direction of MySQL under Oracle, MariaDB is gaining widespread prominence, and it’s been good to see that Fedora and OpenSUSE are the first two Linux distributions to announce that they will move towards replacing MySQL with MariaDB.

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but contains a number of enhancements and has been reported to perform better. Wikipedia were the first high-profile entity to begin switching, and their move has probably triggered similar moves elsewhere. MariaDB is administered by the non-profit MariaDB foundation in a much more open and transparent manner than MySQL currently, and employs some of the original MySQL developers.

Where Fedora goes, Red Hat follows, and it’s only a matter of time before MariaDB is widely available as a standard on most server setups.

Although I still use it myself regularly as a reference, the old book is quite dated now, so it’ll be interesting to get to grips with all the enhancements that MariaDB offers.



Speed Comparison of South African Media Websites

February 2nd, 2013 in

I’ve noticed that each time I’ve visited IOL recently my browser takes a noticeable performance knock. Trying to browse it by opening lots of tabs, as I do with most sites I visit, is out of the question, and it’s probably the worst-performing site I have visited recently.

I decided to run speed tests of the major South African news sites, and a few well-known international ones, to see how the performance shapes up.

I ran Yslow, which, along with Google’s PageSpeed alternative, is one of the more well-known speed tests. YSlow is a Firebug addon, both addons for Mozilla Firefox.

Here are the results. Higher scores are better – I only visited the front pages of each.

Site Grade Score
IOL E 55
News24 E 57
New Age E 60
Business Day D 61
Times Live D 62
Guardian (UK) D 64
iafrica D 66
New York Times (USA) D 68
City Press D 69
BBC (UK) C 71
Mail & Guardian C 73
Cricinfo C 74
Daily Maverick C 75
Facebook C 80
Twitter B 89

It’s no surprise that IOL comes in last, close behind the nearly-as-clunky News24, while at the other end of the scale, the Daily Maverick comes top, closely followed by the Mail & Guardian. The South African news websites are generally slower than the most popular international alternatives, ironic in a country with relatively slow and expensive bandwidth. Although Facebook and Twitter aren’t news sites, I’ve added them as two of the most popular sites for comparison. Twitter is unsurprisingly light, with it’s minimal interface, but Facebook comes out well, probably due to the hefty resources it devotes. It can by no means be called a light site, and the front page is filled with content, but it performs far better that any of the local sites.



You like my blog?

January 27th, 2013 in

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Happy New Year by the way. And Christmas.

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Sam Harris on Free Will

November 24th, 2012 in and

Sam Harris recently released a book on the topic of free will.

I haven’t read the book yet, but watched a presentation he gave of ideas from his book.

Traditionally there are three positions offered. Determinism, which essentially states that we could not have made any alternative choices, as our choices are determined by pre-existing conditions, and that therefore free will is an illusion. The second is compatibilism, which states that free will is compatible with determinism by defining free will not as the freedom to have acted differently, but as being able to act voluntarily. Finally, libertarianism, which claims that we do have free will.

I remember writing an essay at university arguing in favour of libertarianism, and I hauled it out from the moth-eaten piles of paper to reread it again, as I remember being quite proud of it.

Seventeen years later it’s very easy to pick holes in, but essentially I used quantum physics as a basis to argue for free will, much like the video below:

Even at the time I wasn’t satisfied with the argument, as indeterminate quantum events are a far cry from free will, but I saw none of the three positions are coherent, and most of my essay was spent arguing against determinism on the basis of its consequences, and against compatibilism on the basis of its weak definition of free will and arbitrary distinction between causes.

Sam Harris’s video below presents the best summary of the topic I’ve seen so far, essentially arguing against any coherent notion of free will.

I enjoy his video particularly because be undermines the argument I used in my essay against determinism, that of its unacceptable consequences, by making the important distinction between choice and free will, and by highlighting how removing free will from our concept of reality actually increases the love and compassion we show for others.

If we encounter a poisonous scorpion, we don’t assign free will and therefore blame the scorpion for wanting to sting us, but we will also take actions to avoid being stung. By not blaming the scorpion, we are also open to seeing things from the scorpion’s perspective, the basis of compassion.

Similarly, if a human wants to kill us, blame is neither helpful nor rational, and understanding this opens us to understanding, love and compassion. Harris uses the example of realising that a murderer had a brain tumour causing them to act that way. If we understood that, and knew that removing the tumour would take away the impulse to murder, we cannot reasonably blame the person, and our action would shift towards treating them, and we would likely feel compassion for the terrible circumstances of the tumour. Just because we don’t understand the causes of most actions shouldn’t change this understanding.

When asked a question about what sparked his interest in the topic, Harris responds by crediting personal observation, and earlier in the presentation discusses the nature of arising thoughts, and the lack of freedom this entails. Harris is the most interesting of the group of well-known atheists (he dislikes the label), as while some seem closed to any kind of spiritual experience, Harris has studied meditation and seems to have a greater openness and interest in the mysteries beyond our comprehension, all without the need to believe various incoherent explanations in response.

His comment about personal observation and his anecdote about arising thoughts matches what can happen in awareness meditation. At first, we may become aware of our thoughts and the train of thoughts we follow; later we can become aware of our thoughts as they arise, and then slowly get to understand even deeper into this process.

Harris points out that its these thoughts that are often claimed to be the basis of free will, but that a greater look at this process leads us to realise that these thoughts that arise are not free in any real sense.

Watch Harris’s full presentation here:



November African language Wikipedia update: Afrikaans passes Swahili

November 16th, 2012 in

Time to take another look at the progress of African and African language Wikipedia projects.

African Language Wikipedias

Language 1/1/2007 11/2/2011 13/4/2012 16/11/2012
Malagasy   3806 36767 38753
Yoruba 517 12174 29894 30158
Afrikaans 6149 17002 22115 24821
Swahili 2980 21244 23481 24519
Amharic 742 6738 11572 11806
Egyptian Arabic     8433 9341
Somali   1639 2354 2525
Lingala 292 1394 1816 1951
Kinyarwanda     1501 1807
Shona       1272
Kabyle       1144
Wolof   1116 1814 1129

Progress has slowed in a number of the projects, and in the leading two languages, Malagasy and Yoruba, the slump has been quite dramatic after the increase seen in the previous period.

Remember as always I’m only looking at the number of articles, which is a flawed metric since it’s quite easy for bots or single users to quickly create large numbers of low quality articles. Still, it does measure some degree of the level of activity and interest in the project.

Afrikaans is distinguishing itself, and has picked up the pace and once again passed Swahili, which passed Afrikaans to become the largest African-language Wikipedia back in July 2009. Afrikaans also grew the quickest, which means that, on current trends, Afrikaans is heading towards once again becoming the largest African language Wikipedia, although it is still far behind Malagasy and Yoruba.

Two new arrivals in the 1000+ club are Shona, spoken primarily in Zimbabwe, and Kabyle, spoken primarily in Algeria, which have both passed Wolof, meaning there are now eleven African language Wikipedias with more than one thousand articles.

Shona has increased particularly quickly, having less than 100 articles two years ago.

South African Language Wikipedias

Language 1/10/2007 19/11/2011 13/4/2012 16/11/2012
Afrikaans 8374 20042 22115 24821
Northern Sotho 0 557 566 686
Zulu 107 256 483 568
Tswana 40 240 490 497
Swati 56 359 361 363
Tsonga 10 192 193 243
Venda 43 193 190 194
Sotho 43 132 145 151
Xhosa 66 125 136 141

Of the South African languages, besides Afrikaans, there has been reasonable progress in Northern Sotho, which spent a long time in the incubator before emerging to become the second largest, and Zulu. Sadly the growth in Tswana, boosted by the Google Setswana challenge from October 2011 to January 2012, has again stalled, while the other languages remain moribund.

It’s pleasing to see the signs of progress, and the gradual manifestation of a world in which every human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

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US election news you may not have heard about

November 10th, 2012 in

Listening to the US presidential candidates talking about who is more supportive of coal, or who will be tougher on foreign affairs, it can be easy to believe nothing will change, or that voting makes little difference. But there were real choices on offer, and 2012 saw many firsts. Here’s my summary of some of the more interesting results you may not have heard about.

It’s not all about the presidential elections, and the president is in many ways quite constrained. Hopefully many of these positive changes in the lower levels of US government will bring positive changes throughout the whole system,



Lucid Dreaming Chi Kung

October 18th, 2012 in and

I haven’t been lucid dreaming for a while now, at least a few months. In the past, I’ve found that I could become lucid quite regularly if I followed a routine of going to sleep relatively early (before 11pm), then waking up around 4am, then again at 5.30am and finally 7am.

This routine worked very well for me, and I could become lucid quite often while following it.

However, for all sorts of interesting reasons, I almost never follow that routine, and almost never go to bed before at least 2am.

This past week has been a good example. After a staff member family tragedy, I ended up I on the night shift packing boxes at work. I got to bed about 8am. My Coursera course routine has been to do nothing until the just before the deadline day (about 5.30am Monday morning). As the course has progressed, the readings have taken me longer, so I’ve worked right until the deadline the past few Sundays.

And then, there’s the odd stay up till seven just because I’m in the zone, full of energy and getting lots done.

Going to bed before 11 is like most people considering going to bed at 5pm – rather unlikely to happen.

Usually, after seeing too many sunrises in a row, I tend to crash, and have an early night, before slowly drifting later and later again. But now, for the first time since the mindfulness of dream and sleep retreat about 18 months ago, I’ve made three days in a row of going to sleep early, around midnight or before, and getting lots of sleep. The first two days I had extremely vivid, almost but not-quite lucid dreams. And today, the third day, I became lucid again.

The main inspiration for my lucidity has been my son. He began by telling me about his lucid dreams, which was my first realisation that such a thing existed. Quite often, he’s been the trigger in my dreams as well. Playing with him, chasing him down corridors, his form changing around every turn. Or simply when he’s been staying with me. So it’s fitting that yesterday was his birthday, and after a fun but exhausting day with him, I had another early night.

In the dream, I was at my parents house (another common dream motif). I tried to switch on a light, and it didn’t work. As a force of habit, I did a reality check, the easiest being a hand check. I obviously didn’t do a very good hand check because I didn’t realise I was dreaming, but I decided to leap into the air and start flying anyway, and to my complete shock I took off.

So it seems I have a new, more reliable, reality check – flying. Expect to see me hopping down the street from now on, trying to take off.

In almost all of my previous lucid dreams, I have known I was dreaming without doing a reality check. Either something strange has happened, or I’ve simply got the sense that it was a dream. Only once before have I done a reality check and been stunned to realise I was dreaming. Now I realise that perhaps my hand checks haven’t been working, although I don’t recall any failed hand checks after working up. My hand changes have always been subtle, a wrinkle hear, a marking there, rather than the dramatic missing finger or branch growing out some people report.

In this lucid dream I finally managed to do so tai chi and chi kung. After the inevitable blissful soaring through the sky, ended by breaking through a thin cloud, a wish I realise I had while driving in the day, I decided to meditate. Before really getting started, I decide to do tai chi instead.

This has never worked before. Either I haven’t found a spot in my dream where I could do tai chi – my first attempt saw me going on a mission to find a field across a strange city, each field being either covered in rocks or steeply sloped, and when I finally found a suitable field, waking up immediately.

I have only managed once to even attempt tai chi, but it was hopeless, with me staggering and falling about, utterly unbalanced.

Once again, my mind put obstacles in my way. There is a field near my parents house, and I ran there. My “usual spot” on the field was taken by a parked car. I have no usual spot, I’ve never done tai chi on that field. There was dog shit on the field, broken glass. But finally I found a spot, and could so start practising. I started with an eight section brocade, and as I bent my knees and lowered my body, I found myself in water, with only my mouth and hands above water. Somehow this wasn’t much of an obstacle, and I managed to carry on. When I got to the exercise of rotating the waist as far left and right as possible, I found I could keep going indefinitely, and I seemed to stop only to keep the exercise realistic, as I thought that turning around five times is not how the exercise is supposed to be done.

There were more obstacles, a child playing and falling into the water next to me, but I managed a reasonable session before waking up.

I’ve just tried the routine now, and realised that I’d mixed up two routines, the eight section brocade and the seven stars of dipper.

Sadly, I can’t twist around indefinitely either.



Sustainable American poetic Greek and Roman mythological cryptography with Coursera

August 26th, 2012 in and

I’m finally getting around to trying a course with Coursera.

Coursera was founded by a couple of Computer Science professors from Stanford University, and its mission is to make “the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it”.

It launched in April this year, and has already had over a million students. Their course offering has expanded since launch, and browsing through their offerings is like being a kid in a candy store, or in my case, a bookshop. After missing out on Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, I’ve signed up for one starting tomorrow.

Of the four courses starting tomorrow; Cryptography, Gamification, Introduction to Sustainability and Web Intelligence and Big Data, I could happily do any of them. To further complicate the selection, coming up in September are jewels such as A History of the World Since 1300, Neural Networks for Machine Learning, Modern and Conteporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology.

I’ve spent too much time studying formally (majoring in IT and English & Philosophy), signed up for Honours in English (I pulled out after realising my fulltime job at the time didn’t leave much time for studying), and for about ten years used to peruse various university courses with an eye to signing up for more. Part of my reluctance was the idea of year/s spent on only one topic, and Coursera’s bite-sized modules, which seem to mostly be 4-12 weeks, fits perfectly.

It’s a revolution in education, especially for postgraduates, and I remember a friend who signed up for one having to choose between a University of Cape Town class for many thousands of rands, and a similar Coursera one taught by Stanford professors for free. I’m sure the UCT course was very good, but it really wasn’t much of a choice.

I’ve managed to resist signing up for multiple courses at once, and will be starting with neo-malthusians, climate change, peak oil and genetically-modified foods – in other words the Sustainability course taught by the University of Illinois’ Jonathan Tomkin.



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