Genetically-modified foods at the Geek Dinner

May 27th, 2008 in

Like everything else, even the Geek Dinners are going green!..



Manifestation of our humanity

May 27th, 2008 in and

It’s been wonderful to see the reaction of many to the recent attacks. In my local community, the nearby Observatory Methodist church quickly swelled from supporting 80 people, to supporting 300 people. Many of the first batch were Somalian, who later moved to a mosque in Salt River. The next batch of people were mostly Zimbabwean…



Blame alone is not enough to address the violence.

May 24th, 2008 in and

I am immensely sad at the violence taking place in our country right now.

Many of the responses too have left me saddened. When what’s needed is help, all round, so much poison has come up…



Migration to WordPress

May 8th, 2008 in

I’ve moved my blog software from b2evolution to WordPress.

Now if for some malign reason this post got Slashdotted/Dug (and please let me install the caching plugins before being so cruel, oh yes, and the Google ads!), let’s circumvent the inevitable comment storm.

Hoorah, good for you, WordPress is much better because blah blah!

What?..



The South African Wikimedia communities

May 1st, 2008 in

My South African Wikimedia communities submission has been accepted by the Wikimania 2008 Program Committee, so I’ll be presenting it at the conference in Alexandria later this year.

So how are those communities doing since my last update?

Not particularly well… Progress is slow, and there’s a proposal to close the Xhosa Wikipedia as well as the Xhosa Wiktionary.

Wikipedia – number of articles

Language
1st Oct
10 Nov
9 Dec
1 May

Afrikaans
8374
8608
8731
9679

Zulu
107
109
121
141

Swati
56
66
76
116

Venda
43
80
101
112

Xhosa
66
80
88
100

Tsonga
10
16
37
71

Tswana
40
41
43
66

Sotho
43
44
43
53

Northern Sotho*
0
0
0
230

Ndebele
0
0
0

* – incubator

The Swati and Tsonga projects have got a bit of momentum, and Afrikaans is still progressing slowly, but otherwise there’s not much progress.

The Northern Sotho project is still in the incubator, which is where projects go until they are ready for launch, so officially the total is still zero…