October 2014 African language Wikipedia and Wiktionary update

It’s only been a few months since my last update on the state of the Wikimedia projects in Africa, but seeing as the Wiki Indaba was held since then, and this weekend is Wikimedia South Africa’s AGM, it’s a good excuse to take another look.

First, the Wiktionaries. Wiktionary is a much less well-known set of projects compared to Wikipedia, and aims to have a dictionary definition for each word in every language.

African Language Wiktionaries

Language 3/8/2009 30/5/2010 15/5/2011 17/6/2014 29/10/2014
Malagasy 142 4,253 3,191,393 3,599,084
Afrikaans 14,128 14,669 14,731 15,792 15,794
Swahili 12,956 13,000 13,027 13,885 13,903
Wolof 2,675 2,689 2,693 2,310 2,310
Sotho 1,387 1,389 1,398 1,343 1,343
Zulu 127 131 510 586 587
Rwandi 306 306 306 366 367
Oromo 186 218 264 269 322
Swati 31 371 377 290 290
Amharic 311 319 377 204 206
Tsonga 358 359 363 92 92

In short, besides the Malagasy bot activity that’s creating up a storm, and some flickers in Oromo, spoken mostly in Ethiopia and parts of Kenya and Somalia, not much activity at all. Even, the Afrikaans Wiktionary, which has shown steady, organic, growth in the past, had little activity.

What about the Wikipedias?

African Language Wikipedias

10,3792,757
Language 11/2/2011 13/4/2012 9/5/2013 17/6/2014 29/10/2014
Malagasy 3,806 36,767 45,361 47,144 47,061
Afrikaans 17,002 22,115 26,752 31,756 33,392
Yoruba 12,174 29,894 30,585 30,910 30,989
Swahili 21,244 23,481 25,265 26,349 27,021
Amharic 6,738 11,572 12,360 15,968 16,229
Egyptian Arabic   8,433 12,440 12,934
Somali 1,639 2,354 3,646 3,680
Shona     1,421 2,077 2,091
Lingala 1,394 1,816 2,025 2,077 2,087
Kabyle     1,503 1,876 1,967
Kinyarwanda   1,501 1,817 1,832 1,834
Hausa 1,386
Wolof 1,116 1,814 1,161 1,201 1,148
Igbo 1,017

Two new languages have joined the 1000 club. Hausa, spoken natively in Niger, Nigeria and Chad, but also as a trade language across numerous others, and Igbo, spoken mostly in Nigeria.

While most of the languages are showing some sort of activity, the article count in a couple of languages has dropped. This just means there’s been a cleanup of some articles that perhaps were never worthy of the name. Although there’s been little activity on either, Shona has passed Lingala, while Kabyle is catching up to both.

Afrikaans continues to be the fastest-growing African-language Wikipedia, with a healthy, active community.

Onto the South African languages specifically:

South African Language Wikipedias

Language 19/11/2011 13/4/2012 9/5/2013 17/6/2014 29/10/2014
Afrikaans 20,042 22,115 26,754 31,756 33,392
Northern Sotho 557 566 685 691 966
Zulu 256 483 579 630 686
Tswana 240 490 495 510 513
Swati 359 361 364 400 408
Xhosa 125 136 148 333 380
Tsonga 192 193 240 303 309
Venda 193 190 204 209 208
Sotho 132 145 188 197 202

The pace on most of the South African languages has picked up slightly, with signs of life. Besides Afrikaans, mentioned above, Northern Sotho showed a burst of activity, mainly new date stub pages, but there are fairly regular edits.

Zulu has shown signs of stirring, mostly due to its healthy coverage of porn stars, and probably boasts the highest ratio of porn star to other articles of any Wikipedia language edition. The porn star articles also happen to be some of the most well-endowed compared to the usual stub pages found throughout the Zulu and most African-language editions.

I’m very happy to see that Xhosa continues to show good relative growth, and that it’s newfound life in June wasn’t just a reaction to Wikimedia ZA announcing in April that its attempts to activate it had been put on hold due to lack of success, but seems to be sustaining itself.

Otherwise, not too much to note, although Sotho is closing in on Venda as it tries to haul itself off the bottom spot.

As always, I should mention that article count is an imperfect metric. It’s possible to have higher article counts with not much activity (stubs or bot-creations), but the reverse isn’t possible, and it’s a reasonable indicator of the signs of life.

Related articles

Image from Wikimedia Commons