South African language Wikipedias – Wikimania 2022 update

It’s Wikimania 2022 and, being a hybrid event, Cape Town hosted its own get-together.

I took the opportunity to take a long overdue look at the state of the South African language Wikipedias. I include all eleven official languages, with the exception of English.

Afrikaans

  • 104,335 (95,700 on 18 January 2021) articles
  • 190 (210) active editors (1)
  • 39 (40) active editors (5)
  • 45 (47) depth
  • 16 (18) admins
  • 36,138,635 (33,040,587) total words

Top editors:

  • 2,156 Oesjaar
  • 1,828 Aliwal2012
  • 622 Burgert Behr
  • 612 Rooiratel
  • 501 Anonymous user
  • 274 JMK
  • 246 Sobaka
  • 155 SpesBona

Afrikaans has flown past the 100,000 milestone since the previous update, and continues to make good progress. Overall the project appears in good shape. It has a thriving editor community, numerous native speaker admins, and has forged good links with Afrikaans media, ensuring its visibility.

Zulu

  • 10,579 (7,037) articles
  • 48 (26) active editors (1)
  • 8 (8) active editors (5)
  • 6 (3) depth
  • 1 (2) admins
  • 813,798 (370,680) total words

Top editors:

  • 140 InternetArchiveBot
  • 20 Anonymous user
  • 14 TapticInfo
  • 12 Tyulif
  • 11 Fongcwele

Zulu saw good growth since the January 2021 update, passed 10,000 articles, and is now the third largest South African language Wikipedia in terms of article count, overtaking Northern Sotho. However, much of the previous growth was due to one extremely active user and another relatively active user. Neither of these users have been active since 2021, which puts further growth into question. The depth has improved marginally since the last update, although as projects get smaller, depth loses importance, and the metric can be be skewed by excessive vandalism, rather than constructive edits. Most of the articles are still short. Hopefully other editors will step up to keep the momentum going.

Northern Sotho

  • 8,524 (8,229) articles
  • 18 (9) active editors (1)
  • 3 (2) active editors (5)
  • 0 (0) depth
  • 1 (1) admin
  • 304,250 (266,487) total words

Top editors:

  • 16 Ptpare

Northern Sotho has shown a slight uptick in activity, but the majority are minor edits, and with a depth of zero, and a low relative word count, indicating the articles are almost exclusively stubs, it’s still far from developing its own active community.

Xhosa

  • 1,239 (1,181) articles
  • 32 (16) active editors (1)
  • 3 (2) active editors (5)
  • 39 (40) depth
  • 1 (1) admins
  • 272,081 (245,499) total words

Top editors:

  • 9 Ndlovukazi Nomnotho

Xhosa’s growth has been relatively anaemic, with little progress since the January 2021 update, and not much activity beyond administrative.

Sotho

  • 843 (806) articles
  • 25 (17) active editors (1)
  • 3 (1) active editors (5)
  • 110 (48) depth
  • 3 (1) admins
  • 137,851 (102,129) total words

Top editors:

  • 9 Ndlovukazi Nomnotho

The most notable change in the Sotho Wikipedia has been the increase in depth. The top editors (based on July activity) may be very low, but there’s been a fair number of WikiGnome activity, small, marginal improvements. WikiGnome editors are crucial members of a community, but much more is needed for a healthy community.

Tswana

  • 776 (717) articles
  • 22 (10) active editors (1)
  • 1 active editors (5)
  • 107 (76) depth
  • 2 (1) admins
  • 269,758 (290,642) total words

Top editors:

  • 1,021 Rebel Agent

Venda

  • 748 (370) articles
  • 18 (9) active editors (1)
  • 2 (0) active editors (5)
  • 34 (-) depth
  • 1 (1) admins
  • (43,376) 34,238 total words

Top editors:

  • 7 LissajousCurve

I reported in January 2021 last time that Venda was moribund. Albeit from a very low base, it’s shown some significant activity, and has more than doubled the number of articles since January 2021. It was one of the quickest growing South African Wikipedias in the very early days, then stalled, but is again showing signs of life, and has passed Tsonga and Swati. Having gone beyond 500 articles, it now has a depth score as well.

Tsonga

  • 717 (703) articles
  • 14 (14) active editors (1)
  • 2 (1) active editors (5)
  • 175 (178) depth
  • 2 (2) admins
  • 162,122 (154,688) total words

Top editors:

  • 21 Caro de Segeda

Tsonga has a relatively high depth of 175, with a slightly higher ratio of high quality articles, rather than short stubs. Unfortunately there’s been little recent activity.

Swati

  • 574 (524) articles
  • 11 (143) active editors (1)
  • 3 (1) active editors (5)
  • 162 (188) depth
  • 3 (3) admins
  • 69,718 (66,552) total words

Top editors:

  • 17 DerekSquared
  • 13 Bobbyshabangu

Similar to Tsonga, not much to report here.

Ndebele

Ndebele is the only official South African language that doesn’t have its own Wikipedia. It’s in a special state in something called the Incubator, which is where projects that don’t yet have enough activity sit until they’re ready to be launched on their own. There’ve been no new Ndebele articles for many years, so the project is a long way from showing enough activity to have its own Wikipedia yet.

  • 11 articles (incubator only)

Explanation of the terms

  • articles is the article count. An article can be a single line, or can it can be a multi-page in-depth piece, both still count as one article
  • active editors (1) – number of registered editors that have made at least one edit in the last thirty days. An editor is not necessarily a native-speaker, they can for example be a global editor assisting with vandalism.
  • active editors (5) – number of registered editors that have made at least five edits in the previous calendar month
  • depth – a metric intended to give a rough collaborative quality score of the content in the Wikipedia, taking into account the number of times a page has been edited, and the presence and existence of support pages. To compare, English has the highest depth of all Wikipedias: 1,142. The second-largest Wikipedia by number of articles, Cebuano, has a depth of 2. Most of its articles were created by bots, and there’s little human activity. Of other large Wikpedias, French has 254, Chinese 206, German 93 and Dutch 18. Read here for a detailed explanation.
  • admins – number of accounts with administrator rights, intended to support the project by blocking vandals, protecting pages under attack and so on. Most small language Wikipedias rely on global sysops for support, trusted users that do this for multiple languages.
  • Total words – total number of words making up the content pages of the Wikipedia.
  • Top editors – editors listed according to the number of edits they’ve made in the last month. This unfortunately ignores numerous editors that may have made sizeable contributions in the past, but I couldn’t find a way to quickly access this data.

Learn to contribute

Contributing to sharing knowledge in your language is as simple as clicking the edit button on a page and boldly going ahead. If you need any help, feel free to ask me, a fellow editor on one of the talk pages, or reach out to Wikimedia South Africa.

Sources

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Image from Wikimedia Commons