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...]]> 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.

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

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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The project has been sitting for many years in the Incubator, where projects that aren’t yet ready are hosted and developed...]]> Northern Sotho now has it’s own Wikipedia, becoming the 10th official South African language to do so.

The project has been sitting for many years in the Incubator, where projects that aren’t yet ready are hosted and developed. It was a bit of an anomaly, as even though it was more active than many other South African languages, an official project was never initiated, and the rules later changed, tightening up the qualification criteria. This may have been to its advantage, as with the modest goal of getting the project out of the incubator, there has been more activity, and it already has far more articles than any other official language besides English and Afrikaans.

Northern Sotho is South Africa’s fourth largest language by number of home language speakers, but trails only Afrikaans and of course English, far outperforming the much more widely spoken Zulu and Xhosa.

Congratulations to the small but dedicated team of editors who’ve helped bring the project to life.

The Afrikaans Wikipedia continues to power ahead, and recently reached a significant milestone with the creation of its 20 000th article. Here’s an updated table of the South African language Wikipedias by number of articles.

South African Language Wikipedias

*Northen Sotho was not yet an official project at this point, and was still in the Incubator.

Remember, number of articles is a rough metric – it’s quite easy to create large numbers of low quality articles, but it’s one of the easiest ways of measuring the progress of a project. An example of this is the progress of Tswana. Although there has been some activity, many of the new additions have been translated with Google Translate, and are full of formatting errors.

Ndebele is now the only official South African language without a Wikipedia, and being the least widely-spoken, this isn’t surprising. However, besides Afrikaans, and the minor activity in Swati and Tswana, the projects are quiet.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is the most well-known of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, but there are others, including Wiktionary, the free dictionary that aims to define every word, in every language. Here’s how the local Wiktionaries are progressing:

South African Language Wiktionaries

*The Xhosa Wiktionary was closed and moved to the Incubator, where it’s gained a few entries but is nowhere near making a return as an active project.

Afrikaans is closing in on its fifteen thousandth definition, and there’s been some activity in Zulu, but otherwise the local Wiktionaries are fairly inactive.

So although activity in the local language projects has been disappointing, the continued development of Afrikaans, and the reaching of the Northern Sotho milestone, are encouraging.

With bandwidth prices dropping steadily, and devices such as the Ubuntu-powered Webbook from Vodacom, internet penetration is slowly rising, and hopefully this can help spread awareness of the projects, and increase the number of contributors.

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The process for forming a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation was jumpstarted at a workshop at Wits University in August last year, and is now nearing the final stages...]]> There’s been some momentum recently in the local Wikimedia world.

The process for forming a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation was jumpstarted at a workshop at Wits University in August last year, and is now nearing the final stages. The legal documentation is close to being complete, and will be submitted shortly to the Wikimedia Foundation for approval. Once they’ve given the go ahead, we’ll register a local non-profit organisation as the official presence of the local community.

This is happening at the same time as another bid to host Wikimania, the annual conference of all things wiki. I co-ordinated the Cape Town bid in 2008, and this time around Stellenbosch is bidding, with the event to be hosted at Stellenbosch University.

With all this activity, I was invited to talk on SAFM radio yesterday afternoon, in particular about the local chapter, and the local language Wikipedias. It was a short interview, so in spite of hoping to mention both the local bid, as well as the fact that there’s more than just Wikipedia, I was pleased to discuss the much-overlooked local language Wikipedias.

I don’t listen to radio, and I don’t know what sort of impact it, or this particular show on SAFM, has these days, so as soon as the interview ended, I loaded up article counts for all the local language Wikipedias, and now, about eight hours later, I’m looking to see if there’s been any noticeable activity.

Of all the official South Africa language Wikipedias, all but Afrikaans, and of course English, are extremely low traffic, where a single edit is a noteworthy event!

So, how much impact did the interview have, and, more importantly, how have they been doing since my last update?

South African Language Wikipedias

**The Northern Sotho Wikipedia, in spite of being the 3rd largest official South African language, is still in the incubator due to not meeting more recent criteria for a new project – in particular active community support.

In the last eight hours, not much has happened as far as editorial activity goes. A new Sotho user registered, and there was a substantive Venda edit, while a new Zulu article and user appeared. So perhaps speaking on an English-language radio station is not the best way to gain users!

A milestone occured in the Afrikaans Wikipedia though, with the 17000th article being created – by my reckoning it was an article on the Afrikaans metal band K.O.B.U.S! (who make Die Antwoord look like Boney M).

Since my last count, the Swazi Wikipedia has seen quite a jump – mostly a single user adding country entries.

There’s been a flurry of activity in the rest of Africa though. A number of languages have shot past 1000 articles, and two are even growing faster than the relatively stable Afrikaans.

African Language Wikipedias

Swahili has raced past 20 000 articles, and a number of other languages are now growing faster than 2nd-placed Afrikaans. Yoruba has started growing rapidly and gained about 3000 articles on Afrikaans since the May 2010 update, and Amharic also gained more articles in the same period. Lingala and Wolof seem to have both stalled, being leapfrogged by both Somali and Kinyarwanda, which become the eighth and ninth African language Wikipedias to pass 1000 articles.

Kabyle will also pass the 1000 article milestone shortly.

After getting a bit distracted by K.O.B.U.S! above, it’s a bit late, and I’ll update the Wiktionary stats another time.

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Two other African languages, Somali and Kabye, are also closing in on the milestone, both having moved quite quickly into the 800′s, passing the relatively stagnant Igbo and Kikongo.

Swahili remains the largest African-language Wikipedia, and is moving rapidly ahead...]]> A sixth African-language Wikipedia has reached the 1000 article milestone, with Wolof now sitting at 1068 articles.

Two other African languages, Somali and Kabye, are also closing in on the milestone, both having moved quite quickly into the 800′s, passing the relatively stagnant Igbo and Kikongo.

African Language Wikipedias

Swahili remains the largest African-language Wikipedia, and is moving rapidly ahead. Having passed Afrikaans in August 2009, it’s now almost 3000 articles ahead, while Afrikaans remains on a steady trajectory.

Swahili also benefited from a Google project to create more Swahili content, focusing on the Swahili Wikipedia. Google initially targetted 7 East African universities, and sponsored prizes. Contributers had between November and January to write new articles, and the contest resulted in a 30% increase (by words) in the size of the Swahili Wikipedia for that period. New articles were up to 35 a day (up from 9 in October), but it appears this was a temporary boost, as rates have dropped off to 5 or 6 new articles a day since, below the Afrikaans average of about 9.

So, the African language Wikipedias show steady progress, what about Wiktionary?

African Language Wiktionaries

Many of the languages have stagnated, with the possible exception of Malagasy, which at first glance appears to have taken off and is now the 3rd-largest African language Wiktionary. In March though, the Malagasy Wikipedia stood at 6119 articles, so it appears a large number were not article quality, or were spam, and have been deleted. Article count is not a good indicator of quality, as it’s quite easy to create large number of low quality stubs, which isn’t indicative of a vibrant project.

On to the South African languages in particular:

South African Language Wikipedias

* – yes, one article has been created since I started writing this.

** – The Northern Sotho Wikipedia is going great guns in the incubator, but it appears no closer to becoming an actual project, even though it would easily be second to Afrikaans. The missing criteria is “having an active community”, a criterion most of projects still in the main space would fail.

Besides Northern Sotho, and of course Afrikaans, there’s been some minor activity in Venda and Swati, but otherwise the other South African language Wikipedias have all failed to come to life yet, with Sotho even reducing in size as spam articles are cleaned out.

And how about the Wiktionaries?

South African Language Wiktionaries

Again, outside of Afrikaans, and a notable spurt from Swati that seems mainly to have been contributed by one person, nothing but the most superficial of progress.

Overall, only two languages, Swahili and Afrikaans, could be called success stories, but there’s some progress overall with some of the larger African languages.

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African Language Wikipedias – number of articles

Full list of Wikipedias

So while Swahili has raced ahead with great momentum (it grew by four in the course of writing this article), and Afrikaans continues solidly, the pace has slowed somewhat for Yoruba, Amharic and Lingala...]]> The Swahili Wikipedia has just passed the Afrikaans Wikipedia to become the largest African-language Wikipedia by number of articles.

African Language Wikipedias – number of articles

Full list of Wikipedias

So while Swahili has raced ahead with great momentum (it grew by four in the course of writing this article), and Afrikaans continues solidly, the pace has slowed somewhat for Yoruba, Amharic and Lingala. The Wolof Wikipedia is also approaching the 1000 article milestone, and, currently on 969 articles, should reach it this year.

I haven’t specifically looked at the African-language Wiktionaries before, outside of the South African languages. Here, Afrikaans still leads. Yoruba and Lingala don’t feature at all, while some languages show surprising interest relative to their Wikipedia size; Malagasy, Oromo, Sotho and Tsonga, for example. I wonder if a relatively more active Wiktionary shows more linguist interest in the project rather than community interest. Outside of linguists, most people would tend to gravitate to the much more exciting task of writing an encyclopedia rather than writing a dictionary.

African Language Wiktionaries – number of entries

Full list of Wiktionaries

So while at least a few African languages Wikipedias show progress, besides English and Afrikaans, it’s the same old refrain for the South African languages. All have shown short bursts of energy, mainly due to individual editors, there’s not been much progress.

South African Language Wikipedias – number of articles

* – incubator

Besides Afrikaans, none of the other languages have shown any progress at all. Northern Sotho still remains stuck in the Incubator and is unlikely to emerge with current levels of activity. Articles bemoaning the undervaluing of the humanities and the related disastrous effect on the general standard of education still appear regularly in the local media, and many South Africans are still unable to communicate effectively in any language. First languages, with the exception of English, and mainly for historical reasons, Afrikaans, are not well-served, and people are not learning them properly, instead being encouraged to communicate in a second-rate English.

It’s an indictment of South African universities that have local language departments that there’s been so little activity, and so little progress with integrating and raising the profile of the other nine languages.

Similarly, most of the South African Wiktionaries have had almost no activity this year.

South African Language Wiktionaries – number of entries

Still, although progress is slow, the dream of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge is getting ever closer to reality.

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My version involved almost getting banned from Wikipedia...]]> I’m sure many people enjoyed an outrageous weekend. Going to a strip club, drinking too much, behaving outrageously and then getting banned from ever returning. That sort of thing.

My version involved almost getting banned from Wikipedia. Technically I’d broken a fundamental Wikipedia rule, reverting an article three times. Since I’m absolutely passionate about the goals of the foundation, which begin Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, getting banned would be rather sad. The fact that my version of the article was much better than the alternative version wouldn’t have helped my defence!

Skipping forward to Sunday evening, Dorje, in the midst of winning at all costs, said something along the lines of I’m so full of love I love everybody, even baddies.

Wikipedia has a principle of assuming good faith. This very powerful principle implements the idea that by treating people well, they’re likely to treat you well. So, when a user makes a contribution that you deem is not constructive, instead of assuming that they’re an agent of the Illuminati out to corrupt Wikipedia, or some nutter who cons the gullible with their snake oil product, one can work with them. Perhaps the edit was a mistake, or perhaps they are simply well-meaning but not really seeing a perspective beyond their own.

After Dorje’s comments, I thought back to my weekend’s Wikipedia interactions, and loving the baddie I’d been bumping heads with. To my mind s/he was arrogant, aggressive and rude. Except that picturing somone in your mind as arrogant, aggressive and rude is hardly assuming good faith, or conducive to spreading the love. So, I returned, ready to try make peace with this person, even if I couldn’t agree.

I found, to my surprise, that many of their edits were generally constructive, and that I had been in the wrong. In my picturing them as a baddie, I’d overlooked their constructive contributions, and had once even reverted a constructive contribution of there’s under an assumption that it was no good. Since they were perhaps tired, stressed, or picturing me as a baddie too, we’d both been bumping heads, looking at the worst of each other’s activities.

Thanks to Dorje’s contribution, I’m humbled, and for now, all is peaceful again.

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