In March 2004, the Afrikaans Wikipedia achieved the 3000 article milestone. Last July, it reached 4000 articles. Now it’s at 5000. That’s only 1.43 million or so less than the English Wikipedia, but not bad nevertheless. Afrikaans is rocketing up the articles per population table :). January saw over 200 new articles, the most since the early spike. Recent new articles include biological kingdom, deism, ocean surface wave and the vital list of Mazda vehicles.
Progress has been slow, with a small number of regular contributors. But there have been achievements. Every country in Africa now has an article (of sorts). All of the main front page topics now have an article. And there are some pretty good articles too, for example this week’s front page article on Mont-Saint-Michel.
I was recently contacted by one of the contributors wanting to remove the article on the word kaffir. He claimed it was insulting and embarrassing. I’m not in favour or hiding things to protect people’s sensibilities, but I took a look at the article expecting to find some racist diatribe. Instead I was pleasantly surprised, as it was reasonably informative and neutral. I looked at the history to see if it had been a regular vandalism target, but it hadn’t.
Hopefully the article will stay, continue to improve, and help in disempowering the term of its painful connotations.
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