There are only 19 days to go until Wikimania in Cape Town, so it’s a good time to look at the state of the African language Wikipedias again, as always based on the imperfect metric of number of articles.
The following tables show the number of articles for each language on a particular date, as well as the percentage growth between the most recent two dates.
African Language Wikipedias
Language | 26/6/2015 | 24/11/2016 | 5/9/2017 | 30/6/2018 | % + |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Malagasy | 79,329 | 82,799 | 84,634 | 84,996 | 0.43% |
Afrikaans | 35,856 | 42,732 | 46,824 | 50,275 | 7.37% |
Swahili | 29,127 | 34,613 | 37,443 | 42,773 | 14.23% |
Yoruba | 31,068 | 31,483 | 31,577 | 31,672 | 0.30% | Egyptian Arabic | 14,192 | 15,959 | 17,138 | 18,605 | 8.56% |
Amharic | 12,950 | 13,279 | 13,789 | 14,286 | 3.60% |
Northern Sotho | 1,000 | 7,605 | 7,823 | 8,050 | 2.90% |
Somali | 3,446 | 4,322 | 4,727 | 4,898 | 3.62% |
Shona | 2,321 | 2,638 | 2,851 | 3,630 | 27.32% |
Lingala | 2,062 | 2,777 | 2,915 | 3,023 | 3.70% |
Kabyle | 2,296 | 2,847 | 2,887 | 2,844 | -1.49% |
Hausa | 1,345 | 1,400 | 1,525 | 1,856 | 21.70% |
Kinyarwanda | 1,780 | 1,799 | 1,810 | 1,823 | 0.72% |
Kikuyu | – | – | 1,349 | 1,357 | 0.59% |
Igbo | 1,019 | 1,284 | 1,384 | 1,320 | -4.62% | Kongo | – | 1,173 | 1,176 | 1,179 | 0.26% |
Wolof | 1,023 | 1,058 | 1,157 | 1,166 | 0.78% |
Luganda | – | 1,082 | 1,153 | 1,162 | 0.78% |
Language | 26/6/2015 | 24/11/2016 | 5/9/2017 | 30/6/2018 | % + |
The Malagasy Wikipedia still leads by number of articles, but most of the articles were bot-created. 95% of all edits on that Wikipedia were made by bots, the fourth highest of any Wikipedia, indicating that there’s not much of an actual human community.
Shona, Hausa and Swahili saw good growth, with Swahili particularly impressive coming off a high base. Congratulations too to Afrikaans for reaching the 50,000 article milestone, a target they had set themselves to achieve before Wikimania.
Egyptian Arabic, Lingala, Amharic, Somali and Northern Sotho all saw moderate growth.
Otherwise, the other African languages are mostly static, with Yoruba having barely moved since 2013 (and 79% of all edits made by bots).
Igbo and Kabyle have actually shrunk, which is possible due to the cleaning up and removing non-notable articles.
South African Language Wikipedias
Language | 26/6/2015 | 24/11/2016 | 5/9/2017 | 30/6/2018 | % + |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Afrikaans | 35,856 | 42,732 | 46,824 | 50,275 | 7.37% |
Northern Sotho | 1,000 | 7,605 | 7,823 | 8,050 | 2.90% |
Zulu | 683 | 777 | 942 | 959 | 1.80% |
Xhosa | 356 | 576 | 708 | 738 | 4.24% |
Tswana | 503 | 615 | 639 | 641 | 0.31% |
Tsonga | 266 | 390 | 526 | 562 | 6.84% |
Sotho | 223 | 341 | 523 | 539 | 3.05% |
Swati | 410 | 419 | 432 | 439 | 1.62% |
Venda | 151 | 238 | 256 | 256 | 0.00% |
Ndebele (incubator) | – | 12 | 12 | 12 | 0.00% |
Language | 26/6/2015 | 24/11/2016 | 5/9/2017 | 30/6/2018 | % + |
Onto the South African languages. In spite of being far ahead in terms of number of articles, Afrikaans is also growing at by far the fastest rate, even off this high base. It wouldn’t take much to get, say Ndebele to grow quickly – just the addition of one new article would see its percentage growth outstrip Afrikaans, but sadly it’s been static since its early days in the Incubator (the Incubator being a staging area until a project can show it has enough to survive as a stable project).
Tsonga has been growing steadily. User:Thuvack, who was previously president of Wikimedia South Africa, but now works for the Wikimedia Foundation, has personally created 293 of them, the most recent being in April.
Xhosa, Sotho and Northern Sotho have seen moderate growth, while there’s some life in Zulu and Swati. Tswana, Venda and Ndebele have all been static recently.
User:Aliwal2012 continues to be a standout contributor in a number of South African languages, in particular Afrikaans, Northern Sotho and Sotho, and has edits in most of the South African languages.
With so many African languages still in the startup stages, one to two regular editors can make a huge difference. All it takes is clicking “Edit” and getting started.
With Wikimania coming to sub-Saharan Africa for the first time, it’s a great opportunity to meet and interact with others in the project. The preconference to Wikimania starts in Cape Town on July 18, and the main event starts on July 20. There’s still time to register!
Picture from Wikimedia Commons.
Related articles
- September 2017 African language Wikipedia update
- November 2016 African language Wikipedia update
- March 2016 African language Wikipedia update
- June 2015 African language Wikipedia update
- October 2014 African language Wikipedia and Wiktionary update
- June 2014 African Wikipedia and Wiktionary update
- May 2013 African language Wikipedia update
- November African language Wikipedia update: Afrikaans passes Swahili
- April 2012 African language Wikipedia update
- Northern Sotho Wikipedia now an official project, Afrikaans reaches 20 000 articles
- African language Wiktionary update
- African language Wikipedia update
- Wolof Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles
- Swahili Wikipedia now the largest African-language Wikipedia
- The state of Wikimedia projects in South African and Africa – Dec 2008
- The South African Wikimedia communities
- Venda Wikipedia Progress
- First Wikipedia Academy in Africa
- Wikipedia Week
- Afrikaans Wikipedia hits 5000 articles
For Lingala, there are most articles from very few contributors:
– about 50% from two contributors, one active from 2005-2016 and one from 2005 until today.
– 30% from one active between 2016 and 2017 (only about musicians), unfortunately not following spelling rules and including a lot of french words.
– the remaining 20% from 222 other contributors.
One of the two admins tried to get more contributors. He proposed to the few lingala book editors to publish resumees about their books and authors, he got in contact with universities and museums, but most with even no answer. Most help he got was from non lingala speakers.