June 2018 African language Wikipedia update, 50 000 articles for Afrikaans

African language map

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

3 comments

  1. 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.

Comments are closed.