Yes, Aliwal2012's work is impressive. But toiling on one's own often leads to burnout, after a while.
"Recruitment of individuals with skills and interest", as you say, is indeed the key. It has proven a quite formidable challenge, for the non-colonial African languages. Even Swahili, the largest of the African language Wikipedias, has been largely cultivated by non-native-speaker (but fluent) Europeans (Three of the four very active editors of that Wikipedia are Europeans.) In other words, for various reasons it has proven much harder to attract native Swahili (and Zulu, and Sotho) speakers to edit Wikipedia in those languages. It seems to me that over and beyond the objective infrastructural difficulties (Internet access, availability of source material in those languages, etc.), the key obstacle is self-motivation: volunteering to create and curate encyclopedic knowledge -- a bit of a weird hobby *everywhere* in the world -- is even less appealing in Africa. It is anyone's guess what might be done about that. Perhaps some videos focusing on the *why* more than the *how* could be attempted. A. On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Don Osborn <d...@bisharat.net> wrote: > Thanks. This is one of the ongoing challenges for small Wikipedias. It > helps to keep the focus on them, but also needed, I think, is recruitment > of individuals with skills and interest (that's a long discussion). For > small projects, one or a few individuals can have tremendous impact - a > current example is the Northern Sotho (aka Sepedi) Wikipedia > https://nso.wikipedia.org/ > > Don > > On 5/11/2016 8:06 PM, Asaf Bartov wrote: > > Whoever it was, they seem to have given up. There have been zero active > editors in the past few months. :( > > A. > > On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 6:14 PM, Don Osborn <d...@bisharat.net> wrote: > >> FYI, the Kikuyu (Gĩkũyũ) Wikipedia https://ki.wikipedia.org/ has passed >> the 1000 article milestone, currently with 1321 articles. At the end of >> January it had only 847. >> >> A quick look at random pages, however, shows many of the pages are single >> sentence articles on cities. Still, it would be interesting to know more >> about who has been doing the recent editing, and their plans. >> >> One evident gap is that the interface (commands) has not yet been >> translated into Kikuyu. >> >> Don Osborn >> >> >> * >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> African-Wikimedians mailing list >> African-Wikimedians@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/african-wikimedians >> > > > > -- > Asaf Bartov > Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org> > > Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the > sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! > https://donate.wikimedia.org > > > _______________________________________________ > African-Wikimedians mailing > listAfrican-Wikimedians@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/african-wikimedians > > > > _______________________________________________ > African-Wikimedians mailing list > African-Wikimedians@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/african-wikimedians > > -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org
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