Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia at 15 & its African language editions

[Florence Devouard]

Couple of notes and pointers


I have added the link to the blog post here :
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statistics_related_to_Africa#Use_and_knowledge_of_Wikipedia_in_Africa
Please do not hesitate to drop information related to Africa in those pages.
Thank you Don for the info.



The writing contest closed this week-end. More info on that later, but I 
am glad to say we collected 121 new biographies in French and about 70 
in English. Yeah rock !


But whilst the contest was in English and French... a team went on 
translating articles in Armenian language.
They managed 41 additional articles : 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Women_Writing_Contest#Articles_in_other_languages




One of the articles (in English) was rejected for notability issue. It 
has been resubmitted and needs further review. If anyone can have a look...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Onel5969#Draft:_Theo_Sowa



I think the translation approach is an excellent one. I am a bit perplex 
as well as how little productive edit-a-thons with new users are. But 
the struggle to learn how Wikipedia operates on top of understanding an 
article structure on top of looking for relevant information is a bit... 
too complicated for a newcomer. It may be that starting with translation 
might make things easier ? Path worth to explore.


In that prospect, I love this page : 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Loves_Women/Writing_Contest/Articles_suggestions

and I discovered recently that page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Missing_articles_by_nationality/Africa
created by created by @Emijrp and Edgars2007

We need more of those.

Flo


Le 01/02/16 17:24, Amir E. Aharoni a écrit :

It's quite true, sadly.

One thing that that blog post doesn't mention is that the periods of growth
in Yoruba and Malagasy happened mostly thanks to bots :(

There is some hard-to-notice, but real and organic growth in the number of
articles in Xhosa in the last year. I know it because I traveled to South
Africa and I had the privilege of meeting Nozibele Nomdebevana, the woman
responsible for it; see
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/07/new-wikipedia-translators/ . And it's
hard to notice, because almost all of it was done by that one woman, and as
great as her work is, it's too small to be noticed in the statistics
graphs, although I do hope that she will find other people and teach them
the Wikipedia writing craft.

I also noticed some growth in Somali in the last couple of months, also as
a work of one person; more on that further down.

For the most part, it's an unfortunate mix of several factors:
* very low usage of African languages in education: English, French and
Arabic are far more prominent in education on all levels, so most people
don't even imagine that their language can be used for a reference work or
that something useful can be found on Google in their language. Afrikaans
is an exception, but not a surprising one given that the government of
South Africa promoted its use in education for many decades.
* low penetration of Internet connectivity
* of the people who are connected to the Internet, many are connected
through phones, and Wikipedia editing doesn't work on mobile phones as well
as on desktops (though it's important to note that it works far better now
than it did three years ago)
* poverty and lack of free time to dedicate to volunteering

As a shameless plug, I'll suggest the project I'm working on—Content
Translation—as one solution that could help. In many cases, creating
articles by translation should be relatively easier than writing them from
scratch. Over 30% of the articles created in the Somali Wikipedia in the
last couple of months were made using Content Translation, which makes many
of the article creation and formatting steps much easier. See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CX for more info, and contact me personally
if you're interested in more details.


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2016-02-01 17:18 GMT+02:00 Don Osborn :


FYI, a recent blog post looking at African language editions of Wikipedia
that may be of interest:

"Wikipedia at 15 and African languages" (31 Jan 2016)
http://niamey.blogspot.com/2016/01/wikipedia-at-15-african-languages.html

Am interested in feedback on accuracy, as well as observations or comments
from people active in any of the African language Wikipedias or other
Wikimedia projects about their experience and hopes.

Thanks in advance,

Don Osborn

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia at 15 & its African language editions

[Amir E. Aharoni]

It's quite true, sadly.

One thing that that blog post doesn't mention is that the periods of growth
in Yoruba and Malagasy happened mostly thanks to bots :(

There is some hard-to-notice, but real and organic growth in the number of
articles in Xhosa in the last year. I know it because I traveled to South
Africa and I had the privilege of meeting Nozibele Nomdebevana, the woman
responsible for it; see
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/07/new-wikipedia-translators/ . And it's
hard to notice, because almost all of it was done by that one woman, and as
great as her work is, it's too small to be noticed in the statistics
graphs, although I do hope that she will find other people and teach them
the Wikipedia writing craft.

I also noticed some growth in Somali in the last couple of months, also as
a work of one person; more on that further down.

For the most part, it's an unfortunate mix of several factors:
* very low usage of African languages in education: English, French and
Arabic are far more prominent in education on all levels, so most people
don't even imagine that their language can be used for a reference work or
that something useful can be found on Google in their language. Afrikaans
is an exception, but not a surprising one given that the government of
South Africa promoted its use in education for many decades.
* low penetration of Internet connectivity
* of the people who are connected to the Internet, many are connected
through phones, and Wikipedia editing doesn't work on mobile phones as well
as on desktops (though it's important to note that it works far better now
than it did three years ago)
* poverty and lack of free time to dedicate to volunteering

As a shameless plug, I'll suggest the project I'm working on—Content
Translation—as one solution that could help. In many cases, creating
articles by translation should be relatively easier than writing them from
scratch. Over 30% of the articles created in the Somali Wikipedia in the
last couple of months were made using Content Translation, which makes many
of the article creation and formatting steps much easier. See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CX for more info, and contact me personally
if you're interested in more details.


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2016-02-01 17:18 GMT+02:00 Don Osborn :

> FYI, a recent blog post looking at African language editions of Wikipedia
> that may be of interest:
>
> "Wikipedia at 15 and African languages" (31 Jan 2016)
> http://niamey.blogspot.com/2016/01/wikipedia-at-15-african-languages.html
>
> Am interested in feedback on accuracy, as well as observations or comments
> from people active in any of the African language Wikipedias or other
> Wikimedia projects about their experience and hopes.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Don Osborn
>
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia at 15 & its African language editions

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On 2016-02-01 16:18, Don Osborn wrote:


Am interested in feedback on accuracy, as well as observations or
comments from people active in any of the African language Wikipedias
or other Wikimedia projects about their experience and hopes.

Thanks in advance,

Don Osborn



I was following Hausa Wikipedia a couple of years back for two months. 
(I do not remember why, I do not speak Hausa; probably detected 
vandalism and stuck around to see how regular it is). It was essentially 
dead, not a single native speaker regularly edited. Now checked it back 
- I see a number of edits apparently by a native speaker who has an 
account but not a regular editor (less than 20 edits in total). I am 
afraid it is still dead, which is a pity, since this is one of the 
biggest languages in Africa in terms of the number of speakers.


Let me add an (unsolicited) comment about the general coverage of Africa 
on the English Wikipedia. We just had 15 days contest on African women, 
organized by Florence (that was fun), and I decided to write three 
papers on a Central African first female minister of defense, a Nigerien 
academic and former development minister, and a Malagasy former justice 
minister and the first ever female president of parliament. (To improve 
the links, I also started the article of the National Museum of Niger). 
I knew that in principle, but I was really astonished to learn that even 
the basic subjects are not covered at all or are covered extremely 
superficially. As an anecdote, the national museum of Niger was a 
redirect to the national museum of Nigeria. As a more troubling story, 
we do not have articles on a couple of prime ministers of Madagascar 
(and it has been independent for not that long, since 1960), and we have 
for most of the African countries absolutely zero connections in 
politics - it is very difficult to figure out who followed whom and who 
were the ministers (the Central African government is still listed from 
2005 or smth). Most of the subjects of human and physical geography have 
two-line stubs. We obviuosly have a long way to go.


Cheers
Yaroslav

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