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 <d...@bisharat.net>: > 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, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ 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, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
