Dear members of Wikimedia ZA, Living outside South Africa, I was unable to attend either of the recent Capacity-Building workshops (meet-ups) with Asaf Bartov. Now it's June and Wikimedia 2018 is fast approaching - so I'm writing to you all via the mailing list in hopes of forging a bond of inclusion with Wikimedia ZA, at least to apprise you of my activities.
For over ten months I've contributed daily to the Zulu Wikipedia, also for the past two months in the Xhosa WP. Neither WP has an administrator, and their few veteran or new editors are active only occasionally. My own language resources are sparse and I haven't succeeded in developing contacts who can evaluate my provisional translations. (I work prudently with Google Translate and avoid creating wrongly named pages and especially categories.) Nonetheless I've made constant progress based on the Special pages: resolving red links, categorizing, linking with Wikidata, adding bio data, identifying duplicate pages, clearing inappropriate content, etc. I do create stub-quality pages, mainly biographical based on WIkidata and the EN WP. Even if other Wikipedians aren't available for consultation, the process of building these small WPs would benefit from South Africans' input. I'd like to participate in discussions of developing Afrocentric content and avoiding cultural bias - e.g., the current eurocentric "Vital articles" and "Vital 100" have already generated dozens of stubs and hundreds of red links, while many valid topics in the subcategories of :en:Category:South Africa are largely absent. Ideally these discussions will take place within WP on Talk pages, and not in listserved or private emails or on Facebook (useful as those channels are). And board members: I encourage the Wikimedia ZA page on meta be kept up, particularly as an archive documenting chapter events, and please have someone regularly review activity on the Talk page there. (Two of my posts await reply...) I'll send this now, with thanks for your having read thus far :- ) I welcome your responses and am looking forward to our future collaborations and efforts to improve the Wikipedia projects. Sincerely, Deborah (User:Deborahjay) [email protected] _______________________________________________ WikimediaZA mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaza To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected]
