Call to Africans: Take possession of Wikipedia

Tobias Eigen's picture
Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 13 May, 2008 - 14:42.
Tags:

I received the following appeal to Kabissa members to take ownership of the "African Wikipedia" from Gerard Meijssen, via the AfrophoneWikis discussion list. In it, Gerard provides a useful background explanation of the Wikipedia project, the free and open source software it runs on and how it is (and could be) utilized in Africa. In particular, note there is a bounty available for localisation of the Wikimedia software platform into African languages. There are many opportunities for Africans to take ownership of Wikipedia by building up content in their own languages as well as knowledge from their local communities that they know best.

Wikipedia is a community owned project. With over 700 projects in more than 250 languages. With hundreds of thousands editors participating every month it qualifies as one of the biggest community driven projects on the Internet and given the appreciation it gets from the people reading Wikipedia, we are considered to be one of the biggest websites in the world according to Alexa.

Participation is free, reading is free and we provide dumps that provide you with all our content to be used under a free license. MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia is free and we are working hard to provide localisations in as many languages as we have volunteers so that you can use the software as you see fit. MediaWiki has been chosen for "NGO in a box" by Tactical Tech and we have started to support the users of MediaWiki by providing language packs that include the localisations after the last release of a stable release.

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is the organisation that makes all of this possible. It is based in San Francisco and as you can imagine, with over 250 languages it is not able to support individual languages. What it can do is support the communities working on their Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews... The aim of the WMF is to freely share in the sum of all knowledge. This results in organisations like the One Laptop Per Child project including Wikipedia content for its school servers. The point is that Wikipedia content matters.

One of the wishes long held by many people in the WMF is the advent of African languages. On many conferences it has been stated again and again that we wish for the African languages to do well. There are currently projects in languages like Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Igbo, Yoruba ... none of them have more then 10.000 articles. Many of them are doing so poorly that a request is made to close the project for a lack of interest. Many of the African projects are managed by people who are not even of African descent and consequently the quality is expected to be dubious.

Let me explain what is needed to support your language. When your language already has its Wikipedia, all you need to do is start writing and improving articles. If you have questions, ask them in the Community portal. If you are the only person writing in your language, you can ask your questions in English but remember, this project is for your language so you are part of the community that should own the project. When the user interface needs more work on its localisation, the best place to do this is the Betawiki site.

When there is no Wikipedia yet for your language, you start by building a project in the Incubator. This is where you can start building content for your project in an environment where friendly admins help you to learn what is needed and fight spammers and other nasty types away. When you have build a number of artcles that demonstrate your language and the fact that there is a small community for your language, when you have localised the 500 most relevant MediaWiki messages at Betawiki, the language committee of the WMF will ask the board of the WMF on your behalf for permission to start the new project.

When you are of the opinion that English or any other non African language is the language that you want to write in, then be assured that topics relevant to Africa are underdeveloped. We welcome more and better information about Africa, we welcome pictures in our Commons project that are not only lions, zebras or are generally touristy in nature.

Finally we have been running a bounty program; we are happy to pay up to EUR 225,- for the localisation of MediaWiki. This "bounty" is to stimulate the localisation by helping overcome the initial work to get MediaWiki localised. We expect that a vibrant community will be able to maintain the MediaWiki localisation because it is the community that ensures the quality and vitality of their Wikipedia.

Thanks,
GerardM

Your rating: None Average: 5 (2 votes)