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
_______________________________________________
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>
