October 2014 African language Wikipedia and Wiktionary update

It’s only been a few months since my last update on the state of the Wikimedia projects in Africa, but seeing as the Wiki Indaba was held since then, and this weekend is Wikimedia South Africa’s AGM, it’s a good excuse to take another look.

First, the Wiktionaries. Wiktionary is a much less well-known set of projects compared to Wikipedia, and aims to have a dictionary definition for each word in every language.

African Language Wiktionaries

Language	3/8/2009	30/5/2010	15/5/2011	17/6/2014	29/10/2014
Malagasy	142	4,253	–	3,191,393	3,599,084
Afrikaans	14,128	14,669	14,731	15,792	15,794
Swahili	12,956	13,000	13,027	13,885	13,903
Wolof	2,675	2,689	2,693	2,310	2,310
Sotho	1,387	1,389	1,398	1,343	1,343
Zulu	127	131	510	586	587
Rwandi	306	306	306	366	367
Oromo	186	218	264	269	322
Swati	31	371	377	290	290
Amharic	311	319	377	204	206
Tsonga	358	359	363	92	92

In short, besides the Malagasy bot activity that’s creating up a storm, and some flickers in Oromo, spoken mostly in Ethiopia and parts of Kenya and Somalia, not much activity at all. Even, the Afrikaans Wiktionary, which has shown steady, organic, growth in the past, had little activity.

What about the Wikipedias?

African Language Wikipedias

10,3792,757

Language	11/2/2011	13/4/2012	9/5/2013	17/6/2014	29/10/2014
Malagasy	3,806	36,767	45,361	47,144	47,061
Afrikaans	17,002	22,115	26,752	31,756	33,392
Yoruba	12,174	29,894	30,585	30,910	30,989
Swahili	21,244	23,481	25,265	26,349	27,021
Amharic	6,738	11,572	12,360	15,968	16,229
Egyptian Arabic		8,433	12,440	12,934
Somali	1,639	2,354	3,646	3,680
Shona			1,421	2,077	2,091
Lingala	1,394	1,816	2,025	2,077	2,087
Kabyle			1,503	1,876	1,967
Kinyarwanda		1,501	1,817	1,832	1,834
Hausa	–	–	–	–	1,386
Wolof	1,116	1,814	1,161	1,201	1,148
Igbo	–	–	–	–	1,017

Two new languages have joined the 1000 club. Hausa, spoken natively in Niger, Nigeria and Chad, but also as a trade language across numerous others, and Igbo, spoken mostly in Nigeria.

While most of the languages are showing some sort of activity, the article count in a couple of languages has dropped. This just means there’s been a cleanup of some articles that perhaps were never worthy of the name. Although there’s been little activity on either, Shona has passed Lingala, while Kabyle is catching up to both.

Afrikaans continues to be the fastest-growing African-language Wikipedia, with a healthy, active community.

Onto the South African languages specifically:

South African Language Wikipedias

Language	19/11/2011	13/4/2012	9/5/2013	17/6/2014	29/10/2014
Afrikaans	20,042	22,115	26,754	31,756	33,392
Northern Sotho	557	566	685	691	966
Zulu	256	483	579	630	686
Tswana	240	490	495	510	513
Swati	359	361	364	400	408
Xhosa	125	136	148	333	380
Tsonga	192	193	240	303	309
Venda	193	190	204	209	208
Sotho	132	145	188	197	202

The pace on most of the South African languages has picked up slightly, with signs of life. Besides Afrikaans, mentioned above, Northern Sotho showed a burst of activity, mainly new date stub pages, but there are fairly regular edits.

Zulu has shown signs of stirring, mostly due to its healthy coverage of porn stars, and probably boasts the highest ratio of porn star to other articles of any Wikipedia language edition. The porn star articles also happen to be some of the most well-endowed compared to the usual stub pages found throughout the Zulu and most African-language editions.

I’m very happy to see that Xhosa continues to show good relative growth, and that it’s newfound life in June wasn’t just a reaction to Wikimedia ZA announcing in April that its attempts to activate it had been put on hold due to lack of success, but seems to be sustaining itself.

Otherwise, not too much to note, although Sotho is closing in on Venda as it tries to haul itself off the bottom spot.

As always, I should mention that article count is an imperfect metric. It’s possible to have higher article counts with not much activity (stubs or bot-creations), but the reverse isn’t possible, and it’s a reasonable indicator of the signs of life.

Image from Wikimedia Commons