Niamey 1978 & Cape Town 2018: 3. Other angles on Wikipedias in extended/complex Latin

Last August, I began a set of three posts marking the 40th anniversary of the Niamey 1978 meting on harmonizing African language orthographies, and associating that with the Wikimedia 2018 conference in Cape Town - the first in sub-Saharan Africa. This post concludes the series.

The central element of this discussion is the extended Latin alphabet, which is used in the orthographies of many African languages to accurately convey meaningfully important sounds, and which often makes input with ordinary keyboards or keypads difficult.

Composite image from welcome page of Eve Wikipedia.

Looking again at Wikipedias in extended/complex Latin

So far, this article has raised some questions, made some admittedly superficial comparisons, and speculated as to factors related to success or not of Wikipedia editions in African languages. What might be ways of improving this analysis?

One way would be different approaches to sorting and categorizing the Wikipedias using the same numbers in the tables in the previous post. And one of those approaches could be to consider the relative degree of complexity of each orthography within a category. For example in category 3, Fulfulde uses 3, 4 or 5 extended Latin characters and Hausa 3 or 4 (depending on the country), and Luganda and Northern Sotho only one. Yoruba, when typed with the precomposed dot-under (aka "subdot") characters and combining diacritics for tones is less complicated than the same language using the classic style small vertical line under - because the latter requires a combining diacritic and that may mean "stacking" two diacritics on a character where a tone is involved.

A different way would be to look at the quality of content in the various Wikipedia editions. In some, the raw numbers of articles (which are the figures used in the tables mentioned above) are inflated by shell articles, by which I mean a stub that may have only a few words of text and perhaps an image. The list of Wikipedias does include a "depth" metric, which might be used (or perhaps adapted) to look for possible correlations between the quantity and quality of the content on the one hand, and the nature of the orthography on the other.

Yet another way would be to consider the numbers of people working on these editions. Wikipedia counts the numbers of users, active users, and administrators per edition. Could one use these figures to better understand whether the more successful Wikipedia editions in extended Latin (in terms of numbers of articles or a depth metric) are so because of the efforts of a relatively small number of users? That's not to imply any negative judgment of such cases, but it would be useful to know if if a complicated writing system (from the point of view of input) is not a hurdle for a large number of contributors (active users), or if it's really a case of a few savvy individuals carrying the load.¹

And another approach would be to expand the scope of analysis to consider other factors: How many people speak the language? Is it taught in schools? How much printed material is available? Are there different dialects or written conventions that a contributor to or a reader of a given African language edition of Wikipedia must navigate? Any of these and perhaps others might, individually or in combination, affect the potential production of web content in general, and the success of these Wikipedias in particular.

One could also put the numbers in the background and do a qualitative study focusing on the experience of the editors of African language editions of Wikipedia. What might emerge from such discussions concerning the range of tasks involved in building and maintaining an active Wikipedia?

And then there are some stray questions certainly worth checking out. For instance, does the base interface language on which all of the African Wikipedias are built (English vs French) have any bearing at all on the success of Wikipedia editions? What about the degree of localization of the interfaces (from English or French to the language of content? And does that degree of localization relate at all to the complexity of the script?

Research towards success with African language Wikipedias

Although the number of Wikipedias in African languages is relatively small (about 13% of all editions, and collectively contain less than 1% of the total number of articles in all Wikipedias combined²), there are arguably enough data and diverse user experiences to give us a better idea of both how to develop small Wikipedias in Africa, and how much of a factor the scripts used to write them might be in their relative success.

Looking beyond African languages to the experience of Wikipedia editions in other languages written in extended Latin (and non-Latin scripts) would be instructive. This would likely highlight not only methods to facilitate input of diverse writing systems, but also supportive environments (or "localization ecologies") for these languages in general. 

Success for African language editions of Wikipedia may not be found in imitating work on other editions so much as it would in identifying ways to leverage the strengths and unique resources of African language communities. Nevertheless, facilitating input is fundamental, relying at its most basic level on common technology (for keyboards, etc.) and features of the Mediawiki software.

With rapid advances in language technology, an additional focus should be how to adapt speech-to-text to African languages to facilitate creation of content from oral narratives, interviews, and exposition. This is a topic I hope to return to later.

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1. The Yoruba (category 4 orthography) and Northern Sotho (category 3) Wikipedias, for instance, each benefited at different times from large numbers of articles created by a single user in their respective communities.
2. That's 38 of 292 if the tiny Dinka edition is included; 37/291 if not. And about 293k articles out of 48.6 million total. (All as of July 2018.)

Niamey 1978 & Cape Town 2018: 2. Extended Latin & African language Wikipedias

Image adapted from banner on the Yoruba Wikipedia, August 2018

What are the implications of extended Latin characters and combinations for production of digital materials in African languages written with them? The previous post discussed some of the process of seeking to harmonize transcriptions, in which the Niamey 1978 conference and its African Reference Alphabet (ARA) were prominent. That process had a logic and left a legacy for the representation in writing of many African languages. This post asks if there is a trade-off between the complexity of the Latin-based writing system and how much is produced in it using contemporary digital technologies.

One easy, although by no means conclusive, way to consider this question is to look at Wikipedia editions in African languages (those that are written in Latin script). The following table disaggregates 35 African language editions by the number of articles (from the list of Wikipedias, as of 9 August 2018) and the four "categories" of Latin-based orthography¹ introduced in African Languages in a Digital Age (ch. 7, p. 58):

Number of articles	Category 1 Basic Latin / ASCII	Category 2 "Category 1" + Latin 1  ≈ ISO 8859-1	Category 3 "Cat. 1" or "2" + any of Latin Extended A, B, etc, Add'l, & IPA	Category 4 "Category 3" + Combining diacritics
< 500	Swati (447) (Chewa)	Sango (255)	Fula (226) Venda (265) Chewa2 (389)	Dinka (75) Ewe (345)
500-1000	Sotho (543) Tumbuka2 (562) Tsonga (563) Kirundi (611) Tswana (641) Xhosa (741) Oromo (772)	-	Akan (561) Twi (609) Bambara3 (646)	(Bambara)
1000-2000	Zulu (1011) Kinyarwanda (1823)	Kongo (1179)	Luganda4 (1162) Wolof (1167) Gikuyu (1357) Kabiye (1455) Hausa (1891)	Igbo5 (1340)
2000-5,000	Shona (3761)	-	Kabyle (2860)	Lingala (3028)
5000-10,000	Somali (5307)	-	Northern Sotho (8067)	-
10,000-25,000	-	-	-	-
25,000-50,000	Swahili (44,375)	-	-	Yoruba5 (31,700)
> 50,000	Malagasy (85,033)	Afrikaans (52,847)	-	-
# of articles / # of editions = Average	146,190 / 14 = 10,442	54,281 / 3 = 18,094	20,655 /13 = 1,589	36,488 / 5 = 7,298
Grouping 1&2, 3&4	168,471 total articles / 17 editions =  11,789		57,143 total articles / 18 editions =  3,175

Looking at the top row with the smallest editions (less than 500 articles), one is tempted to highlight the high presence of African languages whose orthographies include extended Latin - categories 3 & 4. However, in the group of next highest number of articles (500-1000) there are more editions with category 1 orthographies (the simplest) than there are editions with category 3 in the group above that (1000-2000). And the next highest ranges (covering 2000-10,000) are roughly even between category 1 on the one hand, and 3 & 4 on the other. But then the three largest editions (and 3/4 above 25,000) are category 1 & 2.

So with just a visual analysis, there does not seem to be any clear pattern from arraying the editions in this way. Of course there will be other factors than the complexity of the script affecting the success of a Wikipedia edition written in it. But are there ways of looking at this raw data that can give us a clearer idea what might be the effect is of extended Latin - the ARA plus orthographies with other modified letters and diacritic combinations - on the size of Wikipedia editions?

One approach is to consider all the above editions combined, per category of orthography (totaling by column). This puts the focus on the degree of complexity of the writing system, perhaps muting the effect of other language- & location-specific factors. On the second to last row are column totals of the number of articles in all editions listed above, divided by the number of editions, to give an average figure.This yields an uneven pattern (2>1>4>3), since in the cases of 2 & 4, one large edition in a small total number of editions skews the category average up.

By the totals of the two simpler categories (1 & 2) and of the two extended Latin categories (3 & 4), however, one obtains possibly more useful numbers. This aggregation can be rationalized for our purposes here by the fact that the lower two categories are generally supported by commercially available keyboards and input systems,⁶ while the higher two categories, require a specialized way to input of additional characters and maybe diacritics (such as an alternative keyboard driver, or an online character picker).⁷

The figures thus obtained show editions written in extended and complex Latin having on average about a third the number or articles as those written in ASCII and Latin-1. Admittedly, this result is in part the result of the way categories have been chosen and figures aligned, but I'm proposing them as a perspective on the use of extended (and complex) Latin, and possible gaps in support. Before considering this in more detail, it is useful to compare with the numbers for non-Latin scripts.

What about non-Latin scripts & African language Wikipedias?

Number of articles	Non-Latin
< 500	Tigrinya (168)
10,000-25,000	Amharic (14,321) Egyptian Arabic (19,170)
# of articles / # of editions = Average	33,659 / 3 = 11,220

There are only three editions of Wikipedia in African languages written in non-Latin scripts.⁸ Two of those - Amharic and Tigrinya - are written with the Ge'ez or Ethiopic script unique to the Horn of Africa.

Arabic is the third. How to count this language for the purposes of this informal analysis raises a question. Arabic, of course, is established as a first language in North Africa for centuries, but it is also a world language, spoken natively in the southwest Asia (having originated in Arabia), and learned as a second language in many regions. Drawing users from this wide community, the Arabic Wikipedia is among the top 20 overall, with twice as many articles as all of the editions discussed above combined. It is more than an African language edition. For this analysis, therefore, I have chosen instead to count just the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia.

Taking these three editions, we then get an average number of articles (11,220), which is close to what is seen for the Latin categories 1 & 2 (11,789). The usual caveats apply for such a small sample, but taking the numbers as they are, it is interesting that Wikipedias in the complex Arabic alphabet and the large Ge'ez abugida (alphasyllabary) are on average much larger than those of the ostensibly simpler extended Latin (3,175).⁹

Again, script complexity is but one factor, and in this case probably not the most important, since the two non-Latin scripts in question have long histories of use in text in parts of Africa - much longer than any form of Latin script. Nevertheless, from the narrow perspective of what is required for users to edit Wikipedia, the technical issues are in some ways comparable if even more demanding.

Arabic has had standard keyboards since the days of typewriters. The issues there are not so much the input, but whether systems can handle the directionality and composition requirements of the script.

The Ge'ez script on the other hand, does not involve complex composition rules or bidirectionality. However, it has a total of over 300 characters (including numerals and punctuation; more again if extended ranges are added). The good news is that there are numerous input systems to facilitate their input. Literacy in the script and availability of input systems would not be limiting factors for content development in major languages using this script. The difference in development of the Amharic and Tigrinya editions of Wikipedia may relate to both the larger population speaking Amharic (as a first or second language), and its use officially in a relatively large country (Ethiopia). Development of content in Tigrinya - a cross-border language - might also be hindered by issues particular to one of the two countries where it has many speakers (Eritrea).

From the above one might suggest that complexity of the written form (to be taken here as including the nature of the script itself, and the size of the character set) may be a limiting factor on content development, but that other factors, such as a literate tradition, official use, and technical support for digital production may overcome such limitations. In the case of African languages written in Latin script, however, any literate tradition is recent, and they are often marginalized in official and educational contexts. For those written with extended Latin, there is the additional factor of lack of an easy and standardized way of inputting special characters. Paradoxically, it seems, a modification of the most widely used alphabet on the planet may actually hobble efforts to edit in these languages.

Facilitating input in extended Latin for African language Wikipedias?

Wikipedia editing screen with "Special Characters"
drop-down modified to show all available ranges.

Assuming that the inconvenience of finding ways to input extended Latin characters may be a factor in the success of African language Wikipedias written with categories 3 and 4 orthographies, a quick fix might be to add new ranges for the modified letters used in African languages to the "special characters" picker in the edit screens. As it currently structured, the extended characters necessary for a category 3 or 4 orthography might be sprinkled around in up to 3 different ranges (see at right). And within each range, they are not presented in a clear order, so sometimes hard to find.

Since it may be too complicated to have a special range for each language edition, another possibility would be to draw inspiration from the Niamey 1978 meeting's ARA, and combine all extended Latin characters and combinations needed for all current African language Wikipedias into a common new range.

Of course as mentioned above, there are other factors that can contribute to the success or not of Wikipedia editions in African languages written with extended Latin, but this innovation would at least make editing more convenient for contributors to these  editions. And perhaps it might have a positive effect on the quantity and quality of articles in these Wikipedias.

In the third, and concluding article in this series, I'll step back to look at this analysis and consider some other ways to look at the data on African language editions of Wikipedia, and in particular, those written in extended Latin.

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1. This categorization was intended to help characterize the technical requirements for display and input of various languages. Although the technology has improved to the point that more complex scripts are generally displayed without the kinds of issues one encountered a even a decade ago, input still requires extra steps or workarounds. The four categories are additive in that each higher category builds on those below, with added potential issues. It is also a "one jot" system in that for example, a single extended Latin character, say š in Northeren Sotho or ŋ in Wolof, makes their orthographies category 3 rather than category 1 or 2 (respectively), and the use of the combining tilde over the extended Latin character for open-o - ɔ̃ - makes Ewe a category 4 rather than 3. In terms of input, the higher the category, the more the potential issues with display and input (although technical advances tend to level the field, esp. as concerns display).
2. The only non-basic Latin character used in Chewa is the w with circumflex: ŵ. Apparently it represents a sound important in only one dialect of the language, and is used infrequently in contemporary publications. On the other hand, there is a proposed (not adopted) orthography for Tumbuka that includes the ŵ. Without this character, either language would be a category 1 orthography; with it, category 3.
3. Bambara is a tonal language. Most often, it seems, tones are not marked in text, however they can be for clarity, and some dictionaries make a point of indicating tone in the entries (not just pronunciation). If tones are unmarked, Bambara would be considered is a category 3 orthography; with tones, category 4. 
4. The addition of the letter ŋ puts Luganda in category 3 rather than 1.
5. The dot-under (or small vertical line under) characters used notably in Yoruba and Igbo are particular to southern Nigeria, and not included in the ARA. Yoruba in Benin is written with characters from the ARA.These are tonal languages, and tone is usually marked.
6. When I first proposed the category (itself a modification of an earlier effort), there were some questions why have a category 2 separate from category 1. That distinction had its origins in the early days of computing where systems used 7-bit fonts, meaning that accented letters (diacritic characters) used in, say, French or Portuguese, could not be displayed. Even as systems using 8-bit fonts enabled use of diacritics commonly used in European languages, display issues would still crop up (as a sequence of characters where an accented letter should be). Nowadays, such display issues are rare, and limited (as far as I can tell) to documents in legacy encodings. On the other hand, input of accented characters used may require, depending on the keyboard one is using, switching keyboard drivers or using extra keystrokes - so one will occasionally see ASCIIfication of text in such languages (apparently as a user choice).
7. The difference between categories 3 (extended Latin) and 4 (complex Latin) once were significant enough from point of view of display that informal appeals to Unicode to change its policy of not encoding new "precomposed" characters were common.
8. The Wikipedia incubator projects.includes several African language projects, which are not covered here. These include some in non-Latin scripts (Arabic versions, N'Ko, and Tamazight) and some in Latin-based orthographies. I mentioned one of the latter - Krio - in a previous post, and hope to do an overview of this space in the near future.
9. Average for all African language editions is 7704. By comparison the average for all Wikipedias is 166k.

Niamey 1978 & Cape Town 2018: 1. Some thoughts about extended Latin & content in African languages

Image features the 31 modified letters & diacritic combinations in
the African Reference Alphabet, 1978. (Nor all are currently in use.)

The world 40 years ago, when the Meeting of Experts on Transcription and Harmonization of African Languages took place in Niamey, and that of the Wikimania 2018 conference in Cape Town (which ended last month) seem very distant from each other. But from the angle of the written form of African languages at least, the concerns of the two events are not so distant.

One of these concerns is the extended Latin alphabets that were on the agenda in Niamey, and which are used in about half of the African language editions of Wikipedia. This post and the next consider these two vantage points, asking whether extended Latin is associated with less content creation, and what might be done to facilitate its use of the longer Latin alphabet.

Adapting the Latin script to African realities

In 1978, representatives of countries that had gained independence no more than a couple of decades earlier, or in some cases only a few years before, met in Niamey to advance work on writing systems for the first languages of the continent. One of the linguistic legacies of the colonial period was the Latin alphabet (even in lands where other systems had been used). But given the phonological requirements sometimes very different than what Latin letters represented in Europe, linguists added various modified letters, diacritics, and digraphs to write African languages (sometimes even a special system for a single publication¹.

So, that legacy also often took the form of multiple alphabets and  orthographies for a single language, reflecting the different origins of European linguists (frequently Christian missionaries from different denominations), locations in which they worked (perhaps places where speakers of a language had particular dialects or accents), and individual skills and choices. After independence, many African countries undertook to simplify this situation, but they still often ended up with alphabets and spelling conventions different from those in neighboring countries.

The linguists and language specialists in Niamey, as in other such conferences of that era (many of which, like the one in Bamako in 1966, were supported by UNESCO), were concerned with further simplifying these discrepancies, with accurate and consistent transcription of languages that were for the most part spoken in two or more countries (whose speaker communities were divided by borders). That included adopting certain modified letters and diacritic combinations for sounds that were meaningfully significant in African languages (some of which correspond with characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet).

Language standardization, which is actually a complex set of decisions, was a real concern where there were on the one hand diverse peoples grouped in each state and on the other hand limited resources for producing materials and training teachers. At its most basic level, though, standardization of any sort required an agreed upon set of symbols and conventions for transcription.²

A reference alphabet for shared orthographies

The African Reference Alphabet (ARA)³ produced by the Niamey meeting was an effort in that direction. It built on the longer post-independence process to facilitate use and development of written forms of African languages - a process that had its roots in the early introduction of the Latin script (before the formal establishment of colonial rule) and efforts during the colonial period such as the influential (at least in the British colonies) 1928 Africa Alphabet. The ARA was intended - and to some degree at least still serves - as sort of a palette from which orthographies for specific linguistic, multilingual national, and cross-border language needs could be addressed.⁴

And that set of concerns - alphabets, orthographies and spelling conventions - turned out to be the starting point for later efforts in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) to localize software and interfaces, including Wikipedia and other Wikimedia interfaces, and to develop African language content online, including for Wikimedia projects. Even if it does not seem as visible as other challenges.

What I haven't seen is an evaluation of the efforts at Niamey and the other expert meetings on harmonization of transcriptions, although the most used of the characters in the ARA can be seen in various publications, and all but perhaps one are in the Unicode standard.

In any event. the situations of the various African languages are diverse, with some having well established corpora while others are "less-resourced," and in the worst case, inconsistently written.

Extended Latin and composing on digital devices

One important element in discussions in the process of which Niamey was part, was the role of modified letters - what are now called extended Latin characters - in transcribing many African languages. The ARA includes no less than 30 of them (22 modified letters and 8 basic Latin with diacritics⁵). These added characters and combinations are not intended to all be used in any one language, but represent standard options for orthographies. The incorporation of some of these into a writing of a single language makes the writing clearer, and has no drawbacks for teaching, learning, reading, or handwriting (although there are arguments against the use of diacritics). Since the establishment of Unicode for character encoding, the screen display of these characters is not a problem (so long as fonts have been created including glyphs for the characters).

However even the presence of even just one or two extended Latin characters leads to problems with standard keyboards and keypads - where are you going to place an additional character, and how is the user to know how to find it? This is a set of issues that was of course recognized back in the era of typewriters. One of the spinoffs from the Niamey conference was the 1982 proposal by Michael Mann and David Dalby (who attended the meeting) for an all lower-case "international niamey keyboard," which put all the modified characters (of an expanded version of the ARA) in the spots normally occupied by upper-case letters.

While that proposal never went far (I hope to return to the subject later) - due in large part to its abandonment of capital letters - it was but one extreme approach to a conundrum that is still with us. That is, how to facilitate input of Latin characters and combinations that are not part of the limited character sets that physical keyboards and keyboards are primarily designed for. It's not that there aren't ways of facilitating input - virtual keyboard layouts (keyboard drivers that can be designed like and shared, like Keyman, and onscreen keyboards) have been with us for years, and there are other input systems (voice recognition / speech-to-text being one). The problem is lack of standard arrangements and systems for many languages. Or perhaps in the matter of input systems, the old wag, "the nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from," applies.

The result, arguably, may be a drag on widespread use of extended Latin characters, and as a consequence of popular use on digital devices of languages whose orthographies include them. Or a choice to ASCIIfy text (using only basic Latin), as has been the case with Hausa on international radio websites. Or even confusion based on continued use of outdated 8-bit font + keyboard driver systems, as witnessed in at least one case with Bambara (see discussion and example).

What can the level of contributions to African language editions of Wikipedia tell us about the effect of extended Latin? This will be explored in the next post: Extended Latin & African language Wikipedias.

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1. For example some works on forest flora which had lists of common names in major languages of the region.
2. Arguably in the case of a language written in two or three different scripts, one could have a system in each script and an accepted way to transliterate between or among them.
3. The only other prominent use I found of the term "reference alphabet" was that of the ITU for their version of ISO 646 (basically the same as ASCII): "International Reference Alphabet." The concept of reference alphabet seems to be a useful one in contexts where many languages are spoken and writing systems for them aren't yet established.
4. This approach - adopting a standard or reference alphabet for numerous languages - was taken by various African countries, for example Cameroon and Nigeria. These efforts were without doubt influenced by the process of which Niamey and the ARA were part.
5. By comparison, the Africa Alphabet had 11 modified letters and did not use diacritics. All 11 of the characters added in the Africa Alphabet were incorporated in the ARA. It is worth noting that in the range of modified letters / special characters created over the years, some are incorporated into many orthographies, others fewer, and some are rarely used if at all.

Wikimania 2018: Sessions on, or of interest to, Wikimedia projects in African languages

The 14th annual Wikimedia conference - Wikimania 2018 - starts today, 18 July, in Cape Town, South Africa, and runs through 22 July. It is the second Wikimania to be held on the African continent - the first being at Alexandria, Egypt in 2008 - and the first in Africa south of the Sahara.

Here is a quick look from afar at what Wikimania 2018 sessions in the conference program might treat questions related to African language editions of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. - what we have previously referred to as "Afrophone Wikis."

Preconference

According to the program, the first two days - 18-19 July - are devoted to the Preconference, consisting of "various miniconferences and meetings." Among these, I'd make special note of the 2-day Decolonising the Internet Conference - "…the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online!" Run by the NGO Whose Knowledge? (logo at right) as an invitation-only event, it has a theme that I'd consider of interest to increase African language presence on the internet.

Main conference

The main Wikimania conference follows, on 20-22 July. On the morning of the first day, Friday 20 July, there is a track devoted to Africa with three sessions, all of interest (titles link to project pages, which in some instances already have further links to slide presentations):

• Babel's Tower: South Africa's Wikipedias: An overview and discussion of Wikipedia editions in South Africa's languages (focusing on the 11 official languages), and ways to address the poor development in most of those, including "possible interventions via both educational strategies and technological options." The presentation is by Michael Graaf, who wrote his dissertation at the University of Cape Town on South Africa's Wikipedias.
• Africa's Wikipedias: "A panel to discuss the interesting challenges and possibilities of the Wikipedia language editions of Africa. Includes review of new tech to amplify efforts of editors." Panel includes several editors of African language Wikipedias (Afrikaans, Arabic, Swazi, Tsonga, and Xhosa).
• The quotation of oral sources in a decolonization context: Discussion of how to incorporate oral citations in a resource that generally requires citation of written (ideally published) sources. Reference to an oral citations project in Namibia. Presentation by Bobby Shabangu and Stefanie Kastner.

That same morning, there is another session of particular interest from the perspective of working on African language projects (unfortunately conflicting with the Africa track):

• What tools do we need for small Wikis to increase content and quality?: "This presentation will offer tools especially conceived for medium and small Wikis. From Wikidata-based infoboxes to template translators, those tools will be described taking Arabic Wikipedia as an example." Presentation by User:Helmoony.

 In the afternoon of the same day, another Africa-specific session that might have some content relevant to languages:

• Coolest African Projects - Be inspired: Spotlights relatively unknown projects and activities by African Wikimedia affiliates. Presentation by Emna Mizouni, Felix Nartey, and User:Thuvack.

On the second day of the main conference, Saturday 21 July, the morning session has several sessions of special interest, including three in the Languages track:

• Wikipedia for Indigenous Communities: Compares Western and OvaHerero (Namibia) approaches to knowledge, and discusses a project approaching Wiki editing in a way more acceptable to their community. Presented by Peter Gallert.
• How majorities can support minority languages: Although description does not indicate Africa content, it deals with how people in positions of relative power (in this case speakers of dominant languages) can help those in positions of less power (speakers of "minority" languages) with their Wikipedia projects. Presentation by Jon Harald Søby, Astrid Carlsen, Jean-Philippe Béland, and User:Barrioflores.
• Including minority languages in Wikimedia projects, a strategic approach: Again, no specific Africa content indicated, but a possibly relevant discussion of how to include minority languages in Wikimedia projects. Presentation by Ahmed Houamel-Bachounda.

Also in the morning, sessions dealing with Africa in the Education track (thus conflicting with the above), but without indication whether African language projects will be discussed, or just major Europhone language projects like English & French:

• How do teachers in Chad use Wikipedia to fill the knowledge gap?: Session "aims to explain how some Chadian teachers who were trained to use Wikipedia convinced their students not only to stop plagiarizing Wikipedia but also to contribute to Wikipedia and thus start the principle of sharing knowledge." Presentation by Abdallah Azibert.
• Activating the next generation : Wikipedia in Schools: Discussion of use of Wikipedia in schools, including by WikiAfrica Schools and WikiChallenge Africa Schools. Presentation by Isla Haddow-Flood and User:Anthere.

Source: Commons.WikiMedia.org

On the morning of the last day, Sunday 22 July, four sessions in the Communication track look interesting from the point of view of African language projects (even though none of these are specifically mentioned in the session descriptions except for the last one):

• Working towards Growing Local Language Content on Wikipedia (GLOW): Discusses a 2017 collaboration among Wikimedia Foundation, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Wikimedia India chapter (WMIN), user groups and external partners on a "pilot project in India to encourage local Wikipedia communities to create locally relevant articles in Indian languages." The results will inform development of the GLOW program, which is explained. Presentation by Jack Rabah and Rupika Sharma.
• Record every language of the world village by village, with Lingua Libre: Discusses project to facilitate "the recording process of words in any language (even minor languages or dialects), uploading them to Wikimedia Commons and reusing them on other projects such as Wiktionary, Wikipedia or Wikidata." Presentation by User:0x010C.
• Every Language in the World: Introducing Wikitongues: Focuses "on the activities coordinated by Wikitongues, a not-for-profit organization promoting the use and preservation of every language in the world" through collection of oral histories. Presentation by Daniel Bogre Udell.
• Diglossia and Multilingualism: A help or a Hindrance to Arabic Wikipedians?: Explores "the ways students who are native speakers of Arabic [which has a standard & many vernacular forms] in a multilingual educational system overcome the obstacle of sharing knowledge by using a common idiom while allowing millions of readers engage with the content they create. This session will also suggest solutions for communities with similar language challenges inspired by the educational model used in Arabic-speaking schools that participate in the 'Student Write Wikipedia' program." Presented by Bekriah S. Mawasi.

The above should not be interpreted as meaning that other sessions would not be of interest. This is a subjective selection based on my reading of the descriptions. On the whole it is nice to note the optimism in several cases, with regard to African language projects, and also the efforts to accommodate and integrate oral content and sources.

By coincidence, the timing of Wikimania 2018 corresponds with the 40th anniversary of the Niamey expert meeting on transcription and harmonization of African languages, so I'll draw some connections between the two seemingly very different events in the next post.

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Note: The first two images above are from the webpages for the event (Wikimania 2018) or organization (Whose Knowldge?) concerned. Attribution of the third image can be found on the linked Wikimedia Commons page.

Wikipedia at 15 & African languages

Image source: Wikimedia Commons
via GeoEd Trek blog

Wikipedia celebrated its 15th anniversary earlier this month, so it would seem to be an opportune time to look at how its African language versions are doing. They number 37 by my count (including Arabic), though it should be noted at the outset that most of these are only about 11-12 years old. The short of the story is that while a few African language editions are doing quite well, many are stagnant.

Background & history

Wikipedia has always been a multilingual enterprise, building on Jimmy Wales' vision of delivering "a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."¹ There are currently 291 different language editions (280 active) of which the English edition was the first to be launched, on 15 January 2001. During the rest of that year, it added 13 more European languages (plus a second "simple" edition of English), and its first African language - Afrikaans (total 16 editions, though efforts on some other languages were also initiated²). In 2002 it added 12 more language editions, mostly European or Asian, and in 2003, 25 more, of which Arabic may count as the second African language edition.

On top of a total of 53 editions, 112 more were added in 2004, including 18 African languages: Afar, Hausa, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Malagasy, Oromo, Shona, Swati, Somali, Sotho (Sesotho), Swahili, Tsonga, Tswana, Twi, Venda, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu. The year 2005 saw the total increase from 165 to 201, including 12 more African languages: Amharic, Bambara, Chewa/Nyanja, Ewe, Fula, Gikuyu, Igbo, Kirundi, Sango, Tigrinya, Tumbuka, and Wolof.

In 2006, the story starts to get more complicated. The total number of Wikipedia editions increased to 257, a net increase of 46, including six more from Africa: Herero, Kanuri, Kongo, Kuanyama, Luganda, and Ndonga. The Afrikaans Wikipedia became the first African language edition to pass 5000 articles. However the pattern of stagnation of many other African language editions started to become apparent. On the other hand, beginning with a couple of presentations at Wikimania 2006³ and the subsequent founding of the AfrophoneWikis list, African language editions as a group started to get more attention (although this geographic division has no special standing within Wikimedia, and in fact the idea had some initial pushback).

In 2007 the Akan and Kabyle editions were started; in 2008, Egyptian Arabic. Northern Sotho came later. At about this time began more attention to localizing the interfaces of African language editions, as well as proposals to close African language Wikipedias (and other Wikimedia projects).

Growth of  African language Wikipedias

Growth of African language Wikipedias has generally been slow, though some editions have experienced bursts of growth, if you will. In 2009, Swahili passed Afrikaans to be the largest African language edition (apart Arabic), and was in turn passed by Yoruba in 2011. In recent years, the Malagasy Wikipedia edition has grown quickly, becoming the largest African language Wikipedia in 2012. (The Malagasy Wiktionary has also grown to one of the largest overall.) In some cases a single individual is the main driver in adding content. Similar patterns of growth are observed in some smaller Wikipedias.

The Neverness blog has a good series of articles going back several years that discuss aspects of growth of African language Wikipedias, with focus on South Africa.

A problem common to many African language editions of Wikipedia has been the quality of articles, with many being very short and in some cases inconsistent with orthographies.  These are the kind of issues not unexpected with less-resourced languages, but also point to a need for more attention by language experts.

Closing Wikipedias and ... the incubator

There have been 48 proposals to close various African language projects, about half of them for Wikipedias, and the other half for other Wikimedia projects (Wiktionary, Wikiquote, etc.). Most of the Wikipedia closure proposals did not pass; for some there were even second attempts. Overall one got the impression at one point that there was more focus on closing African language projects with little activity than on developing them (see brief discussion of the first proposal to close the Xhosa Wikipedia in 2008 on this blog).

The concept of "closing" in Wikimedia parlance needs explaining. Usually when you hear some kind of project or initiative being "closed," it means something final - it's over. With Wikipedias, however, its not that simple. Technically "closed" means no further open participation, with the edition moved to an intermediate level called "incubator" - which in turn requires more explanation.

The Wikimedia Incubator is intended to serve "as a platform where anyone can build up a community in a certain language edition of a Wikimedia project." Most projects there are new, but some, like Wikipedias for Afar, Herero, Kanuri, Kuanyama, and Ndonga, are "closed" projects.

There are different opinions about the benefits of keeping struggling projects open vs. closing them and sending them down to the incubator, and these emerge with each proposal to close a project. It should be noted that the criteria for closure has evolved to where inactivity is no longer considered sufficient justification by itself.

Two African language Wikipedias were started in the incubator: Egyptian Arabic and Northern Sotho. There are a number of other African language projects currently in the Incubator, of which I previously posted about Krio. Another one I'll call attention to is Kabiye of northern Togo - the first African language I actually studied. (For others, see the full list on the Incubator.)

Data on African language Wikipedias

A sortable table follows with information on 36 active African language editions of Wikipedia.⁴ Arabic, which is larger than the others by an order of magnitude or more is omitted from the table. "Depth" is an index intended to indicating how often articles are edited.⁵ (For comparison, the depth index for Arabic is 224, that for English is 913, and French is 206.)

Language	Articles	Total Pages	Edits	Admins	Total Users	Active Users	Depth
Malagasy	81,142	215,494	812,070	3	11,439	46	10
Afrikaans	38,446	93,859	1,470,439	12	75,385	160	33
Swahili	31,775	77,451	1,007,865	9	23,199	58	27
Yoruba	31,144	53,515	550,296	1	13,189	40	5
Egyptian Arabic	14,667	120,315	754,615	7	74,209	96	325
Amharic	13,023	42,417	343,881	3	20,348	36	41
Somali	3,777	15,381	163,889	2	13,310	66	101
Northern Sotho	2,782	4,148	22,253	1	2,322	6	1
Kabyle	2,530	7,911	64,331	0	5,609	20	37
Shona	2,458	6,796	47,677	0	5,892	15	22
Lingala	2,119	6,881	112,968	2	6,106	12	83
Kinyarwanda	1,784	4,961	77,554	0	5,598	12	50
Hausa	1,356	3,300	33,392	0	5,360	10	21
Kongo	1,116	2,579	42,204	1	5,146	9	28
Igbo	1,047	5,437	59,324	1	6,087	11	192
Wolof	1,042	5,263	101,068	2	8,178	11	315
Kikuyu	847	2,225	18,884	0	3,700	12	22
Zulu	725	3,947	38,618	0	8,153	23	193
Luganda	709	2,598	21,302	0	3,556	11	58
Oromo	682	3,676	24,705	0	4,180	14	130
Twi	559	1,698	17,733	0	5,957	12	43
Tswana	503	2,252	21,160	1	4,510	8	114
Kirundi	489	1,667	19,694	0	4,211	9	--
Xhosa	462	2,354	28,632	0	5,268	11	--
Tumbuka	440	1,671	23,783	0	3,393	8	--
Swati	412	1,872	37,384	2	4,168	10	--
Bambara	358	2,971	36,291	1	6,023	8	--
Ewe	317	3,516	48,123	1	6,716	16	--
Sotho	293	2,803	18,657	0	4,900	10	--
Tsonga	281	1,901	29,322	1	4,312	10	--
Akan	252	1,798	20,536	1	5,771	17	--
Sango	240	1,472	20,413	0	3,447	6	--
Venda	189	1,463	17,037	0	3,515	9	--
Fula	182	1,610	21,284	0	4,204	9	--
Tigrinya	161	1,470	19,764	0	4,302	16	--
Chichewa	160	1,407	17,139	1	3,708	13	--

The English language Wikipedia has articles with background about some of the abovementioned editions, including: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bambara, Egyptian Arabic, Northern Sotho, Swahili, Tsonga, Venda, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu.

Where to now?

Personally I see a lot of potential in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, even as issues with the main editions cause speculation about its sustainability (for example in the New York Times last year). A lot of that potential however may actually be in the years ahead, with growth of the smaller editions such as those of African languages. How that might work and conditions that would make it possible are topics to return to later this year.

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1. This quote came from a message Wales posted to the Wikipedia-L list in 2005, but it is along the lines of similar statements he made earlier.
2. The Wikipedia page on its own history indicates that versions in some major non-European languages - including Arabic - were attempted in 2001, however there were evident coding issues for those with non-Latin scripts (see ar.wikipedia.com, for example).
3. The presentations were by Martin Benjamin and Kasper Souren.
4. Copied from the List of Wikipedias on Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki on 30 January 2016.
5. Wikimedia's formula for the "depth" index is: [Edits/Articles] × [Non-Articles/Articles] × [1 − Stub-ratio]