 The slides contributed by different members of the panel and they're going to fade in and out every five seconds and then when it reaches the end it loops back to the beginning. So if you see a slide that you're interested in, you might want to see the URL so don't sit at the back if you think you might be interested in details. You know that it's going to come back again when the show repeats because we'll be talking freely about what we're talking about and now and then the slide will come up that relates to what has been talked about. So just know that if you miss it the first time you can get it the second or third or fourth time. So that's how it's going to work. So now I'm going to start that and then we're going to sit down and talk. We've got one member who's on her way but she's also contributed slides so you'll see information about her pretty soon. This is her, Nozi Bailey. So she'll come up when she's back. So I think most of you were at the previous session about South Africa's Wikipedia's. Now we're going to talk about Africa's Wikipedia's including South Africa's Wikipedia's. Unfortunately the panel is mostly South African anyway but I'm sure we've got Wikipedians from many other African countries in the audience so we're going to definitely encourage them to participate as well. It's going to be a very informal arrangement especially as we have to pass the microphone from hand to hand. So without further ado I'm going to ask each panel member to introduce themselves, talk a little bit about their work, about their language Wikipedia. Maybe I should say about myself, I'm not primarily a Wikipedia editor. I'm a Wikimedian activist. As you saw in the previous session I do a lot of work in making Wikipedia and Wikimedia accessible through technology and through community organised telecommunications. So it's about access and this is a big factor in Africa and this is why we're going to be talking about zero rating and stuff like that. So that's what I am, what I do and I also researched the South Africa's Wikipedias but I'm not a big editor myself. OK Dionne. A good morning ladies and gentlemen. As you can hear at the moment I open my voice, definitely South African. That is my accent. This is my characteristic, can I say, mark. I'm born African, speaking African and the language has grown, come from Dutch. Very much influenced by Portuguese, we picked up a lot of words from them and a lot of other languages as well. So it's quite a mixed language, interestingly Mike said Creole. I never thought about it that way but actually it is true. I was the first African-speaking person ever to attend the Wikimania three years ago in Mexico City. Why Africans never got to become or get part of Wikimanias I would not know but thank goodness we have found a bigger community of Wikipedias where we can communicate and talk and chat. The Africans, Wikipedia is the biggest in the continent in terms of quality with 50,000 articles, 50,000, yeah, 50,000. And as early as Wikipedia from Island of Madagascar which is slightly bigger than us but their quantity is not as good as a lot of online machine generated articles and so on where in Africa we try and put as much content into articles rather less articles of high quality than other way around. My personal contribution to the African-speaking Wikipedia I'm close to the 5,000 articles and 100,000 edits coming up in the next year so hopefully for me, yeah, thanks for that but it is not about milestones it is about getting all knowledge into all languages. Unfortunately I cannot help my colleagues, Dumie and Bobby I can speak a little bit of their language I cannot write it but we'll try what we can to help them and so on and I think that's enough from our side. Good morning Wikimedians, yeah, my name is Bobby Shabangu and I am a Wikimedian. I must contribute in the English Wikipedia but I'm very much active in the Sissuati Wikipedia as well. It is a very small Wikipedia, it's old but it's not growing very fast, why? Because there are not a lot of contributors in that Wikipedia. The language itself is spoken by somewhere around 3 million people in the whole of South Africa but the country of its origin is Swaziland so they are more Swati speakers here in South Africa than in the country itself so because of political reasons I believe but yeah, my contribution on to Wikipedia is really not influenced by anything. I don't contribute on to Wikipedia because I focus, I have a specific topic that I focus to. I'm influenced by my life. I can contribute on to Wikipedia about Wikipedia. I can translate a page from English to the Sissuati Wikipedia about Wikipedia. If I see the news, what is happening, I contribute about that. If I see sports, if I see politics, if I see whatever it is, just contribute. If I like a nice picture, I take the picture, I then upload it on to Wikikomons as well. So that is my involvement with the Wikimedia movement. In terms of the work that I do in South Africa, I am part of the South African chapter. Sound, one, two, testing. Can you hear me? Yeah, so where was I then? Yeah, so I was joined in 19, in 2012, in 2013. So I joined by invite. So the first time I knew about Wikipedia, it was at the time when I was working as a radio producer for a South African broadcasting company called the SAPC. And as a producer, you have to come up with content for your show. To create content for the show so that the presenters will talk according to what is happening in the current space. But every time I would go online to search, Wikipedia would be the first link. And I asked myself, why is this Wikipedia the first link every time? But I noticed at some time that there were different languages there. But I did not know how to actually edit on Wikipedia. Until I met a good friend of mine, he's one of these panel. His name is Dumisani, who actually introduced me to Wikipedia to say, hey, you can actually edit onto Wikipedia. There are many things that happened over the years, since I have joined the chapter. One of the other things that we are doing is to collaborate with Glam institutions. We don't obviously have control of what is contributed onto Wikipedia. In our collaboration with the Glam institutions. But we try to influence what people are doing there. By creating or by bringing up themes that are African in nature. So yeah, that's who I am. And I'm going to pass it to the next panelist. Thank you. My name is Nozivele. Thank you. I'll be very brief. I joined Wikipedia under an academic institution, the University of South Africa. Under the project, which is the Academy of African Language and Science. Which is made up of two projects. Within each is a corpus development for the South African indigenous languages. And Wikipedia. Actually, Wikipedia, in our project, we are looking at the status of English in South Africa. South African language speakers, particularly those living in rural areas. Experienced difficulties when they have to get information in English. So it has been a problem. But now, because there is Wikipedia, we are using it as a platform to introduce South African indigenous languages as well. For now, I think I'll end there. I don't know whether I've left something. I don't think so. Thank you. I thought Emna was going to go first. She's got the coolest stories. But we're going to sort out the South African area first. Before we go to the North Africa. My name is Dumisani Ndubani. I currently work for the Wikimedia Foundation. I joined Wikimedia Foundation last year. That was after a long-term volunteer work that I've done with the Wikimedia South Africa chapter. And in particular, the Wikipedia, which I discovered firstly at the University in 2008. And I stuck with it for a long time because it was my study aid companion for my electrical engineering studies. I didn't know that there was an African language version of Wikipedia or the projects in my language in particular. Until I went to Wikimedia in DC in 2012 and people were talking about small indigenous languages. And I said, where's my language? What's happening? And when I found my language, I wanted to cry. It had less than 10 articles. All those that were there were really stubs as in one sentence liners. And I thought, how can that be? There's more than 8 million people speakers in my language. How can we only have less than 10 articles on Wikipedia? And I wanted to blame someone. And I couldn't find who to blame. So I started looking at myself and blaming myself. Maybe you're not doing anything about it. So I started working on the language Wikipedia. Today we have reached over 600 articles. It's very insignificant compared to the English Wikipedia. But if you're looking at my language, which is the second smallest language in South Africa, the Shitzonga Wikipedia has become actually the major source of Tonga content online. And I have spent a lot of time building that up, frustrated by things like, I think we're going to talk about that later, frustrated by things like the interface was not in my language. So although it's my English Wikipedia, the buttons, the links on top are still in English. The menus are still in English. So why is it called Shitzonga Wikipedia? I still have to go to read a menu that says log in. What does that, how can I put that in my language? So I started working on translating the interface, then went on to the articles themselves. The main page was looking bad. I worked on that. So I had to learn the markup language, the templates. I had to move some of them on to the, from the English Wikipedia. They were broken, so it didn't look like it should be looking on the English Wikipedia, which was frustrating, info boxes. And the biggest challenge was actually getting sources in my language, which is still a big challenge today. So unfortunately, I still have to go and look for an English source, translate it first, then cite it, I will put it on to my language. But it's work in progress. At least we have 600. We didn't have that 10 years ago. Good morning everyone. I think I learned a new word in South African language, saying Malwini for everyone. So I'm from Tunisia, but because of this panel, I'll be representing North Africa, not only my country, my home country, I'll be representing the North African community. Basically, the Wikipedia is there. What brought me to this movement was in 2013, Wiki Loves Monuments, and it was thanks to Habib Mhenne, who is here, that I joined this amazing, vibrant movement. And it was like, I wanted badly to promote my country and its heritage. Wiki Loves Monuments was the tool to do that. I did not miss the opportunity, and we got a lot of encouragement from Habib and other folks from the Wikimedia user group. Back then we were a community to contribute, and what makes me here today, presenting the North African Wikipedias, is the same spirit that we would like to promote our culture. Our culture is not the colonial languages. It's the colonizing the languages of Wikipedia by talking about smaller languages like the Kabil, like the Sherwi Wikipedias. So I'll be talking about that. If you would like to hear more, I'm not the expert in those languages. I do not speak them, but I endorse them by heart and by effort. There are few folks attending Wikimedia from these languages that I can show you to them later on. So, up to you, Michael. Okay, thanks to all the panelists for that. But I think maybe we should now turn to something that's just come up in what Emna was saying and I think some of the other touched on it. There's just been a parallel pre-conference that was called Decolonizing the Internet, which was largely dealing with issues related to many of what we've just been talking about. So maybe those who were at that conference could share with us some of what came out of that. Yeah, so I attended that conference and I really loved the discussions we had there. I think the language of today is to call them lit discussions. They were quite lit, if I must say. One of the things that came through the conference, particularly with Wikipedia, is firstly the language diversity that's there, that Wikipedia has become this big resource of knowledge, especially open knowledge on the Internet. And yet when it comes to language diversity, it really still runs along the colonial lines in terms of the language distribution that's available. And also even in those language projects, it still runs along the colonial lines in terms of the knowledge about emerging communities or areas below the equator. So it is a gauntlet being sent through to the editors of Wikipedia who are in this conference to think about what it is that you're writing online and putting online and how is that enriching the knowledge that we're putting there about the world. The slogan of the conference was whose knowledge, whose faces are we not seeing online, whose knowledge and whose languages are not online. And you don't have to be an expert in that language to contribute. There's this community which I really respect of small language patrollers in the Wikimedia community. They don't even speak the language, but they will patrol the pages of the small language Wikipedias. They will assist with templates. They will make sure that if there is vandalism, it's reverted and so on. So one of the things that came through the conference is to try and find allies who can assist in small language Wikipedias. So I attended also the conference yesterday and one of the highlights for me was the word freedom. So at the end of the conference, we were asked all what the conference represented to us, each and every one had to say two words that the conference represented to them. And for me it was freedom. I had that word being repeated three times. And there was one who actually said the struggle continues. So those three words were the words that resonated with me because I realized that with the small language Wikipedias, it is not something that can be achieved in just only one day or whatever it is that we want to achieve at the end of the day with regards to having a decolonized space. It's not something that can be achieved over a very short space of time. I realized that when I'm looking at the history of revolutions, there are revolutions, there's a quick approach and there's a very soft approach. I think we are taking a very soft approach because we are trying to find ways of how can we chat, how can we find a balance of reaching a decolonized space within the internet. There are those revolutions that take fast to achieve whatever it is, the goal that they are looking for, the Tunisian revolution for an example. So we are not taking the stance of taking black arts and facing Google or facing whoever it is that we blame, that you guys are the ones that are making us not being represented out there but we are trying to find a way or a nice way of trying to decolonize the content. So I had a lot of voices, a lot of ideas of people who were suggesting things that can be done in order to eventually reach that space and we will have a decolonized space in the internet. I think I would like to invite anybody in the audience who's from other African Wikipedia's and or from that conference. We could share the mic with you just to add to what the small groups have been able to say. I'm standing here for fear of rejection on joining the panel I'll talk from here. I consider myself the flag bearer of the northern Zutu Wikipedia that's a local South African language, also called Zeperi but there's many arguments in language people whether it's really Zeperi or northern Zutu I think people will know. Why I say that is I mainly engage on the Africans Wikipedia next to Usiaria next to me but I managed to trace this indigenous language obviously on Wikipedia and I had studied 6 and 7 formal education in Pretoria those years in this language so although I'm not a fluent speaker of that it's not my mother tongue, I managed to start translating articles into that and I say this with my tongue in the cheek unfortunately it's almost like one-liners as Usiaria called them I've taken all the cities and towns and I'm busy now with the rural villages in South Africa they match up close to 4000 that I'm working on that I've covered now like on a geographical map from north to south so every now and then on a weekend when I've got time I engage myself in another block of those data what I achieved with that is that although I can't exactly translate things like the tree is green then I have to go to the dictionary it's very easy with the data or wicked data across on the templates but once you've got the coordinates and maybe a picture of the place it makes sense to build the article on that so with the help of some other tongue speakers that corrected my input that got the right language onto sentences it's featuring now as I say it's not a very big achievement but the northern sutu wiki is now the biggest one besides Afrikaans what about anybody else from another African Wikipedia and or from the conference I was in the conference and one thing that I did not realize before that and that really struck me is how much English Wikipedia is often influencing the smaller language communities when they start and we talked about how this happens in three ways one way is that often people just will look at the English Wikipedia for content but they will look how do they do the policies and how do they have the rules about notability and all that and because it's just the biggest language Wikipedia they will just copy those rules even if they don't make a lot of sense for that language community the same thing happens because often the people starting a new Wikipedia they will have had some experience as editors in the English Wikipedia and bringing their experience with the policies that work for the English Wikipedia to their community and not really reflecting is it something that we in our community want that's another way this influence goes and the third way is that often content is just translated in the beginning from the English Wikipedia and it's not just the content that comes on but along with the content is the way how is the article laid out do we need do we want info boxes all those things are things that could be open for discussion but by just translating you take over the thing just as it is on the English Wikipedia and so we said this is perhaps an important thing to talk about and to think about how could emerging Wikipedia small Wikipedia's that are not yet formed fully formed how can they make up their own rules how can they have their own policies also about notability also about citations we talked a lot about oral knowledge and how could that be brought online and perhaps communities with a language that have a strong tradition there they could work on that and make it work for their community and for their language from the who's knowledge conference I was there too and I work on with we document endangered languages and so of course one major problem is literacy name you the issue that a majority of languages are not even written and so none of them can become represented and the moment they become represented it is written about people the second issue I think is crucial is we work with communities and there's lots of communities that don't want to share their knowledge and so our big ideal of openness is also one that is in a way a particular view on everyone should have access when communities themselves say no this is ours so those were I think two really major issues to address namely that already the step into literacy for non-written languages that don't have a script that don't have a representation will not become represented with Wikipedia so I'm mainly active on English Wikipedia and I'm here representing an oracle art and feminism and I attended the decolonizing internet conference and for me one of the major takeaways is that it takes all of us working together that each of us has a role and that all those roles are important so maybe sometimes that means that we are in the street and we are doing the protesting or we're on Wikipedia and we're doing the editing or we're going into communities that we represent and we're showing them how to edit on the platform or we're developing policies for smaller language Wikipedia's that are more in line with the culture of that language but in terms of the conference just thinking about that idea of liberation or that idea of freedom being it takes all of us playing our roles in order for the work to be effective Hi so my name is Kelly I was also at the conference this weekend and one of the past couple of weeks it all merges into one it's been a long few days one of the key things that we thought about especially was the privileges that people have and sometimes it's as important to be quiet and to listen especially to people whose voices are often less heard and that isn't only about language and that isn't only about regions and those are all things that Wikipedias and Wikipedians are comfortable comfortable ways in looking at differences but it's also in the less comfortable ways of looking at difference I am a person of African descent both I'm a part of a number of diasporas I'm a part of the African diaspora and also a part of the Caribbean diaspora and very much the reason I'm here is as a result of colonialism and there are spaces in which I need to recognize the privileges that I have and sit down and be quiet and listen and there are also spaces in which I need to take my role and to stand up and be heard so those are all things that are important when we're thinking about how do we build a more equitable environment online on the internet which was the purpose of our conference but also for generally speaking in the world that we're living I would like to say something my name is Idi John I'm coming from Tanzania and our language is Swahili I think it's a mostly spoken language in Africa as well so being here and as well as the decolonized the internet I happen to learn that the first famous word in Wikipedia is contribution Contribute and I think by contributing it means you have a freedom to add whatever the content as much as it doesn't add violence or insults anyway and then with that freedom as part of learning it's my first time being here and I'm part of Wikilabs Africa and as well as soon Wikilabs monument and as well as part of Wikilabs women in Tanzania so just coming here I think few things that I've grabbed is I am not a complete person who can say I'm a leader to everybody but I can help people to facilitate or I can facilitate or being a facilitator to help other people in Tanzania to be able to write the best articles in our local language especially Swahili which we don't have a lot of content in Swahili in my Wikimedia group in Tanzania and then being here and being at the conference I realized that it's actually has opened doors for me to meet people who could actually support me and me I'll go back and support others in Tanzania so I'll say we actually decolonizing the thinking thank you Thanks I just want to butt in as a non... I'm not much of an editor nor was I at the conference but I want to comment on the point made that in some cases communities that have been maybe oppressed might want to preserve some degree of privacy if you look at the slide show there's one show one slide that's about Wikifundi which is an offline editing platform it would be possible to have a private Wikimedia where you could hand down generations of knowledge but without necessarily opening it to the rest of the world so the technology would provide that the other thing that I just want to sort of insert would be that we have with us Jackson who's mentioned on one of the slides and I think I would like him to just talk a little bit about his project Hello everyone like he said my name is Jackson I've been working on a research project for African language content generation so what we basically want to do with this project is basically try to get people to be more motivated in contributing languages and African languages through the use of a tool actually a technology new that's called gamification so it's online as we speak it's running for six months and what you could do in that tool is that you could either create content by writing a blog or translating sentences extracted from sorry articles in Wikipedia thank you and do you have a poster this evening so Jackson will be showing his poster this evening Hello I'm Eleanor Sisulu I'm from the Puku Children's Literature Foundation and we're trying to build an online encyclopedia for children's books in all Southern African languages and I'm not a Wikipedia editor but I do see the problems with getting African language editors and one of the major problems is that it's voluntary editing and people and I'm very ambivalent about equal access we have attention we want equal access but we need to pay content providers who are in impoverished situations and the biggest repositories of indigenous knowledge in African languages are often rural people and they are often impoverished so you know there's a woman called Madocini here in Cape Town like the repository of Cosa indigenous music and literature to go to someone like Madocini and ask her to give her knowledge for free when she is struggling and not rewarded properly through a lifetime of great work that is not acknowledged in a colonial situation is actually very difficult so how are we going to deal with that real issue of impoverishment expecting people to give free content because if you have a degree of affluence you can become a Wikipeditor but if you are in a rural situation struggling for even to have three meals a day it's actually a challenge we've had a children's literature festival in Isikosa and there's amazing people there producing amazing content and I encourage some of those young people to become Wikipeditors but I would never ever go to them and expect them to give their content for free and I think that ties up with the points about how indigenous communities want to protect the content because if you just take it and make it open access and what does it mean for them if it's not going to move them from a situation of poverty to some kind of reward for their content what does that mean for them and I think that's a very serious challenge we face and we have to find a way to meet it I think we have part of the solution but it's something we need to discuss further we have an endangered language here in South Africa where five people all in the 80s speak that language now if we say okay you must get on to Wikipedia and voluntary edit it's not going to change that situation of endangerment of that language so as long as people are not being paid or cannot make a living out of working in their languages we're going to face a big challenge on the African language Wikis Thanks Before I continue handing the microphone around I just wanted to respond to that Kiwix which is mentioned here the slide example is about the medical Kiwix but the same technology can also be and is also used for exactly for children's stories there's several different children's Wikipedia's as well some of the languages that have struggled against what they see as oppression like the Basque language have the best children's Wikipedia's so I think as a worldwide Wikimovement we can share those sort of lessons with each other and that's all I wanted to add Thank you I'm Peter from Namibia I wanted to add to the thought of communities not freely giving out their knowledge having a certain skepticism towards our project that has to do with the situation that for centuries indigenous communities have been described in writing by aliens, by people who do not belong to that group missionaries, traders, adventurers, scientists and today it's us we are writing, we write predominantly male predominantly European or Northern American people are writing the history of Africa and it has already happened and we haven't, we have asked for input but maybe we haven't asked loud enough and I don't think it is a surprise that Wikipedia is now seen as yet another tool by the former, current, future colonizers to draw a certain picture and sometimes, of course we are not doing it on purpose I hope most of us are not doing it on purpose but it does happen, you know people are going through a list of important places or things or people and I just had an episode the other day where I came across an article about person XY was the first finance minister of Namibia born in this year or he's still alive, didn't die yet and I think like oh my god this person was the highest apartheid administrator of Namibia for 28 years and the only thing that Wikipedia knows about him is that after independence he got, you know so that the white people don't start a revolution one of the ministries went to a white person and that's his only claim to fame on Wikipedia and of course it's not wrong, he was finance minister but it's a terrible characterization and I can imagine if somebody who has a history or who knows the history of that country reads that things like oh my god what kind of people are these that are writing Wikipedia so it's not just the size of Wikipedia it's not just availability of languages it is what is being said and from which point of view things are being described and that's what we need to gain we need to have the African input not as translation slaves but as putting the point of view putting a point of view from an African perspective this is what we need that's why when I read translation it's like oh no that's not a good idea we had a translator in Wintourg I was one of the co-organizers because they needed the Wikipedia expertise of course and what do I see? I see young black students translating what I had written half a year ago translating it from the English Wikipedia now this is not what we want we want you to write down your history and that's what we need to help them with because there's different perspectives and certain things we do wrong and we don't see it it's not our intention we need to give a hand but not provide the content okay we're coming to the end of our time slot the next session up is Bobby and who else it's about something similar to what Peter has just been talking about which is Wikipedia's culture of citations and the suggestion that it should include oral citations which is you know it touches on what he's just said so Bobby's going to be presenting it with somebody else I think we have to have a short break just to rearrange the furniture and so on but if people want to continue the conversation come up to the front and let's just carry on while the furniture gets moved around and the laptops get shuffled and all that jazz so thanks for the session and let's just carry on informally in front here