 It was totally the opposite of the old constitution. We're all equal as citizens, whereas previously we were divided into different classes and groups. And all our languages have equal status except, as you'll see later, not all. Right. So everybody knows English. It's rapidly becoming more and more of a global language. But it also was the last colonial language that we had. So it's still de facto the lingua franca of South Africa. Afrikaans and English were the two official languages under the Partite regime. Afrikaans is technically called a Creole language. Creole meaning its origin is a combination or an interaction between colonial and colonized. So there are many Creole languages around the world. Some are derived from French, some from Portuguese. You name it. Afrikaans is a Creole language. Then the other nine official languages belong to the Bantu language group which is found in approximately half of Africa contains Bantu languages. So we have nine. Most of them are also spoken in some of the neighboring countries by a considerable part of the population. Among those nine, four of them belong to the Nguni language group and they're somewhat mutually intelligible. Another three belong to the Tsutotswana group and they're also somewhat mutually intelligible. We have Chivenda and Shitzonga. If you'll note the spelling of Shitzonga, I'll get back to it just now. Now when you see where I've said the nine Bantu languages, there's an asterisk that refers to the fact that they have various degrees of Koisan influence. Unlike most of the Bantu languages in the rest of Africa, the Southern African Bantu languages, most of them have some degree of influence such as click phonemes of which there are actually hundreds of subtle variations. This indicates many centuries of interaction. Unlike the apartheid narrative which kind of tried to portray Bantu people, Bantu language speaking people as having arrived almost at the same time as the colonial arrival. Both the linguistic and the archaeological and the DNA evidence all suggest many, many centuries of interaction between the Koisan and the Bantu groups. We'll leave English for now. Everyone knows about it. Afrikaans. What many people don't know, which was kind of swept under the carpet during apartheid, is that the oldest, by far, the oldest written Afrikaans was written in the Arabic script. You can look this up in Wikipedia. Even the Afrikaans Wikipedia has a good article about Arabic Afrikaans. And the reason for this is that in the early part of the last century, the other 19th century, the Cape Town Madrasa, which is a Muslim religious school, which had been teaching in what they then called Malay language, which would nowadays be called Indonesian, because people were hardly speaking that language anymore. It became impractical, so they actually started to write down the language that they were speaking day to day, which at that time was considered like kitchen dutch. But because it was written in the Arabic script, which is phonetic, people who can read Arabic script can read it out, and it sounds more like Afrikaans than like dutch. So that was the oldest written Afrikaans in the early 1800s. Then in the later part of the 1800s, the non-Muslims also started to write it down, but they only got serious with translating the Bible in 1923, and then the government recognized it in 25. The Bantu languages, they all had different timelines of when they were first written down by missionaries, mostly somewhere around the mid-1800s, and the missionaries came from various colonial powers, Portuguese, French, and British mostly. Shitzonga was transcribed by Portuguese. That's why it's spelled with an X, which in the Nguni languages, the X would be a click. But in Portuguese, orthography, the X is a sheet, or e-sh sound. So Shitzonga is spelled with an X. Okay, so we arrived at the New South Africa with all these languages. A former political prisoner called Neville Alexander, he was on Robin Island with Nelson Mandela. So by that fact you can tell that he wasn't classified as white, but otherwise he would have been in Pretoria Central, which is where I nearly ended up. He proposed that the number of languages should be, official languages could be reduced by standardizing those groups that I mentioned earlier. So we would have ended up with six national languages instead of eleven. But politically, there was no traction. Apartheid and colonialism had succeeded in creating what seemed natural to people to be separated and divided like that. So it was perpetuated until today. And, okay, the only Qoisan language with a significant number of people speaking it in South Africa is Nama, sometimes called Koi Koi and various other things. But most of its speakers live in Namibia and Botswana. We have maybe 60,000 in South Africa. In Namibia, we can hear a bit more from some of the Namibian Wikimedians just now maybe. They do actually have like academic processes in that language. All right, the actual Wikipedia's. Just a few weeks or months ago, Afrikaans reached 50,000. Afrikaans obviously representing a much more privileged demographic profile than the other languages than English in South Africa. Internet access being the biggest determining factor. The second one, Cepedi, also known as Northern Suthu or Suthu-Saleboa, is like eight times as big as Isizulu, which has actually just passed 1,000 during the course of Wikimania with the help of, yeah. So this figure that I give here is slightly out of date. So, yeah, Cepedi is eight times as large as the next one. And all the rest are really small and their growth is static. Potential Wikipedia's. It's in Debele, which is an official language in South Africa, but it's also the second major language of Zimbabwe. It's still in incubator status. I've heard since I've produced these slides that it's also technically in incubator status. Again, we can hear a bit from the Namibian Wikimedians I think later. But I think that maybe we should try and, like, generate some process within this Wikimania so that we can try and, like, see how Nama could come out of incubator one day. Okay, this is just some research that I did into the statistics given by the Wikimedia Foundation on their Wikistats website. The important thing about this graph is that it's a logarithmic scale. The vertical axis is logarithmic. So anything that's twice as high is ten times the size. If I didn't display it like that, English would be, you know, above the ceiling. So, anyway, that... I know you're all sitting... those sitting at the back can't see. The blue line is English of the red line. The second one is Afrikaans. Well, you're sitting at the back. If you want to see better, come closer. So you can see the Afrikaans as well above the other Banta languages. So now to be able to look at the Banta languages more accurately, I'm getting rid of English and Afrikaans and using an arithmetic scale on the vertical axis. So now you can compare them to each other instead of comparing them to English and Afrikaans. Now you can see the dramatic difference between Sepedi and Isizulu and Isikosa and all the others. And how fairly recent it is, actually. The horizontal axis is the years, right? What I did was I took a sample in September of every year, the size of those Wikipedia's. Then I looked at the number of contributors. In other words, the communities that create the Wikipedia's. And here you'd expect maybe that Sepedi would have more contributors because it's got eight times more articles, but no. Isizulu is... Sorry, I'll get back to those. First, I'm also showing... I've gone back to a logarithmic scale with English and Afrikaans. So let's get rid of them, get back to an arithmetic display. Here you can see, Sepedi is blue, so it's in the middle and it's got like only less than half of the Isizulu contributors, although it's got eight times as many articles. I wasn't able to really document how that came to be. That's for someone else to research, or maybe I'll do it at some stage, but I just didn't get it done in this stage. So the number of contributors is also not growing as fast as one would hope. But the only thing that is growing very well is page views. We're back on a logarithmic scale now, so it doesn't look too dramatic. But what you can see is that English and Afrikaans are actually the number of page views per year has declined, interestingly enough. This is worldwide, right? Not just in South Africa. The other thing I should point out that around 2015 there was a redefinition of what constitutes a page view, so that would explain some of the strange disruptions at that point. But the good news is that generally the Bantu languages have a steady upward slope, which is seemingly continuing, which is much better than the, you know, English and Afrikaans. Okay, now I'm going to talk about possible ways forward. This is what they're talking about next door right now as well. What can be done for smaller Wikipedia's to assist them. So Wikipedia has a machine-assisted translation tool. I didn't know until this Wikimania started, or the pre-conference in the last couple of days, I found out that the actual machine translation is outsourced to Yandex, which is a Russian company. So what Wikimania does is, what Wikipedia does is like the user interface, rather than the actual translation. And I found it doesn't have much support, hardly any support for Bantu languages. So, you know, I was going to try and say that as the Wikimedia Foundation, they should remedy that, and it wouldn't be too difficult because of the similarity of many of the languages. But now that they say it's outsourced to Yandex, I asked the question, could they perhaps be able to link up to other providers at the same time, like local ones. The University of Cape Town, for example, had a bit of research in a machine translation. And so maybe we could experiment with supplementing the service as it is. Another thing that they're probably talking about next door is using Wikidata to generate article placeholders, which are like the framework of a future article with the basic things like dates and statistics already filled in. So that editors in creating articles, they would have like a suggested framework. The big thing that I want to talk about, I hope most of you in your welcome pack, you've got a little thing like this that says Kiwix on it, right? If you have a look, you might find it. Most people won't know what it is. But if you take it out, there's a little, it's actually a little stick-at that you take off this card and you can put it on your laptop webcam. It's a shutter. So you can open and close your webcam and it's got a little slogan on it that says go offline. Because Kiwix is an offline web hosting system for content, not only Wikipedia articles, but largely, it was largely developed for them. Kiwix has also just entered into a huge new funding agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation. I think it's 250 million just a couple of days ago as well. So we have a lot to hope for that. We would be able to make educational content, including Wikipedia, available to places that have no internet or to people who can't afford it. Because a lot of people live and there's like data signals passing through their bodies and their spaces all the time, but they can't afford to access them. But with Kiwix, and fairly cheap devices like Raspberry Pi's, we can actually provide Wi-Fi hotspots where you don't need to pay to use the data. All you need is maybe a phone or a tablet which are becoming more and more affordable as time goes by. Zero rating. When we had the thing where we sort of suggested words in that word cloud thing earlier on, it was in the top ten of the words among the dragons and goats, zero rating. And that's also because the youngsters from St. John's High School pointed out how crucial it had been for them. And I don't know how many of you know that just earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it was going to stop supporting zero rating, which I thought was a huge mistake. But I kind of understood why they were doing it because at the time there was a big debate in America and in other countries about net neutrality. And they were lobbying for net neutrality to be legally mandated and compulsory. And many people's understanding of net neutrality is saying that all content should have equal status online as things mustn't be boosted by being sponsored, whatever. So I think that's the kind of dogma that they were imposing. Personally, I can't see that we should have to generalise like that because each data packet can be handled the same by the network regardless of who's actually paying for it. And we can actually monitor that. There are tools for monitoring traffic. So, you know, I would like to reopen that debate. Oops. Oops. Oops. Okay, way forward. In South Africa, probably in most of Africa and most of the so-called developing world, editor stones are not easy to attract all social classes because transport is expensive. And parts have forced people to live far from each other. So although we're supposed to be volunteers as Wikipedia, I think we really have to provide transport allowances and refreshments for people who come from far to Wikimedia events. So we should start budgeting for those. The other thing is that educational authorities and cultural authorities in South Africa are very out of touch with what Wikipedia is and what it can be. In other countries, the situation is very different. The session that's coming after this is about Africa's Wikipedia, where this kind of stuff will be covered in more detail. So the last thing I want to say is that we need to continue having debating issues, okay? And some of them are raised by this... Oh, it's even more distorted on the slide then. Okay, this is an academic paper that I came across by Heiko Wiches of Wake Forest University. And the key sentence that I've kind of underlined there, this paper argues that Wikipedia and indeed the Internet itself favor Western mainstream languages and content. If you read through the paper, you can sort of criticize that statement. Maybe we should criticize it, but we also have to understand the element of truth in it. And there are other similar criticisms that can be made. So I think we shouldn't just say, yeah, yeah, we can provide key weeks, we can make it happen. We should know that we have to be careful and critical of what we're doing. Okay, thank you. I think there's time for one or two questions. Or else just come to the next session. Yeah, someone at the back, stand up? Yes. It's freely available on the Wikipedia website. If you're going to be at the next session after this, Africa's Wikipedia, we'll cover it in a bit more detail. But yeah, it's not quite ready for general use. It's somewhat experimental, but it is free and it is available. It's just that because it's using an external company, there's issues of language support that has to be negotiated. Yes, Dion. Okay, okay. Thanks, Dion. Oh, yes, come on. A proposal. Well, the question is about Neville Alexander's proposal to standardize languages. It would have had advantages and disadvantages because, in the same way that English, for example, used to have many different dialects and it's more and more becoming a standardized, globalized language. So a lot of that diversity is being lost. But because English-speaking population contains sufficient affluence and internet access, people who want to preserve variants of forms of English are able to start their own Wikipedia's and they have fun with Middle English and whatever they want to do. But for these very small Bonta language Wikipedia's, it would have probably been a good thing if they could have been sort of consolidated at some stage and then only once they're really up and running with a critical mass of users and contributors, maybe then they could start sort of splitting into dialects and whatever. But it was a matter of political will. The political will didn't exist, so it didn't happen. Well, as I was saying, the Nguni group which contains Isizulu, Isikosa, Siswati and Isindebele, the proposal was to standardize, to create a standard form of Nguni and then a standard form of Tsutotswana. So that would have made seven into two. Yes, thank you. Well, I'm sure they're somewhat mutually intelligible as well. Both would be members of the Nguni. Perhaps you could say they were dialects of the same language. This issue will also be covered in the next session, the whole debate about what makes a language a language and not a dialect of another language. There's one definition, sort of a wisecrack that says, if it has its own army it's a language. Yeah, so that's a political decision, yes. So nowadays the army can also be an online army, you know, of editors. If there's a group of editors who want to create a Wikipedia in a specific language or dialect, then it happens. But they have to exist and they have to have access to the equipment and they have to be able to afford the bandwidth. This is why we have a dismal situation in South Africa. It's a relatively affluent country, but the cost of doing things online is less affordable to the majority than in poorer countries. So again, it's a political matter. Our government hasn't done what it should have. I think we can point to politicians being given shares in cellular companies and say, what was that about? Because then they get more dividends. If the data is more expensive, the politicians get more dividends. It's just recently passed 50% but it's debatable because how do you measure when someone's online, if they only go online a couple of times a week? They've got an email address, they've got maybe a Facebook page and they can hardly ever afford the time and even the electrical energy. If you live off the grid, as many people still do in rural areas, you have to go to the shop usually with your phone and pay to charge your phone. So it's such a person online just because they have a Facebook account which they look at once or twice a week. It's debatable. Part of the effort of making internet accessible is we're starting to have a movement of community networks in South Africa in rural areas, especially in poor communities, community-owned telecommunications infrastructure. And sometimes it's solar powered as well. But it's still in a very early stage of the movement. I think our time is up, eh? I've got a panel discussion coming up with a bunch of other people about Africa's Wikipedia, so I think we have to... Yes, yes, it's yeah. So if you want to attend that, just stay where you are but just give us some time to switch over the system.