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Almost all African languages are underrepresented on Wikipedia.
L The diversity of languages and the decolonization of knowledge was at the center of the opening sessions of the annual Wikimania Conference, which was held in Cape Town last week.
Hosted in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time, the theme of the 2018 event was Bridging Knowledge Gaps: The Future Path of Ubuntu
For Douglas Scott, Wikimedia Chapter President from SA, this theme was chosen because of its relevance to the Wikipedia publishing community in South Africa. "From a geographical point of view, the vast majority of publishers are still from the North, a very small minority comes from Africa and by encouraging people from the rest of the world to edit Wikipedia, I think we're going to create a more complete platform. "
To paint a picture of the current situation, Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, explains that only 1.3% of the changes on Wikipedia come from the African continent – an astonishing statistic when estimates that about one billion people live in Africa.
With these figures in mind, she pointed out that the Wikimedia Foundation is committed to something that she calls "the only one in the world. equity of knowledge. "
The idea is that there are people, places, languages and stories that are not currently represented, but that should be." In discussing with different people of different At venues at events like this, we hope to address some of the practical issues to fill knowledge gaps and to make more and more people share their ideas and have access to information.
Almost all African languages are under-represented on Wikipedia, from smaller regional languages to more widely spoken languages, says Maher.
"One of the languages that comes to my mind is Arabic, which only has one article per 1,000 speakers, although it does is one of the most spoken languages in the world, it is estimated that 350 million Arabic speakers in the world and yet Wikipedia in Arabic has only half a million articles. "
only 3% of the Web is in Arabic and only 20% of Arabic speakers can speak more than one language. "When we think of the influence of the Internet on what we have access to in the world today, this gap is incredibly large and has profound influences."
According to Scott, there are just under 300 different languages represented on Wikipedia; a little more than others. "In South Africa, many of our local languages need more information: there are about eight million South-East speakers in South Africa, but there are only 1,000 articles in isiXhosa on Wikipedia. As the world becomes more and more digital, if languages are not represented online, they are not represented in a very important part of our lives, added Maher
. "The digitization of knowledge in the languages spoken by people is essential to ensure their fulfillment, and it is not only the knowledge that exists on Wikipedia: when there is a strong representation of a language on Wikipedia it is more likely that web-based services will also be available in this language. "
On top of that, she added that linguistic diversity is essential in matters of education.Search shows that learners who are educated in their second language fail to absorb up to 50 % of the information they are taught.
To fill these gaps, Scott encourages anyone who is passionate about a specific topic or local element – just to register to edit the Wikipedia and other content. to start making contributions and to do so in their mother tongue
"The only way we are going to change the content bias is to add content that represents a more diverse user base and it's precisely where the Wikipedia community is becoming so important. "[19659020]
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