A lot of indigenous language communities are evolving from Africa. Most of these communities adopt the English Wikipedia interface to start a Wikipedia in their language. Meanwhile, many keep complaining about how unfriendly the Wikipedia interface is and the shortcoming of the notability criteria. By 2030, will African language wiki communities still be adopting the English Wikipedia interface and policies which do not necessarily work for the African context or not?
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أعتقد أنه ليس من الضروري نسخ تام لسياسات ومعايير ويكيبيديا الإنجليزية، لكن يُمكن جعلها منطلقًا، وتعديلها وفق الإمكانيات والتصور العام للسياق الأفريقي
@Nehaoua great point made about having a baseline to start with. Do you think the Universal Code of Conduct can be used as the baseline?
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The articles an encyclopedia should have is a content decision. The UCoC covers behavior. You could use the UCoC as a starting baseline for behavior, but that won’t help with any of the content decisions.
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متفق تماما مع @Barkeep49K، الخط الأساسي هو الركائز الخمسة لويكيبيديا (Five pillars)
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I doubt that. If I had my way, I would have changed the Igbo Wikipedia interface to make things easier and appealing for people. I’m personally amongst those complaining about the unappealing nature of the Igbo Wikipedia interface.
Another policy I would discard for Igbo is the notability criteria. It’s quite limiting for us as well. Not just my opinion but also feedback from community members.
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djavadjavay! Greetings from Paiwan Wikimedians User Group. This is iyumu from Paiwan which is one of the indigenous communities in Taiwan. We are new and have been working on some wiki projects in our language for a year. I can understand the situation you mentioned above. For example, in our community, the users can understand Mandarin interface easily. However, the most important thing is that we are working together with all the other communities on Wikimedia to share all free knowledge “in our own langauges.” And language itself can also contain a lot of knowledge. So for sure, the Foundation should support more on language diversity.
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As a contributor to language Wikipedia, i understand the sentiment behind the need for interfaces of language Wikipedia to be improved and not a subset to operate as extension of the English Wikipedia’s interface. We need to understand that at the initial stage, majority of the smaller languages mirrored the interface of the existing and major languages… this is not a bad idea… Now that the smaller languages are evolving at an astronomical pace, it’s important for WMF to invest in the improvement of the interface of the various Language Wikipedia to be able to meet the needs of users on such platforms.
In doing this, we need to understand that the needs of each language differs from one language to the other.
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@Nehaoua @Olaniyan_Olushola @Tochiprecious @Barkeep49 @Iyumu Very good points raised. I am curious though, are there any ongoing projects targeted at improving the interface of language wikis? I would love to learn about the work of volunteers helping to improve their language wikis and policies.
Yes I agree with @Barkeep49 too on using the UCoC as a starting baseline for behaviour. But @Nehaoua Wikipedia’s five pillars is a summary of the principles and guidelines of Wikipedia. I do not see how adoption of the five pillars as a baseline can solve the notability issue for African volunteers.
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@Zuz_WMF For the Igbo Community, we do not have any per say but we have an ‘Igbo Wikimedians User Group Librarians Hub’ they’re a group of volunteer librarians in the Igbo Community improving the citations and references on the Igbo Wikipedia. They’ve been helpful in other ways like: helping get the proper term for ‘REFERENCES’ in Igbo Language which we were confused about for years.
We also have a program we’ve just started in the community called the ‘Wiki Mentor Africa’ program. The essence is to improve the skillsets of African developers to build new tools or improve existing ones. We’re just 2 months into the program and we hope that someday, it would be very helpful to us and the global Wiki at large in solving some of these problems.
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اعتقد ان الموضوع يتكلم عن الملحوظية ومعاييرها وهل نشتقها من الإنجليزية فما علاقة مدونة السلوك بها. وعلى العكس من ذلك لها علاقة وطيدة بالركائز
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that is one great possible way to address this.
Hi Zuz! What do you mean by “the en:wp interface” here? The arrangement of the sidebar + skin? Or the language for any untranslated strings in the interface? What alternatives would you like to see?
Hi! @Sj, I think it is both but the skins and arrangement of items especially. I have heard complaints from volunteers about how unfriendly the interface is. I don’t know if volunteers from my region have explored different skin designs and arrangement of items for their local wikis. It would be great to learn from the language communities in my region if there has been any efforts or initiatives to improve or contextualize/customize the interfaces of their local wikis beyond what they adopted from English Wikipedia.
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Hello, if you’re interested in interfaces, take a look at a new thread I’ve just created: Making Vector 2022 the new default.
Maybe you would like to have this interface as soon as possible?
Maybe you have some questions or suggestions?
Let’s talk about Vector 2022 in that thread.
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This is really good to know, thank you for sharing.
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wauu , mudusangize amakuru natwe tubigireho kubyo mwagezeho
muraho !
icyi ni ikibazo kubanditsi cyane cyane igihe usanze hari article wanditse muri english ariko zigasibwa cg ntuzigereho access kd warafashe umwanya wawe wandika ,nkibaza nigute umwanditsi yazajya agira access kubyo handitse nanone ibyasibwe bijya hehe ?
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