Luca Martinelli - Wikipedia Primary School - Case study Wikipedia and African languages used in primary education, additional documentation, Wikimania Hong Kong 10/08/2013.

1. Wikipedia and Primary School
An Assessment of Wikipedia's Articles
Luca Martinelli Hong Kong, 10 agosto 2013
Presentazione rilasciata con licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 3.0 Unported

2. What we did
1. Which languages are used in African schools?
2. How many "African" Wikipedias do we have?
3. What is their growing rate?
4. Do they have the articles we are looking for?
5. Can those articles be used in primary schools?

3. Schools in Africa
• 35 languages used
• Most used: French (26 countries); English (24 countries)
• Portuguese still dominant in former Portuguese colonies
• Ethiopia is the only country NOT to use any "colonist"
language
• Congo DR, Ghana, Namibia, and Uganda assign a fixed
number of hours to "regional languages"

4. Statistics of "African Wikipedias"
• 32 versions out of 35 languages
• Top 6: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
Arabic
• First African-based Wikipedias: Malagasy and Yoruba
(+30k articles)
• ~50% are below 1,000 articles
• African-based Wikipedias growing rates are lower to
blatantly lower than the top 6

5. The South Africa case
• 11 official languages (Afrikaans, English, Southern
Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Setswana, Southern Sotho,
Swazi, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu)
• 10 Wikipedias (Southern Ndebele still a test wiki)
• 8 of the 10 least positions are occupied by the South
African official languages
• All of them have less than 1,000 articles (still)

6. Statistics about articles
• 126 articles (71 articles about History, Geography,
Art, Citizenship, Music, Religion + 55 articles
about the African states and Italy)
• Top 6 has 95-100% of the articles
• Afrikaans best African-based version (76%)
• 18 out of 32 versions have less than 50%

7. Statistics about articles
13 versions have less than 54 articles (i.e.
all African states)
• 11 versions have articles about only 1/3 of
the African countries
• Mostly of the articles are "X is an African
country"
• Infobox not always there

8. Some numbers about
quality assessment
• Good quality articles: English 17/126; French
6/126; Italian 2/126.
• On average, English and French Wikipedia
have a sufficient quality
• Italian Wikipedia unfortunately not :(
• [[HIV/AIDS]] is the only well-written article
on all three versions