Monday, April 19, 2010

Of tiny acorns mighty oaks grow

There is no Ganda text yet
The Ganda Wikipedia is a tiny #Wikipedia. Last month its number of articles grew by 6%, or two articles, its traffic is expected to grow to 42K up from 26K and today we welcome localisations at translatewiki.net.

If the Ganda language were in the incubator, few people would notice because it has quite some way to go before it reaches the requirements for creation. However, this is an existing Wikipedia and as such its current activity is really welcome.

When you consider that some 10 million people speak this language, roughly 10 times more then Estonian, you can appreciate that this tiny acorn has potential. As Hans Rosling explained in one of his talks, there are people in Africa who can, who have the potential and who have the possibility to do whatever we do in the west.

Our strategy should be to enable the people who can. To provide the tools to make a difference. A difference can be made when we know what people want to read.. The WMF wants to grow its traffic and, the Ganda Wikipedia grew 53% on a yearly basis. To compare, last months traffic for the Estonian Wikipedia was 6.3 M and decreased on a yearly basis by 5%.
Thanks,
       GerardM

2 comments:

Jeroen De Dauw said...

42K? That's definitely promising :D

GerardM said...

More promise then anything... but given that the Ugandan web world has been recently enriched by new cables, it is significant given the size of the Ganda speaking population.
Thanks,
GerardM