Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili/Report 2019

Our group continued to communicate via discussion pages on swwiki and per email. 3 members could participate in the astronomy edit event in November 2018. Our 2 Dar es Salaam members participated also in a number of events of the Dar es Salaam group of Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania.

The major event of the past year was the "Swwiki workshop astronomia". In cooperation with Astronomy and Space Science Association of Tanzania and the Swahili Institute of University of Dar es Salaam we went through the text of a manuscript consisting of the astronomy-related content of swwiki, made corrections and decided on terminologies. In the spring months we had a number of edit meetups with members of the Dar es Salaam group to enter the corrections from the workshop into the online content and to select images for the intended book publication by the Swahili Institute. In June we handed the corrected manuscript to the Institute. Since then we have had discussions about inclusion of desirable illustrations (cost intensive for printing) which went slow because of summer break and ongoing projects of our partners at the institute but should be resolved in October.

A major challenge was the discovery of quality conflicts in a number of articles; a Kenyan group had registered as users and offered to insert promotional links into Swahili language articles. We were alerted by a global sysop about multiple spam and had an intense discussion in our group how to react in future as the extent of directed spam was a new phenomen for us.

Generally we have moved to look sharper into sourcing of information even for shorter articles.

We arranged between our members strategic content creation and aimed at widening the encyclopedic spread of content, concentrating on geografic information for some months. This contributed largely to the rise in content to more than 54,000 articles from 47,000 at 1 January. Also viewership (users) has been rising from 1.3 mio 2 years ago, via 1.6 mio in 2018 to 2 mio so far this year.

Our group has not had requests for new members in the last year. Unfortunately one of our longtime admins had to stop because of health concerns.