Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili/Report 2020-21

Activity report for Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili 2020/2021

As for the Corona Situation, we could not have much in-person activities.

As for our basic orientation we continued to communicate and coordinate development of Swahili wikipedia.

Generally our work is less event centered but rather continual communication and coordination of admin work. We could have some meetings in person as members Kipala and MuddyB are still both based in Dar es Salaam; Kipala could assist Riccardo once working with the ongoing wikipedia club at Alfagems Secondary school in Morogoro and ChriKo could meet with Kipala at Nairobi.

The wikipedia Club at the school in Morogoro continues thanks to Riccardo's position as school manager. Kipala could come over once to do a training weekend for the club students.

A major step was the broadening of the admin roles in Swahili wikipedia. So far this had been done exclusively by Jenga Wikipedia members. Since the Wikimedia User Group Tanzania has continued with gaining experience and activities, we proposed rules to vote new admins in September 2020 and the election was done in October 2020, adding a number of new admins for swwiki.

The challenge of keeping up quality continued. As the Tanzania User Group initiated a number of topical editing exercises in line with WMF initiatives, we saw the problem of (for our environment ) large numbers of edits uploading computer translations of English languages articles with bad results. We consulted among Jenga Wikipedia members and shared the discussion with the community and the Tanzania User Group. This resulted in an agreement in a new and sharper deletion and blocking policy which we follow since and which has shown to be helpful to keep the numbers of defective new articles lower.

We see that generally view numbers of swwiki kept on rising, from a daily average of 65.856 in 2019 to 73.056 in 2020 to 83.595 in January to October 2021 (pageviews.toolforge.org). We take this as a sign of larger internet use in East Africa, but also as an encouraging sign for the quality of swwiki, i.e.

a) we are interesting enough to come back and link our articles

b) we cover more subjects that are searched so that the google search leads to our content.

Generally through cooperation with Tanzania User group the development of swwiki has reached a new level.

We continue to see our task in coordinating admin work and quality control.

We need assistance from outside for templates and menue development; the competences / access to the wording of our menues is still a matter which is not understood, and we have inherited some silly menues which we do not know how to access.