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The Wikipedia link is what most of us click on when seeking basic knowledge about pretty much any topic.
But when it comes to South African Wikipedia pages, information is sometimes minimal or inadequate.
Wikipedia editor, Bobby Shabangu, noticed this before he started creating and editing Wikipedia pages.
Shabangu was a radio producer in Polokwane and did most of his preliminary research via English Wikipedia pages, which he then translated to siSwati.
“The stories that are here are more skewed to western topics. There’s not much content about the African continent,” he said.
There were also not many people who contributed to the siSwati pages.
“I realised if I did not edit, no one would edit for me,” he said.
Because of this, Shabangu started writing and editing pages specifically on African content.
He said he started Collins Chabane and Solomon Mahlangu’s Wikipedia pages with that in mind.
“When I searched [these Wikipedia pages] there was nothing.”
Shabangu is now a Wikipedia editor and a board member of Wikimedia South Africa, a chapter of the global Wikimedia.
He said most Wikipedia editors were male, white and mostly from the tech industry.
This was the lack of representation he would like to change.
While no one has control on who edits specific content, Shabangu said he personally likes to encourage people in Africa to write and edit content about Africa and about their indigenous cultures and traditions.
“Because nobody else will,” he said.
So within the organisation, Shabangu hosts editors’ workshops where he encourages editors to practice this.
South Africa to host Wikipedia conference
The Wikipedia organisation has also realised the lack of representation with regards to African content on Wikipedia pages.
With this in mind, 17 years after the first Wikimedia conference, the organisation will be hosting the annual event in South Africa for the first time.
Douglas Scott, the president of Wikimedia South Africa, said the organising team hosting the conference had applied to host before but was unsuccessful.
“With such a global community, the competition to host this event can be intense, but I believe that the reason why we were not successful in the past is geography,” said Scott.
On July 18-22 more than 700 Wikipedia volunteers, local academics, teachers and heritage specialists will gather in Cape Town to improve the diversity of knowledge represented on Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites.
Shabangu said the challenge with Wikimedia was that it becomes difficult to reference a lot of African content, with much of the knowledge being oral based.
He said the key issues the conference aimed to tackle was to decolonise content on Wikipedia and increase the number of women working on content.
Wikipedia has active editions in two South African languages, isiXhosa and Afrikaans.
The organisation said most of the other African languages are either missing or do not have regular contributions on its site.
“Currently the representation of human knowledge from Europe and North America is relatively well represented on Wikipedia generally, and [the] English language Wikipedia in particular.
“If we are serious about our goal of the sum of human knowledge then it is vitally important that African knowledge is better and more fully represented on Wikipedia,” said Scott.
