Today I received that my abstract that I submitted to the IDLELO3 conference that will be held in Dakar from the 18th till the 20th of March was accepted. Here it is:
Wikipedia in West African languages Wikipedia is a project for the creation of free encyclopedias in many languages. The project has a huge potential for the education and development of West Africa, where there are hardly any books or educational material available in native languages. The Wikipedias in Bambara, Peul and Wolof were started in the beginning of 2005. The interface of the Bambara and Peul Wikipedias were partly translated and some articles had been written as part of a side project of a Geekcorps Mali volunteer, in which people were given one dollar for every article placed on-line (with total expenses less than 100$). After 2005 there was only sparse activity, and in December 2007 there are respectively 142 and 28 articles. Not much happened to the version in Wolof until 2006, when many tiny articles with no real content were added to the Wolof Wikipedia. Then in April 2007 a Senegalese student living in Italy starting adding a lot of text in Wolof, and in November the Wikipedia reached 500 articles. We think combining an efficient distribution (e.g. through Moulinwiki.org) and content in native languages (besides Arabic, French, English or Portuguese) will offer great educational opportunities to Africans. Our hope is that NGOs, universities, Africans (both in and outside Africa) will be inspired to join in these efforts.I hope that I can meet up with Ibou, whom I´ve met before in Italy and with Renaud a former Geek who created Moulinwiki and did a lot more awesome work in Mali. Recently he set up an official French non-profit organization: Kunnafoni.