Wikipedian in Residence

Lerato (🤣🤣🤣) prompted me. I prompted Chat GPT. My WIR (Wikipedian in Residence) Community Coordinator with the African Wikipedian Alliance gave me the final push. I’m starting to record, collect and publish the statistics about the status of “Vernacular Wikipedia”.

My dashboard about Vernacular Wikipedia has been placed on Github. Its offers brief information about 9 vernacular languages in South Africa. Depending which language you speak, the numbers will mean different things.

Afrikaans has the most articles (129 029) and isiZulu follows at second. (12 267). But in this is not a race, its the opportunity to learn. For example, if you look at Pages you’ll see a big a number. That’s the the non article information, the conversations and discussions, plans and edits, that goes on behind the scenes. Wikipedia has far more than articles.

If you would like to verify the data behind the dashboard, then click on Afrikaans or isiZulu for the json file. The same pattern applies to all json files. The dashboard is flashy? The json file to complicated? Then view the screenshot. This is my baseline for May 2026. I’ll try to collect the same information for the next five months.

The dashboard does make JSON prettier. https://web-learning.github.io/sa-wikipedia-dashboard/? But there is no suger coating the numbers. The current picture is for vernacular languages in South Africa is – frankly – bleak.

Not all is lost. There are some Wikipedians who ARE making a massive contribution. I’d like to introduce you to two of them (they are also from South Africa like me) who are also Wikipedians in Residence (WIR)

• Twin Mosia is a South African museum curator, Mosotho cultural activist, heritage practitioner and a Wikimedian from Mamafubedu, Free State. He is a co-founder and chairperson of the Lubombo-Maloti Wikimedia User Group.
• Jan Du Toit who joined the Wikimedia movement at the age of 12 in June 2017 became an administrator or on the Afrikaans Wikipedia in 2020. He has also created Wikidata items and uploaded freely licensed images to Wikimedia Commons on relevant topics. Du Toit served on the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia ZA from 2023 until 2026.

I have created another dashboard. Its not ready to be released. It shows a more comprenhesive picture about vernacular Wkipedia contributors. I’m hoping that this resource WILL give Lerato (🤣🤣🤣) an idea of who needs to be put into positions of administration.