Category:Wikimedia UNISA meetup 2015

English: Amir Aharoni represented Wikimedia on June 3 in Pretoria, South Africa, at a meetup organized by UNISA to discuss the intellectual development of African languages, especially the South African official languages, through Wikipedia. Speakers were Professor L Teffo of UNISA, Laurette Pretorius of the Academy of African Languages and Science (AALS) at UNISA, Amir Aharoni of Wikimedia, Friedel Wolff, Nozibele Nomdebevana and Abraham Mulaudzi of UNISA.

The specific aims of this workshop were to 1) explain what Wikipedia is and why it is of strategic significance for sustainable multilingualism; 2) explore possible ways to identify topics on which to write and to select articles in the English Wikipedia to translate; 3) provide basic technical information on how to participate and how AALS can assist; 4) get a glimpse of what it means to be a Wikipedian – examples and lessons learnt.

Amir Aharoni and Nozibele Nomdebevana demonstrated the new content translation tool, using English to Xhosa as an example. Amir also illustrated the Dutch to Afrikaans machine translation. The possibilities of future implementation of machine translators or dictionaries were discussed, which would preferably be open source, or if necessary copyrighted. The question of template translation was touched on. Creation of a user account on the android interface was explained.