180 Country Report: Wikipedia in South Africa

It comes unsurprising that Africa is a very underrepresented continent when it comes to media coverage and accessibility. As seen in a visual from January 31st’s class, South Africa, alongside Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco are the only African countries with over 1,000 average monthly edits in 2014. Compared to its 60 million residents, this is a very small number, which is somewhat interesting given the fact that South Africa has such a large English language presence. Although, the most spoken language in South Africa among natives, Afrikaans, only has 3 editors per million speakers, whereas English has 27. It goes without saying that Wikipedia in South Africa has a ton of room to grow. The page titled South African Wikipedians shows that there are only 260 users from South Africa, which leads me to believe that much of the content we see on the country come from external sources. Another indicator of this that I inferred was the fact that many of the article sources from the Wikipedia page in English, South Africa, were government pages, the United Nations, and American news sources. From personal experience with Wikipedia in the United States, it is somewhat discouraged in academic atmospheres due to user editing, so it would only be fair to assume that it is even less utilized as a source in South Africa.

The Wikipedia content regarding South Africa is actually quite extensive, not only in quality, but also in quantity with roughly 500. There is a mix between importance indicators of the pages, with a majority being deemed “mid,” but most of them had to do with important figures, wars/epidemics, and international sports. The South Africa Wikipedia page in English covers important topics very well. I give it credit in covering topics, such the economy and culture. When I look at the South Africa Wikipedia page in Afrikaans, the majority language, there is a much different perspective. It is relatively similar in length but contains a much more extensive history into European colonialism, growth of the white population, and Apartheid in South Africa. This makes a lot of sense when you take cultural preferences into account, and also points to the idea of Wikipedia being highly influenced by the Western world. Obviously, most of the users editing the Afrikaans page are predominantly South African. But when I looked at the editors of the English page I encountered drastically different results. Interestingly enough, I found quite a few editors from Italy, and a few from the United States. This certainly makes sense, as it pertains closely to what has been discussed in class meetings. Furthermore, the English page was edited last at 6:00 pm on February 12th, and the most recent edit on the Afrikaans page was in October of 2022. As a trend that I have noticed, Wikipedia usage and creation among South Africans is used as a much more powerful tool to promote past injustices, as opposed to what outsiders put on the website.

Sources:

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suid-Afrika

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:South_African_Wikipedians&pageuntil=Shadowfoxza%0AShadowfoxza#mw-pages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_South_Africa/Popular_pages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_South_Africa/Statistics