 | |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
|---|---|
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| URL | bm.wikipedia.org |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 2005 |
The Bambara Wikipedia is the edition of Wikipedia in the Bambara language, spoken in Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal. This edition of Wikipedia contains 819 articles.
The Wikipedia was started in the beginning of 2005, along with the Wolof Wikipedia and the Fula Wikipedia. Kasper Souren, a Dutchman who worked with Geekcorps, established this Wikipedia while working in a mission in Mali. [1] In December 2007 the Bambara Wikipedia had 142 articles and the Wikipedia in Fula had 28 articles. [1] According to Souren, he was volunteering in Mali in 2005 when he first encountered the Bambara language. [2]
Souren wrote in a report to an open source conference a Geekcorps Mali volunteer had created a side project where a person who wrote for the Wikipedia received $1 U.S. per article. [1] Souren went to Bamako and met people at a community center. He paid each person willing to write an article $1 U.S. The authors had no internet connections and no Wikipedia usernames. They wrote articles in Microsoft Word and gave the files to Souren. Souren uploaded each article and credited the authors. Souren wrote "I can’t understand 100 percent of what they wrote, but I could estimate that it was right. It is a Wikipedia anyway, so I hope they can correct it." [2]
The total expenses of the project amounted to fewer than $100 U.S. [1] In regards to the payment, Ndesanjo Macha, a Wikipedian who speaks Swahili, argued that it is unnecessary to pay editors for their efforts, and he believed he was speaking for everyone in Africa. Noam Cohen of The New York Times wrote "Most of the people who have heard about Mr. Souren's decision to pay for entries lauded his goal but questioned his tactics, saying that they undercut the Wikipedia spirit, and that, ultimately, a Bambara Wikipedia would work only if there was a voluntary community to support it." [2] This project resulted in the partial translation of the interfaces of the Bambara and Fula Wikipedias and the creation of some articles for those Wikipedias. Souren wrote that after 2005 the Bambara and Fula Wikipedias had "only sparse activity". [1] In December 2007 the Bambara Wikipedia had 142 articles and the Wikipedia in Fula had 28 articles. [1]
In 2013 Valentin Vydrin, lead creator of the "Bamana Reference Corpus (BRC)", wrote that "The Bambara Wikipedia counts a couple of hundred entries, most of them rudimentary and often written without any respect for the rules of orthography." [3]
Bambara, also known as Bamana or Bamanankan, is a lingua franca and national language of Mali spoken by perhaps 14 million people, natively by 4.1 million Bambara people and about 10 million second-language users. It is estimated that about 80 percent of the population of Mali speak Bambara as a first or second language. It has a subject–object–verb clause structure and two lexical tones.
Mali, officially the Republic of Mali, is a landlocked country in West Africa. Mali is the eighth-largest country in Africa, with an area of over 1,241,238 square kilometres (479,245 sq mi). The country is bordered on the north by Algeria, on the east by Niger, on the northwest by Mauritania, on the south by Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire, and on the west by Guinea and Senegal. The population of Mali is 21.9 million. 67% of its population was estimated to be under the age of 25 in 2017. Its capital and largest city is Bamako. It has 13 official languages, of which Bambara is the most spoken one.
The music of Mali is, like that of most African nations, ethnically diverse, but one influence predominates: that of the ancient Mali Empire of the Mandinka. Mande people make up around 50% of Mali's population; other ethnic groups include the Fula (17%), Gur-speakers 12%, Songhai people (6%), Tuareg and Moors (10%).
The Bambara are a Mandé ethnic group native to much of West Africa, primarily southern Mali, Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Senegal. They have been associated with the historic Bambara Empire. Today, they make up the largest Mandé ethnic group in Mali, with 80% of the population speaking the Bambara language, regardless of ethnicity.
The Mande languages are a group of languages spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples. These include; Maninka, Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Jula, Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are around 60 to 75 languages spoken by 30 to 40 million people, chiefly in; Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ghana and also in northwestern Nigeria and northern Benin.
N'Ko is an alphabetic script devised by Solomana Kanté in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa. The term N'Ko, which means I say in all Manding languages, is also used for the Manding literary standard written in the N'Ko script.
The Portuguese Wikipedia is the Portuguese language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was started on 11 May 2001. In addition to being the sixth most accessed website in the world, Wikipedia is the fifteenth most accessed website in Brazil and the sixth most accessed in Portugal. As of December 2023, it is the 18th largest Wikipedia by article count, containing 1,114,662 articles.
Geekcorps is a non-profit organization that sends people with technical skills to developing countries to assist in computer infrastructure development.
The Bamana Empire was one of the largest states of West Africa in the 18th century. Along with Kaarta it was one of the most important successors of the Songhai Empire. Based on an earlier kingdom established in 1640, it grew into a powerful empire in the early 18th century under Bitòn Coulibaly. The empire existed as a centralized state from 1712 until the 1861 invasion by the Toucouleur conqueror El Hadj Umar Tall.
The Arabic Wikipedia is the Modern Standard Arabic version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of December 2023, it has 1,223,091 articles, 2,517,227 registered users and 53,194 files and it is the 17th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 8th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was the first Wikipedia in a Semitic language to exceed 100,000 articles on 25 May 2009, and also the first Semitic language to exceed 1 million articles, on 17 November 2019.
Mansa is a Maninka and Mandinka word for a hereditary ruler, commonly translated as "king". It is particularly known as the title of the rulers of the Mali Empire, such as Mansa Musa, and in this context is sometimes translated as "emperor". It is also a title held by traditional village rulers, and in this context is translated as "chief".
The culture of Mali derives from the shared experience, as a colonial and post-colonial polity, and the interaction of the numerous cultures which make up the Malian people. What is today the nation of Mali was united first in the medieval period as the Mali Empire. While the current state does not include areas in the southwest, and is expanded far to the east and northeast, the dominant roles of the Mandé people is shared by the modern Mali, and the empire from which its name originates from.
The Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has 1,913,010 articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006, and 1,000,000 articles on May 16, 2013. It is the 8th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles and has the 4th-most edits. It also ranks 12th in terms of depth among Wikipedias.
The Japanese Wikipedia is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-source online encyclopedia. Started on 11 May 2001, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008. As of December 2023, it has over 1,396,000 articles with 13,244 active contributors, ranking fourth behind the English, French and German editions.
The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia is a 2009 popular history book by new media researcher and writer Andrew Lih.
The Wolof Wikipedia is the edition of Wikipedia in the Wolof language. It currently has 1,689 articles.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry.
N'Ko (ߒߞߏ) is a standardized unified koiné form of several Manding languages written in the N'Ko alphabet. It is used in Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and some other West African countries, primarily, but not exclusively in written form, whereas in actual speech the different Manding varieties are used: Maninka, Bambara, Dyula and others.
Petit nègre, also known as Français tirailleur or Petinègue or Forofifon naspa, is a pidgin language that was spoken by West African soldiers and their white officers in the French colonial army approximately 1857–1954, and across certain French colonies. It consists of a simplified form of French. It never creolized. This "simplified" language was taught to indigenous inhabitants in the French colonial army, and colonies.
Valentin Feodosyevich Vydrin is a Russian Africanist. Until 2011, he was the head of the Department of Ethnography of African Peoples of the Kunstkamera, Professor, Doctor of Philology. He is a Graduate of the Department of African Studies of the Faculty of Eastern Studies of the Saint Petersburg State University, where he was later a lecturer. He is an author of numerous scientific works, published in Russian, French, and English, on the topic of Mande languages, including dictionaries and treatises on grammatical features.
