 | |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
|---|---|
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| URL | bm.wikipedia.org |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 2005 |
Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
The Bambara Wikipedia is the edition of Wikipedia in the Bambara language, spoken in Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal. This edition of Wikipedia contains 842 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 4.2 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.
The music of Mali is, like that of most West 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 English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
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 family of languages spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples. They include Maninka (Malinke), Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Jula (Dioula), 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 and also in southern Mauritania, northern Ghana, northwestern Nigeria and northern Benin.
The Portuguese Wikipedia is the Portuguese-language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was started on 11 May 2001.
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 Tukulor Empire (1861–1890) was an Islamic state in the mid-nineteenth century founded by Elhadj Oumar Foutiyou Tall of the Toucouleur people of Senegal.
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 Essjay controversy was an incident in which Ryan Jordan, a Wikipedia editor who went by the username "Essjay", falsely presented himself as a university professor of religion from 2005 to 2007, during which time he was elected to top positions of trust by the community, including administrator and arbitrator. In July 2006, The New Yorker published an article about "Essjay", and mentioned that he was a university professor of religion. The New Yorker later acknowledged that they did not know his real name.
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 the Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has 1,997,105 articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on 8 March 2006, and 1,000,000 articles on 16 May 2013. It is the 8th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles and has the 4th-most edits. It also ranks 28th in terms of article depth among Wikipedias.
The Japanese Wikipedia is the Japanese 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 2024, it has almost 1,441,000 articles with 12,405 active contributors, ranking fourth in the latter metric 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 1,708 articles.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry. Wikipedians may or may not consider themselves part of the Wikimedia movement, a global network of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and other related projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
NKo (ߒߞߏ) is a standardized unified koiné form of several Manding languages written in the NKo alphabet. It is used in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and some other West African countries, primarily, but not exclusively, in written form, whereas in speech the different varieties of Manding 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 and across certain French colonies approximately from 1857 to 1954. It consists of a simplified form of French. It never creolized, and the "simplified" language was taught to indigenous inhabitants in the French colonial army in the French colonies.
The epic of Silâmaka and Poullôri is an African epic transmitted by oral tradition, mostly in the languages Fula and Bambara, and always accompanied with music. It relates the adventures of two heroes, Silâmaka and Poullôri, who are bound by friendship.
