The representation and preservation of our continent and our stories matter.
- Africa represented in the Wikimedia Foundation board.
- Anyone can edit Wikipedia.
- South Africans are encouraged to add knowledge on Wikipedia in their language.
Bobby Shabangu, an activist for linguistic diversity on Wikimedia projects, has big plans to grow the platform in South Africa following his 2025 historic appointment as the first African board member of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimedia is a global, non-profit community for sharing open-content educational resources for free. The Wikimedia Foundation funds Wikipedia.
Shabangu’s plans include strong partnerships with galleries, libraries, archive institutions, and academic institutions across South Africa to grow local language content and improve representation on Wikipedia.
On Saturday, February 21 Wikimedia celebrated 14 years in South Africa. At the celebration, Shabangu expressed his excitement for this appointment as a board member, he said, “I feel fantastic about this and it is important because it will actually bring diversity of thought on the board of trustees.
“I know what it is to not have data, to not have network, such things people who aren’t from Africa may not relate and sitting on the board will open doors for more support and inclusion for communities in the Global South.”
Shabangu’s relationship with the organisation dates back to late 2010s when he would use Wikipedia to prepare for prime time shows he was producing for Ligwalagwala FM.
This was when he noticed there were information gaps in African languages on the platform. With less than 10 000 articles published in each of our national languages.
When he discovered the edit button, he aggressively started translating English articles into the five national languages he knew at the time – Siswati, Ndebele, Zulu, Sesotho and Setswana.
Herschal Jackson, Executive director of Wikimedia South Africa, said it is important to be active in our consumption of Wikipedia research. “We are now working on getting more people to contribute to knowledge on Wikipedia in their own language. English is already sitting at over seven million articles. We all need to push together,” he said.
Lwazi Molepo, a biomedical scientist and cultural preservation enthusiast emphasized the importance of editing the platform using an example of Star Wars: A New Hope movie, where the Jawas spoke Zulu and Xhosa yet Wikipedia did not document that.
Claiming that as a result of this omission, other film makers who copied the language spoke gibberish. “We ought to correct incorrectly documented information and add missing information on the platform for the sake of the future generation.”
Everyone is encouraged to edit in information about their tribes and translate already existing English articles into their own mother tongues.
FEATURED IMAGE: Herschal Jackson addressing the audience at the Wikipedia 14th birthday. Photo: Lulah Mapiye
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