A Johannesburg librarian builds a Wikipedia for Sepulana, one article at a time

Matete Lesele, a municipal librarian in Randburg, is building a Wikipedia in Sepulana, his home language, which has no official status. During Heritage Month he also started a 30-day campaign to fill South Africa's indigenous-language Wikipedias. By the third day, 23 volunteers had translated 39 articles.

Lesele works as a librarian for the municipality in Randburg, in northern Johannesburg, and sits on the board of Wikimedia South Africa. In September, which is Heritage Month in South Africa, he began a 30-day campaign. Volunteers translate English Wikipedia articles into the country's indigenous-language editions. Some of these editions are so small that a single committed editor makes a difference.

Sepulana is his own project. It is a Sotho-Tswana language spoken mainly around Bushbuckridge in Mpumalanga, in the hills near Graskop and Pilgrim's Rest. Language planners have usually classed it as a variety of Northern Sotho, not as a language of its own. For that reason it has no official standing. Lesele is under no illusion about what depends on him. If he set the work down, he said, no one else would probably pick it up.

The gaps are large. The Xitsonga Wikipedia has about 1,000 articles, kept up by 41 active editors. Sepedi has 9,000. In the 2022 census, isiZulu was the main home language in 24.4% of households, almost three times the share for English. Online, the balance goes the other way. A Zulu speaker looking something up usually ends up reading in English.

Volunteers use Content Translation, a tool the Wikimedia Foundation introduced in 2015. It shows the English article next to a draft in the target language, and it carries over links and references automatically. Many people who might help hold back anyway, because they are unsure their English is good enough. Lindani Sikhakhane, who translates into Zulu, has a simple answer for them.

"Focus on your own language. It doesn't mean you have to understand English. Join, and learn as you go."

Lesele does not claim that Wikipedia is what keeps a language alive. "A language can live in conversation, in songs, in the things a grandmother says that no one writes down," he said. Much of that lives only in speech, and people forget it when no one writes it down. An encyclopedia is one place where it can be written down.

His hopes go beyond article counts. He imagines a Zulu speaker talking to him in Zulu while he answers in Sepulana, and both understanding each other. Neither would need to switch to English to be understood.

For now the work goes on in small steps, one translated article after another.