I started editing Wikipedia in 2003 and I was quite active until around 2007. In 2019 I'm starting to work on Wikipedia again, especially on African languages as part of FiFi Africa. Note that FiFi is a commercial project. We hire people in Africa to work on our own website in several languages, including Swahili. All content in African languages is available under the CC-BY-SA license which is compatible with Wikipedia. As part of our hiring process we let some people translate useful parts into African languages.

Please let me know if I'm doing something that was OK a decade ago but not so much these days.


I studied mathematics, sonology and artificial intelligence and I'm a hobby linguist.

Wikipedia

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Around 2004 I started Wikipedia in Limburgish, my father tongue, and I helped to grow it to over 1000 articles. These days it's quite active, with thousands of articles.

In 2005 I started Wikipedias in Bambara and Peul. I've contributed extensively to Wikipedias in English and Dutch from 2003 until about 2005.

In 2005 and 2006 I presented at Wikimania, which made it to the New York Times (note that I used OpenOffice, not MS Word).

I've also started Hitchwiki a little bit later, Trashwiki in 2008.

FiFi Africa

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Since I left Mali I always want to get back to working on Wikipedia in African languages, I just didn't really know how. Over the years I've done a lot of different things and in 2019 I figured out how to get to Ikigai: build FiFi, a finance portal in many different languages, including African languages and as a side effect grow Wikipedia in African languages. As a concrete start we are improving articles about Ebola in Swahili and other languages that are currently relevant.