7 in 7: Celebrating the impacts of Wikimedia Fulfulde Community on Wikidata

In the past seven months when you tried to look up for even the most shortest forms of Fulfulde words like “e” which means “and”, “a” meaning “you” and so on, none of these words could be found on Wikidata. Because they did not exist and there was no one to create even the simple lexemes like them. However, that story changed entirely following the first ever physical meetup organized by the Wikimedia Fulfulde Community.

With Musaddam Idriss as the project lead, active community members were introduced to Wikidata at the end of August 2022 and made their first of thousands of contributions of Fulfulde lexemes to Wikidata. This increases visibility of the language on Wikidata and puts the language on equal footing to similar languages like Hausa, Klingon, and Hindustani each which have between 1,000 to 2,000 lexemes.

Since August, the community members keep up their active participation and made numerous contributions to change the existing narrative. It was not a month later in September 2022, that the Fulfulde language become the second language with the highest number of lexemes among the languages spoken in Nigeria with over 3,000 lexemes – second to the Igbo language with only a difference of a few hundred lexemes.

Now, it is exactly seven months since the members of the Wikimedia Fulfulde Community where introduced to Wikidata and it marks our notorious achievement of creating over 7,000 lexemes! Which makes it the first Nigerian language to reach that height and in Africa second only to the Dagbani language of Ghana.

This huge success was achieved following the Community’s Thematic Week and Capacity Building Project where series of trainings, editathons and workshops were held. These events gave room to the recruitment of new editors from various places in about three different states of Nigeria – and added new skills for the existing editors.

The Fulfulde Wikimedians Community is a newly established unrecognized affiliate that is a part of a smaller and underrepresented communities with a strong vision of making greater impacts across the Wikimedia projects and to stand out of the crowd among the bigger communities. Learn more and get involved on Meta-wiki.