Four roles every language Wiki needs: A conversation with WMZA’s Herschal Jackson

Herschal Jackson is going through the request-for-adminship process on four South African language Wikipedias. He doesn’t speak any of them. It’s a rough measure of how dire the situation is, he says: many of South Africa’s local-language wikis have no administrators, no technical contributors, and no one in the community advocating for them consistently. On several of those wikis, the home page still greets readers with the English phrase “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” because no technical contributor has come along to configure the localised phrasing.

Jackson was appointed Executive Director of Wikimedia South Africa after a few years in the movement, making history as the Chapter’s first. He was first an outside facilitator brought in to run the board’s strategy session for 2024–2027, and then an executive coordinator. What drew him in wasn’t the planning documents but the lightning talks at that first session: Wikipedians recounting how they got involved, including one librarian who described a colleague “hammering” on them every day until they signed up. That on-ramp (the moment someone realises they can write for Wikipedia, not just read it) has become the thread running through the chapter’s current work.

Jackson’s plan for South Africa’s twelve official languages rests on a simple diagnosis: a healthy language wiki has four kinds of contributors, and most of South Africa’s local wikis are missing three:

1. Editors add and revise articles.
2. Language champions run meetups, keep community members active, and pull newcomers in.
3. Administrators
4. And there are technical contributors who build tools and localise the wiki so it doesn’t feel like an English wiki in disguise.

Where all four exist in abundance, a language wiki grows on its own. Where any are missing, the burden falls on a small handful of people. On one South African language wiki, one or two volunteers wrote close to 9,000 articles before stepping back to occasional edits, worn out from running workshops, campaigns, and advocacy on top of their day jobs.

Before the end of the current financial year, Wikimedia South Africa will pilot the four-role ecosystem model on a subset of the country’s language wikis, deliberately trying to seed each role rather than only adding editors. If the pilot demonstrates what Jackson thinks it can, the proposal for next year is a two- to three-year rollout across every South African language Wikipedia.

Programming that draws people onto Wikipedia in the first place is running in parallel. The chapter’s annual Heritage Month translation campaign — coordinated this year by board member and City of Johannesburg librarian Matete Lesele — mobilises South Africans every September to translate articles on heritage, history and culture into official local languages. An October follow-up will engage the South African Sign Language community (SASL became the country’s twelfth official language in 2023) to help sign the openings of the month’s top-performing articles so they can be embedded across language wikis.

Wikimedia South Africa is one of the only formal chapters on the African continent, and Jackson wants that presence to translate into mentorship rather than just visibility. Chapter scholarships now include a member from a neighbouring SADC community by design. Workshops have begun to run outside South Africa’s borders — a Wikipedia training for university students in Eswatini, mentorship work in Botswana. He holds the chapter to the line that the broader movement should be able to see the benefit of its existence, not only South Africans.

Asked where he’d like the movement’s attention pointed over the next year, Jackson lands on the ecosystem pilot. If it works, he says, it should be cheap to replicate wherever the same problem exists — which is almost everywhere small-language wikis are trying to grow. What he’d like it to demonstrate is what a working community around a language actually looks like: enough editors, one or two champions, at least one administrator, at least one technical contributor. Enough of the right people, in the right roles, that no single Wikipedian has to hold a language up on their own.