Internet

These days there is a huge number of requests for closure of wikipedias in African Languages. The issue is controversial as obviously one can look at them from a number of conflicting points of view. From one end you can pretty much say these requests are discriminatory in nature, as they tend to ignore the potential amount of public for information published in such languages and they deliberately ignore the objective problems (low alphabetization, lack of connectivity, to name but the first that come to mind) that slow down the production rate for such projects. On the other end, there is a number of practical problems associated with the management of an empty project, as spammers do not know linguistic boundaries and must be dealt with no matter if you have users for a project or not.

One of the things we initially used for this project was Alexa. When i-iter started, almost a year ago, we could not use proper stats as we did not control our own server, as we do now. So there wasn't much we could do to track traffic, apart from using Google and Alexa. So I was happy to install the Alexa bar on my Firefox and proudly show what appeared to be a massive traffic. In a few months we jumped up to the top 100k positions.