From Mbombela to the world: Bobby Shabangu has led a regional effort to draft the Africa Agenda, a document that captures the challenges faced
by the Wikimedia Communities in Africa. Photo: Supplied
The election of Bobby Shabangu to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is a historic milestone for the Wikimedia movement, as it marks the first time an African serves in this senior governance role.
Diversity in representation remains an important lesson we continue to learn as the human race, as it makes it easy for members of any society to take responsibility for that society’s endeavour when one can identify themselves with those at the highest echelons of such organised activity.
Shabangu’s election marks a real step towards a geographic diversity within the leadership of the nonprofit that provides an anchor for Wikipedia and its sibling projects, including Wikidata, Wikimedia commons, Wikisource and others. These projects collectively form the largest repositories of open human knowledge ever assembled by volunteer contributors from around the world.
The Wikimedia Foundation was established as a nonprofit organisation in 2004 and is governed by a Board of Trustees with ultimate responsibility for the organisation’s mission, legal and regulatory compliance, long-term strategy and fiduciary oversight.
Working in close partnership with the Foundation’s executive leadership and the global volunteer community, the Board helps create and sustain the conditions under which Wikimedia projects can thrive.
Through this stewardship, the Board must ensure that the foundation’s resources that are largely generated through public donations, the policies and programmes further the core mission of making knowledge freely accessible to everyone.
As a result the composition of such a board should be representative of the movement it serves and Shabangu fits the bill.
Shabangu’s is a typical South African story. He was born and raised in Mbombela which is nestled in the heart of Mpumalanga province to a not-so-well-to-do family. His early education started at Duma primary school and culminated in his matriculation at Lihawu secondary school.
In 2006 he applied for and was awarded the Darmasiswa Cultural Exchange scholarship which took him to Padang Panjang college of Indonesian arts in Sumatra where he studied for a diploma in Music theory and Indonesian language.
He recently graduated from Unisa with a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Communications and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Information Technology Management with the same institution.
His professional engagements outside the Wikimedia movement have complemented his community leadership.
Shabangu has worked at organisations including the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and is currently a Knowledge Manager at the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), contributing to research, communication and knowledge management initiatives.
His journey in this free knowledge movement began over a decade ago with contributions to multiple language editions of Wikipedia, most notably the Isiswati Wikipedia and other South African language editions.
He is truly our own and has proven himself truly a servant amongst us. His campaign for the board election was rooted in his experience as a Wikimedian who has for the past 15 years worked to promote underrepresented content and small language wikis from the African continent, which has allowed him to understand challenges and opportunities from the Global South lens.
Shabangu has served as President of Wikimedia South Africa, a local affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation, where he expanded outreach to volunteers in the country and deepened regional collaboration.
In the 13 years he spent as a board member of the South African chapter, Shabangu has worked in various impressive open knowledge projects, from experimenting with oral citation of indigenous knowledge in Namibia with the Ovaherero people, working with the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation to digitise photographs of heritage buildings in the city which led to a Blue Plaque project with the City of Johannesburg, through to leading the chapter in collaborating with the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) and the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) to run the biggest language focused Wikipedia project in Southern Africa called SADiLaR-Wikipedia-PanSALB (SWiP). This experience has only sharpened his resolve that free and open knowledge should be available to people in their language.
Beyond his service to the South African chapter, Shabangu has chaired the WikiIndaba Steering Committee, which is a body that coordinates annual continental gathering of African Wikimedians called Wiki Indaba conference, which is a platform for African Wikimedia volunteers to network, collaborate and share skills across African communities.
This role has seen Shabangu lead a regional effort to draft the Africa Agenda, a document that captures the challenges and problems faced by the Wikimedia Communities in Africa. This document has allowed the Wikimedia Foundation to refocus resource allocation to actual needs of African volunteers on the ground.
His service to the region truly embodies the adage of letting “the best amongst us lead”. It is little wonder then that he was embraced with the most votes at 2258 out of a total of 6129 votes cast.
“Most of the world’s young people live in the Global South and, as Wikipedia looks to grow the next generation of editors and administrators, it is essential we understand their needs,” says Shabangu. “As a longtime community member from the African continent, I will ensure their voices will be heard as the Wikimedia movement prepares for the next 25 years.”
It is fitting for Bobby’s election to come at a time when Wikipedia is confronting the rise of artificial intelligence and large language models, who while having benefited from using Wikipedia as training data, are beginning to have a negative impact in traffic to Wikipedia sites.
Despite the growing reliance on artificial intelligence technologies that can generate and summarise information, Wikipedia continues to occupy a central place in the avenue of global information ecosystem.
With more than 65 million articles published across over 300 languages, it remains one of the largest repositories of human knowledge ever assembled. Wikipedia content is viewed nearly 15 billion times each month and accessed from more than 1.5 billion unique devices around the world, underscoring its enduring role as a platform with truly global reach.
This scale is sustained by a vast and diverse community of nearly 250000 active volunteer editors who contribute to the platform every month. Together, these efforts drive billions of views across language editions worldwide, with the English Wikipedia alone hosting more than 7 million articles.
For Shabangu, campaigning for this position was driven by a belief that knowledge equity must be reflected not just in the content on Wikipedia but also in its leadership. Precisely because this new and exciting era demands someone who understands what volunteering in the Global South takes and looks like in order to chaperone the Wikimedia foundation to equitably resource efforts of thousands of volunteers in this direction.
The fate of Wikipedia therefore depends on Wikipedia’s ability to continue to bring in new knowledge to its sites. Luckily, Wikipedia has now documented every street name in London. It can turn its attention to the untapped indigenous knowledge of the Global South in its various formats and in so doing truly prepare to serve the next billion users coming online.
There’s no doubt that Shabangu will bring the wealth of knowledge layered with his unique world view to help the board and ultimately the Foundation to think about how best to also serve the volunteer in the rural areas who has intermittent access to the internet, editing on his old mobile phone with a singular purpose to see his language enter the digital realm though Wikipedia, because, at some point in his life, he was exactly that volunteer.
Dumisani Ndubane is a board member of Wikimedia South Africa