They wrote articles in Microsoft Word and gave the files to Souren.

"[2] The total expenses of the project amounted to fewer than $100 U.S.[1] In regards to the payment, Ndesanjo Macha, a Wikipedian who speaks Swahili, argued that it is unnecessary to pay editors for their efforts, and he believed he was speaking for everyone in Africa.

Noam Cohen of The New York Times wrote "Most of the people who have heard about Mr. Souren's decision to pay for entries lauded his goal but questioned his tactics, saying that they undercut the Wikipedia spirit, and that, ultimately, a Bambara Wikipedia would work only if there was a voluntary community to support it.

Souren wrote that after 2005 the Bambara and Fula Wikipedias had "only sparse activity".

[1] In 2013 Valentin Vydrin, lead creator of the "Bamana Reference Corpus (BRC)", wrote that "The Bambara Wikipedia counts a couple of hundred entries, most of them rudimentary and often written without any respect for the rules of orthography.