A wealth of opportunities hiding in plain sight

Kimberli Mäkäräinen & Susanna Ånäs

Wikimania 2019

Sharing in �the sum of all knowledge �is made very difficult for �less-resourced languages

(if not impossible)

Autonym

UI language

CLDR

ISO code

MediaWiki extra languages

IETF code

LangCom

Monolingual properties

SDC captions

ULS

Working with language �is a more accessible starting point�than interpreting culture

Depictathons

Decolonising the digital commons

Tagging mainstream media with the Saami languages Yle

Source: Pia Virtanen: Tagging Content with Wikidata at Yle at WMFI Saami workshop 5 June 2019

Co-development with �educational institutions and language authorities

1. ideas / opportunities
2. problems / obstacles
3. own experiences

• ideas / opportunities

• making the language better known in the non-Saami communities
• visualizing in Wikidata all places whose name is in that language with the tag in that language
• makes people aware of the association between the current place name in other languages with the indigenous name
• recruit academic experts, high-level students to (re)write articles and translate them
• promote taking photos for outsiders (also problem)
• outsiders shouldn’t do too much, but there are still things they can do
• concentrate on pictures and illustrations
• licenses
• we need to find a proper balance

• ideas / opportunities

• MT
• LinguaLibre
• automatically transferred to Wikimedia Commons
• can sound-caption images
• language preservation, but also educating outsiders at the same time
• can divide them up into categories in LL
• try to coordinate indigenous and minority languages globally
• escape from Wikipedia and go outside
• thematic campaigns, drives, and events
• gamifying native language use to make it an everyday activity
• automatically duplicate the captions and summaries in Commons

• ideas / opportunities

• videos presenting communities and their heritage
• pt of making Commons more multimedia-based and diachronic
• technical term creation
• Wikispeech (WMSE)
• Wikioral

2. problems / obstacles

• outsiders doing too much, suppressing the communities’ efforts
• All Wikidata / SDC-supported languages don’t work in local wiki(pedia)s eg infoboxes in language Wikipedias
• projects have problems getting out of the incubator
• NoongarPedia
• ContentTranslation doesn’t work with incubator projects
• does MinorityTranslate?
• There might not be an orthography for a language, or too many
• When a language is used in several countries there might be a problem with mutual intelligibility.
• This is not unique to indigenous or lesser-resourced languages

2. problems / obstacles

• Do you use different dialects in one article or do you only use one?
• What if people cannot understand another language variety?
• The uneven quality and coverage of important articles in larger Wikipedias (to be translated etc.) (cf :en:saami languages)
• Bot-created trash articles of bad quality
• Easy instructions for technical beginners are needed to begin enriching structured Commons (many technical beginners may be substance experts)
• Lack of language institution or authority
• Ume Saami does not work on Commons captioning

3. own experiences

• Been making categorizing in Commons and in Wikipedias with geographical objects but less in Wikidata & Structured Commons so far – but would like to do in future.
• No information about how we can query Wikimedia Commons with SPARQL
• Under-resourced Wikipedian communities who will not admit new members because they speak a slightly different version of their language
• Near Cape Horn, NO islands have their own indigenous name listed on Wikipedia, even in Spanish (yaghan, kawesqar, ona)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_Saami