Capacity development for underrepresented communities/Evaluation
The evaluation phase aimed to summarise the learning and determine the impact of the project. It was conducted in the period from 1 to 31 January 2023.
Lessons learnt - Communities require thorough research to get familiar with their needs and expectations. Research is an important approach to acquiring valuable knowledge that can be used as a basis for developing an implementation plan. There are multiple research tools available, so getting thorough understanding is dependent on their right combination. Usually, it stands to reason to use direct surveying of community members and indirect interviewing of experts.
- Every community is different with specific needs and expectations. However similar is the state of underrepresented communities in the society, their differences are always more pronounced. This means that every single community has to be approached separately so that a good understanding about their needs and expectations is gained.
- Fluent speakers of endangered languages are difficult to find and more difficult to motivate. The majority of speakers of endangered languages are people in the working-age group whose everyday job is unrelated to the conservation of their native language. These people are low in number and cannot be easily reached, so a strategy involving collaboration with associations of the particular community may be helpful. Furthermore, getting the people involved in the Wikimedia movement is a real challenge requiring a lot of patience and time invested because their replacement is severely restricted due to the low number.
- Availability of reference works on topics related to the communities may be scarce. Typically, members of the underrepresented communities are not only interested in generating content in their language but also in promoting their culture. However, reference works on such topics are usually scarce, which may be discouraging for their involvement. This being said, collaboration with associations that dispose of or have access to such works in advance is strongly recommended before conducting direct outreach to community members.
- Communities may prefer generating content about their culture in other languages. Depending on the state of the underrepresented community in the society, its members may find it more important to generate impartial and reliable contents about their culture in the most widely spoken languages in their area of residence. In such cases, it is practically impossible to get people from a community involved in contributing to the Wikimedia projects in their own language because they struggle to gain some basic rights and their primary goal is to improve the social status of their community.
- Hybrid events can help to significantly increase reach. Members of the underrepresented communities are usually scattered across a larger geographical area, so reaching out to all of them physically would require a lot of time and efforts. Yet, the rising popularity of the hybrid events during the COVID-19 pandemic and the availability of virtual conferencing platforms allow to hold hybrid events with both in-person and online attendance. In addition, the technology used for organising hybrid events enables easy recording and fast sharing with others.
- Collaboration with a sign language interpreter is a must. When it comes to working with a group of people who do not understand a spoken language, engaging someone who will mediate the communication is necessary. This person is usually an expert with a very good understanding of the community and could also provide useful insights in the research phase as well as participate in the development of an implementation plan.
- Sign language users are generally not fluent in the native language spoken within their family. Owing to the fact that the majority of sign language users have never heart the spoken language within their family, they are likely to lack fluency in the written form of the language either. In other words, they view it as a foreign language and may not be able to write high-quality content.
- Working with a sign language community requires innovating in free knowledge. As a result of the lack of fluency in the spoken native language within their family, there is a need to work towards identifying other ways to get the sign language users involved in the Wikimedia movement. One possible way is to produce free videos documenting content in sign language as a new form of free knowledge.
- L'important c'est de participer. Pierre de Coubertin's idea that "important is to participate" (French: L'important c'est de participer) fully applies to the activities with underrepresented communities. Given that the pool of potential editors from such communities is very low and strenuous efforts are needed to motivate them to take part, it is ungrateful to have expectations other than a slow development of a new community of Wikimedians.
Future plans - Aromanian-speaking community. Following the successful implementation of the planned activities with the Aromanian-speaking community, the future plans include further integration of the newly emerging community into Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe. In that context, a potential follow-up could consist of participation in Wikimedia CEE Spring, joining the network of Wikimedia CEE Hub and sending delegates at the Wikimedia CEE Meeting.
- Romani-speaking community. Considering that the implementation of the planned activities with the Romani-speaking community was unsuccessful, which possibly accounts for the preference towards generating contents about their culture on other languages, the future plans include collaboration on organising events in which members of the community would write impartial and reliable articles to break the common stereotypes about the Romani people in the society.
- Macedonian Sign Language community. As the collaboration with the Macedonian Sign Language community resulted in identifying a new form of free knowledge, an idea was born to conduct a project on producing videos documenting scientific terminology interpreted in the Macedonian Sign Language. Specifically, the project would focus on interpreting economic and legal terms that the members of this community encounter in everyday life but fail to clearly comprehend.