Learning patterns/Documenting language oral history

A learning pattern forGLAM

Learning Pattern Library

Documenting language oral history

problemThe pattern presents a knowledge base for documenting, preserving, digitisation and usage of language oral history on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

solutionThis project aims at preserving, documenting and digitization of oral history of languages and make them available under an open license for improvement of existing and new articles on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

creator• Olaniyan Olushola

created on17:28, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

status:DRAFT

What problem does this solve?

• The learning pattern seeks to identify endangered languages that stand the risk of going to extinction. Thereby create knowledge and content gap for Wikimedia projects and language enthusiasts.

• Less than 10% of these languages and dialects were covered on Wikipedia.

• The problems above are signs of no communal engagements or activities to promote the identified languages on Wikipedia.

• There is no digital archival of the identified languages under open license.

What is the solution?

• Identify the problems that you and your team desire to solve around language documentation. This will require; list of the endangered languages, solutions to be adopted and the communal impact of the project on Wikimedia communities and the focused wikimedia projects eg Wikipedia and its sister projects

• Carry out community-wide research about the group, individuals or organisation that might have executed a similar project in the past.

• Schedule a meeting to understand challenges, opportunities, knowledge gaps, required skills etc about the project.

• Build a repository of a list of endangered languages with a focus on the existing content gap.

• Defines the project scope, management and overall success criteria that the team can go back to during the project. It contains the basic information of the project such as context, scope, team, and collaboration. It is equally important as an internal guide and for external stakeholders.

• Discuss your idea with a grant officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, who will help to determine the relevance of the project to the overall goals of the Foundation. At this junction, you will know the chances of the project being funded or not. Also, you will understand the WMF grant that will be suitable for this project.

• You can also attend relevant WMF's Office Hours where your project will be well appraised for funding if required.

• Submit your proposal for funding.

• Design a landing page that will showcase, the background history of the project, problems you plan to solve, the solution to be adopted, your project methodologies, the ongoing work and statistics where applicable.

• Ready to answer all the leading questions that will help the grant committee to validate the project for funding. At this stage, you are required to defend most of the information provided in your proposal eg budget etc.

• Prior to the announcement of the funding result of your proposal, you must have contacted all the expected stakeholders to your project eg for language documentation; the following are the project Stakeholders

1. The Local community will use the final result of the project eg Wikimedia affiliates.
2. The language community eg native speakers
3. The project crew; Producer/director, Scriptwriter, Documentation officer, Post-production, location/Production manager
4. Partners

• Create an appealing landing page where necessary information about the project could be accessed and used where required.

• Organise regular edit-athon=s where content produced would be used by the relevant Wikimedia communities on Wikipedia and its sister projects.