Talk:Celtic Knot Conference 2020/Submissions/Search Support for Minority Languages

Oral languages

This is a topic that is close to my heart but I have a little expertise. So, I am really keen to join and learn. BTW are you also covering oral languages as they are at the bottom of the search support on the internet. Wikimedia projects do not yet have much support for oral languages whereas most oral languages are in the verge of fast extinction. --Psubhashish (talk) 04:33, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

I won't be covering oral languages specifically, but it is an interesting topic to think about. Are you thinking of languages in which all content in the language is audio or video rather than text? That's a very different search problem! And with minority languages, it's very unlikely that there is software to automatically do the conversion from audio to text. Even with English, that technology is not very good when people have non-standard accents or when the environment is noisy. In my opinion, the best first step to improve searchability in an oral language is probably to come up with a consistent writing system and convert documents to text, unfortunately. Trey Jones (WMF) (talk) 15:25, 6 July 2020 (UTC)