Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub/Progress

Here you can see an overview of ongoing, planned and past projects.

Planned

Growing the Hub - grant application

Our current grant application involves activities to build a stronger community around this initiative, and act on some of the learnings from the research report. The grant is built on the strategy that we spent the first part of 2024 defining.

Read the grant application here.

Ongoing

Wikitongues Movement Strategy Grant Project

A project to help launch 10 new Wikipedia projects in underrepresented languages. The Language Diversity Hub and Wikitongues project is ongoing.

Past projects

Movement Strategy Grant Research Project

The first Movement Strategy Implementation Grants proposal was approved. The research project ran from May to December 2022.

The results can be read on the research - page. page.

Arctic Knot survey

From the post-conference survey at the Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference we have gathered a list of the suggestions to what functions people would want to have in a Language Diversity Hub:

Help with access to archives, share ideas, provide PR (Collaborations and partnerships).
Give support on how to establish partnerships for affiliates and language projects and how the hub can be a bridge to the UNESCO Decade of Indigenous languages 2022-2032 (Collaborations and partnerships).
Provide resources for working with linguists to deepen the approach to languages (Collaborations and partnerships).
Create workspaces that transcend Wikimedia and have an impact on the cultural preservation of languages (Collaborations and partnerships).
Make it easier to approach communities about the opportunities the Wiki projects can afford them, how we can help (training, funding (this should be launched finally), etc.), what other communities have been doing similar projects and what the outcome was (Collaborations and partnerships).
Advocate for technical development on wiki for small wiki languages (Collaborations and partnerships).
Coordinate collaboration opportunities (Collaborations and partnerships).
Serve on cooperation efforts (Collaborations and partnerships).
Give support on how to bring projects (Wiktionary, Wikipedia) out of the incubator space (Capacity building).
Give support in learning how to edit Wikiquote and other Wikis to promote languages (Capacity building).
Give skills training (Capacity building).
Give capacity building support on anything language related (Capacity building).
Share experiences, being able to reproduce other people's initiatives (Capacity building).
Help smaller Wikimedia editors coordinate strategies and tactics for editor recruitment and support (Capacity building).
Provide informative videos (Capacity building).
Provide peer-to-peer learning, and shared capacity building (Capacity building).
Make an overview of the process from A-Z for a new Wikipedians (Governance).
Help with building community learning pattern (Governance).
Make some continually updated FAQs for best practices could be great (Governance).
Develop resources and use Wikipedia to protect endangered languages (Governance).
Serve on administrative capacities (Governance).
Finish the work with Global templates (Technical support).
Help with providing a single-point of reference for working with WMF developers on smaller-Wikimedia functionality (Technical support).
Provide technical support for creating things such as Wikidata infoboxes, how to write guidelines, etc. (Technical support).
Develop technical tools that generate a user-friendly space for contribution (Technical support).
Help with providing some tools for us to connect with the hub and other people (Technical support).
Provide Incubator support - Help on how to retain more editors (Technical support).
Help improve the centralized reference resources across the movement to ensure consistent metadata capturing in our sharing about these languages (Technical support).
Provide incentives (mobile data, browsing equipment) to those interested in diversifying the languages to protect smaller languages from going into extinction (Provide resources).
Provide internet data/connection (Provide resources).
Provide tools like laptops or good Android phones (Provide resources).
Give financial support for projects (Provide resources).

Wikimania workshop

Building on input the Wikimedia Norge team gathered during the Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference 24–25 June, we facilitated a workshop at Wikimania 2021 to gather input on 1: what focus areas a possible Wikimedia Language Diversity hub could have, and 2: what partnerships in the wider ecosystem of free knowledge a hub could benefit from. Here is a link to the etherpad with session notes

Wiki Indaba

With steering group member User:Shahadusadik were present with a booth at Wiki Indaba 2021. The booth was a place to share experiences with editing on Wikipedia in underrepresented/new/smaller/ small but large/indigenous languages. We wished to provide a space to connect and talk about the fun and the challenging parts of contributing - to further develop the idea of a thematic hub for language diveristy on the Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Foundation workshop on hubs

The Movement Strategy and Governance team of the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a co-creation workshop on the concept of Hubs on November 27, 2021. Members from the Steering Committee took part in this workshop.

Lingualibre.org

This Wikimedia project is dedicated to audio document the diversity of human languages, via their words, voices, and a rapid recording studio. Over 800,000 audios have been recorded in 4 years.

Steering committee meetings

Minutes from recent steering committee meeting are organized in a google document for practical reasons.

2022 - October

Highlights

Updates on the MSI grant project so far.
Introduction of new observational members.
Discussion of next steps, some of the suggestions for next projects:
- Improving keyboards, collaboration with Giellatekno at University of Tromsø and Endangered Alphabet.
- Improving the incubator and follow up of
- Doing a wishlist survey, to document more precise needs
- Duplicate current project with 5-10 new communities.
- Capacity building project - look to other initiatives in the movement to be used in the language community.
- Physical conference for Language Diversity Hubbers
- Language Diversity Conference in Africa

Which projects to start with will be decided shortly.

2022 - May

Highlights:

Introduction to the WikiWomen project by Rebecca.
Update on the MSI Grant project.

2022 - March

Highlights

MSI grant approved, new timeline: March to December.

2022- January

Highlights:

Agreed on including observational members to the steering committee. Everyone interested can be invited to join meetings, and also express opinions. in case of a vote only the original members have voting rights. Everyone are encouraged to invite relevant people to join.
Agreed to be joining in a MSI Grant with Wikitongues.

2021- December

Video call for the steering committee, about the Movement Strategy Implementation Grant application. 5 members of the steering committee took part. Have a look at the draft here.

2021- November

Minutes

Topics for the meeting:

There is a big movement-wide meeting about hubs coming up, that will happen on Saturday 27 November, from 13:00 to 17:00 UTC. There are some open questions about hubs in the Wikimedia world that we should think about and try to come up with answers for for this meeting.
MSIGs! Movement Strategy Implementation Grants. We were talking about this during the last meeting, and now it is getting nearer the time to apply. We have some ideas for projects that we should apply for as a group that we would like to discuss.

2021- October

Minutes

Pitching game

In the meeting 10 of October we did a pitching game to get the discussions going. Here we have gathered some bullet points on issues that were raised under the different statements. The goal was to get a common understanding between people working with different small languages on challenges we face.

STATEMENT #1 Many small language communities face similar challenges, today there is no movement-wide structure that facilitates exchange of problems and solutions.

Templates pose challenges for many groups. Inexisting support system for that today. Global templates are a part of the solution. Need one place to go, to ask for support about everything. templates: big challenges many places finding tools, and get support with them storage system for terms, and support for finding good terms in small languages a place to discuss language related questions

Many of the communities don’t know how to use or have access to basic technology: need tools to open the doors to those communities. We need mobile friendly tools that can be used off-line.

STATEMENT #2 It is a problem that small language communities that are not yet on wiki aren't aware of the Wikimedia projects' opportunities for language revitalization and conservation.

Unintentional harm has been done on several small language Wikipedias by non-speakers: need strategies or tools to avoid that. Can we really claim that wikiprojects can be used for conversation? Probably with Wikisource, but not so relevant for languages that don’t have a tradition of writing. We need to reach out to more language communities.

STATEMENT #3 Wikipedia in underrepresented languages face challenges on sources, intellectual property rights and knowledge systems that are quite different from majority languages versions.

Need a quicker way to get all projects supported in a new language. Today it might take a long time from release out of incubator, to all the other features of Wikipedia becoming active on a new language version. Transfer of knowledge in indigenous cultures leaves few or no written sources - how to include this knowledge in Wikipedia? Ethical and privacy issues of image archives and artefacts have to be protected, examples from GLAm institutions where that has been disregarded. chance to flag content, protect living family members.

STATEMENT #5 It is difficult for groups or individuals working with small language Wiki-projects to get funding from the WMF

Not all communities can receive funding from the US by US law, maybe a different funding model can change that. Requirements from the WMF might lead to resourceful people not getting funding because of technicalities. A better funding structure could give more opportunities for individuals to make an impact for small language wiki-projects.

STATEMENT #8 We need a better system for identifying knowledge gaps about underrepresented topics.

Knowing what you don't know is difficult. Need to go out and talk and listen to people. We can be the bridge. The community themselves has to discuss the gaps. On irish wp: heavy articles on language, missed out of the fun parts of irish life - why?