Arctic Knot Conference 2021/Submissions/Reimagining (radical) oral Wikimedia projects for oral languages

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Submission no.
22
Title of the submission
Reimagining (radical) oral Wikimedia projects for oral languages
Author of the submission
Psubhashish
Submission format
  • Pre-recorded video presentation (10–30 minutes)
Language of presentation

English

E-mail address

subhashish(_AT_)theofdn.org

Country of origin
India
Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
O Foundation
Personal homepage or blog
https://theofn.org/openspeaks
Abstract (up to 300 words to describe your proposal)

Four of the popular Wikimedia projects -- Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiktionary -- as a construct are extremely incompatible with almost all smaller, low-resource and oral languages. Knowledge is neither equitable nor open when a speaker of a particular language cannot access that knowledge (or contribute) in their own language, that to only because of platform incompatibility. What is the entry-level Wikimedia project for the speaker of a language with no standardized writing system? To make the Wikimedia movement inclusive for everyone, we probably need to reimagine in radical ways how existing projects are defined or create new Wikimedia projects to address the issues that low-resource languages often face (and dominant languages never face).

As a documentary filmmaker and multimedia nerd, I have not only spent a lot of time working closely with indigenous and endangered language speakers, I have also learned from them the practical challenges that their diaspora face. Three documentaries that I started working on in 2018 -- in indigenous languages Kusunda, Bonda/Remosam and Ho -- helped creating a set of frameworks for long-term and community-led open knowledge projects. As each low-resource language communities is uniquely positioned in terms of their demographic barriers and new opportunities, the approach to address the challenges would largely vary. This session would be a soft launch of these frameworks that are given a placeholder name -- OpenSpeaks Framework (named after OpenSpeaks which is an open project hosted on Wikiversity to help multimedia archivists document low-resource languages).

What will attendees take away from this session?

This session will be helpful for the audience to use the Framework as a tool and capture the socio-linguistic and other critical factors for a particular language. It also, in every stage, puts the average native speakers in the center to ensure the methodologies they would imagine or the solutions they would ideate are inclusive enough for everyone.

When the session is not going to provide ready solutions (as many Wikimedia projects that can potentially solve the real world issues do not exist yet!) it would derive a lot from practical examples. For instance, how can a language community be creative to use a neighboring writing system that fully express all the native pronunciations and create an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) converter tool. Such a tool could allow make a wordlist/dictionary of all known words and even use LinguaLibre to record the pronunciations of those words by leveraging the robustness Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide. An open voice library could potentially lead to creating voice recognition and speech synthesis engines that are not only beneficial for persons with disability but oral-language speakers.

Theme of session
  • Empowering wiki communities
Slides or further information (optional)
Special requests
I would use open/closed captioning and it would be great if the video streaming platform could support the same.
Is this Submission a Draft or Final? Final

Interested attendees[edit]

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  1. Anass Sedrati (talk) 10:19, 16 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Trey Jones (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]