Grants talk:Project/MSIG/Shared Knowledge/Sign language content as a new form of knowledge

Overall Positive Feedback

Commendations to the team! The initial evaluation from the previous work appears to have laid a strong foundation for this work. The challenge of bridging the gaps to better understand community needs, the difficulty in engaging fluent speakers of endangered languages, the scarcity of reference works on community-related topics, and the unique challenges of working with sign language communities. The application demonstrates that the future plans outlined are being thought through intentionally to explore new forms of knowledge with the Macedonian Sign Language community. This application has laid down a good framework for working to better understand the community's needs, translating and localizing existing resources, and creating new resources or activities that aim to address those needs. The learning from this work could easily be influential to how other communities might think about engaging with people with disabilities within their own regions. YPam (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

Feedback for improvement

The following feedback is shared with the team to support the strengthening of the current application;

• Consider emphasizing and providing more details regarding the connection between your project and the anticipated impact on Wikimedia projects and communities, particularly in relation to the Movement Strategy Initiative you are looking to implement. This means highlighting specifically how the economic and legal research for content creation in Macedonian Sign Language will contribute to the development of a Wikimedia Sign Language community. Consider adding information regarding how this will foster inclusivity and diversity.
• The community engagement strategies could be expanded on some more to include feedback sessions with the Macedonian Sign Language community that may be positioned to provide valuable insights into specific needs and preferences.
• Please share more details related to the evaluation metrics and methods you aim to use to assess the effectiveness and impact of the videos on improving economic and legal literacy among the Macedonian Sign Language users. This could involve pre-and post-project surveys, focus groups, or usage analytics to provide concrete evidence of the project's success and areas for improvement.

An important consideration for the team is that, because this project will be implementing the outcomes of previous work, it would be great to use this phase to outline a plan or strategy for how this project's outcomes might eventually be integrated into the ongoing work of Wikimedia MKD, thereby ensuring sustainability and a lasting impact. This approach could contribute to further demonstrating the strategic alignment of your project with the broader Strategy 2030 goals of knowledge equity and knowledge as a service.

Thank you for all you do to enable the advancement of Movement Strategy.

YPam (WMF) (talk) 18:53, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

@YPam (WMF): My responses to the bullets in corresponding order are presented in turn:

• The recording of videos documenting the meaning of economic and legal terms in a sign language aims to expand the scope of the sign language content available at the Wikimedia projects. As the majority of sign language content at the moment consists primarily of videos documenting letters, numerals and words, this project will make a major step further by interpreting whole swathes of texts in order to explain the meaning of scientific terminology. This intends to widen the perspectives of the sign language community members around the world on how to contribute to the Wikimedia projects by enabling them to produce content that could deliver valuable learning for other users of the sign languages. Moreover, this project relies on the idea of strong collaboration between users of a spoken language and users of a sign language as a principle pre-condition for getting the sign language communities involved in the Wikimedia movement in a more inclusive and sustainable way.

• All activities with the Macedonian Sign Language community that were planned and implemented as part of the Capacity development for underrepresented communities had been based on the results of a thorough research of the needs and preferences of its members. In the same fashion, this project will employ the successful practices that were established during that project, which will include regular communication with the Macedonian Sign Language community in all phases of the procejt’s implementation as well as active participation by sign language users in evaluating the recorded materials.

• We plan to conduct a pre-implementation and post-inplementation surveys on a panel of Macedonian Sign Language users in order to study the progress in their understanding of the economic and legal terminologies covered by the project. Furthermore, we intend to conduct a survey on the perceptions and level of confidence to apply the economic and legal knowledge acquired from the recorded videos in everyday life.

Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 21:00, 17 February 2024 (UTC)