Grants:Project/MSIG/Building the Language Diversity Hub

statusproposed

Movement Strategy

LDH/Building the Language Diversity Hub

Building on the work from previous proposals, building the Hub, improving the incubator and supporting communities.

targetSmall and new language communities using Wikimedia projects.

start date15 August 2024

start year2024

end date15, February 2025

end year2025

budget (local currency)46227.5

budget (USD)46227.5

grant typeOrganization

non-profit statusyes

grantee• Shahadusadik

contact(s)• uniques.sadikegmail.com• wikimedialanguagediversityhubgmail.com

organization (if applicable)• Wikitongues

website (if applicable)• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_Diversity_Hub

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Summary

The Wikimedia movement is one of the most linguistically diverse projects on the internet, with a global community across all regions of the world. But despite this vast diversity, similar challenges hinder the growth and progress of underserved languages. Hence, there is a need for a Wikimedia Hub that brings together all the different voices and partners to collectively progress towards the strategic direction of knowledge equity.

Theory of Change

This theory of change outlines a step-by-step approach, from initial guidance to long-term support, to empower new language communities and ensure their success in Wikimedia projects. By building their capacity and fostering collaboration, this proposal seeks to foster a vibrant and inclusive Wikimedia ecosystem.

The Language Diversity Hub expertise will create scalable guidelines for all stakeholders working with under-resourced languages. This proposal will focus on identifying interests and existing content in the target language and introducing new communities to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

Project Goal

What will be the outputs of your project and how will those outputs contribute to advancing a specific Movement Strategy Initiative

Building the Language Diversity Hub

The goal of this project is to pilot the Language Diversity Hub by launching initiatives that will support emerging language communities, and improve the way knowledge and capacities are shared between the different language communities using Wikimedia projects. The vision of the Language Diversity Hub is to

• Be the learning and onboarding spot for new language versions of Wikimedia projects.
• Actively work to bring more languages into the Wikimedia movement.
• Bring more awareness to the challenges experienced by emerging language communities and cultivate multilingual approaches across all movement strategy initiatives.
• Actively support and further develop existing language communities.
• Be a central point for collaboration for language-diversity projects both internally and externally to the Wikimedia movement.

What specific Movement Strategy Initiative does your project focus on and why? Please select one of the initiatives described here

Regional and thematic hubs

Project Background

When do you intend to begin this project and when will it be completed?

Start date: 15 August 2024

End date: 15 February 2025

Where will your project activities be happening?

This is an initiative for a global hub, and most of the activities will happen online. This project will stimulate underserved language communities' participation in the Wikimedia movement.

What specific challenge will your project be aiming to solve? And what opportunities do you plan to take advantage of to solve the problem?

The challenges this project aims to address:

The movement struggles with disjointed resources, making it difficult for communities to find the support they need to thrive. This is especially true for smaller or underserved communities that often lack the technical skills and visibility within the larger movement.

The opportunities that this project aspires to seize:

We have conducted a research project, and outlined a strategy plan for the next few years. This document results from more than 40 hours of work by the steering committee, in which we have decided to use the next few months to focus on the following programmatic points:

Empowerment and Inclusion:

Facilitate community engagement and active participation in Wikimedia projects. Foster linguistic diversity and multilingualism through collaborative partnerships.

Supporting Sustainable Growth:

Advocate for increased support for new language projects beyond incubation, emphasizing their representation in Wikidata, Commons, and other platforms.

Technical and Human Support:

Connect communities with experts in various technical areas. Assist communities in finding funding beyond rapid grants.

Does this project aim to apply one of the examples shared in the call for grants and if so which one?

Pilot

Project Activities

What specific activities will be carried out during this project? Please describe the specific activities that will be carried out during this project.

In the short term, we decided to scale down our initial proposal, and work on building up our technical support & capacity building areas. This convenience will enable us to adjust our internal structures and generate a cohesive group that can carry out more ambitious projects in the future. We also believe that this aspect can yield the highest return in a short period for the impacted communities.

• Technical Support framework: We aim to offer training and online assistance in navigating Wikimedia tools for underserved communities.

• • Community calls or Office Hours with the Community: we believe there is a need for a space for discussion, involving Wikimedia Foundation decision-makers, affiliates, and emerging projects.
    • During these calls, we can host workshop sessions or masterclasses for navigating Phabricator among other tools.
    • We can also host meetings to offer feedback to WMF teams working on apps for new language projects
    • We plan to host community call meetings once every two months during community calls every two months during this grant period we aim to hold four community meetings (Aug, Oct, Dec, Feb)., and reach out to at least 20 community members in each of the meetings.
  • Consulting calls: we also intend to have a list of experts in various wiki areas that can serve as direct support, focused through the hub. We plan to have counseling sessions between wiki-experts and newcomers. Those wiki-experts will also be invited to be part of the programmatic work of the hub.
    • We plan to have at least two one-on-one calls per month, completing 6 in the grant period, aiming to reach different community members for underserved languages. We plan to document these calls in Meta-Wiki and follow up in case further support is needed.

• Community Building Framework: We aim to provide resources and best practices for fostering a vibrant community.

Understanding how difficult it is to find resources in our movement. We plan to create a website and social media profiles to organize community resources and reach potential contributors outside the movement.

• Language Revitalization Tools: building on what other groups such as Wikitongues are already doing,  we want to create documents and video tutorials for the community, mostly focused on how to use different aspects of our platform, making them easy to digest and easy to translate.
  • Wikipedia Incubator Fast Track: We want to generate resources for better user interaction with Incubator, and we want to produce a quick orientation tool for newcomers or people looking to use the platform. We also want to start keeping consistent data on the projects currently in the incubator, and their status (alive, dormant, etc.) and link this information with relevant stakeholders.

• Building the next phase of the Language Diversity Hub
  • We want to continue the programmatic work, so we think that face-to-face meetings are essential for this initiative, especially after three years of online work. We want to have two working days during the Celtic Knot 2024 in Ireland, where we will coordinate the execution of this project, the ramp-up of the steering committee, and plan a larger impact meeting for the year 2025.

How do you intend to keep communities updated on the progress and outcomes of the project? Please add the names or usernames of these individuals responsible for updating the community

User:Malikbr and User:Oscar . will be responsible for updating the community

Regular office hours to update communities on the progress and outcomes - Updated Meta-page and selected social media channels and mailing list, focusing on where the community will be most active. The grant application will be announced mainly on Telegram where the community is mostly active. The final outcome of the project will be published on Diff.

Who will be responsible for delivering on this project and what are their roles and responsibilities?

• Fiscal sponsorship: Wikitongues and Wikimedia UK

Knowing how challenging it will be to keep this initiative afloat with only volunteers, we are looking to contract individuals to carry out the majority of the programmatic work; such individuals will come from within our community, while others may be hired externally.

The whole steering committee is responsible for the project, however, the main activities will be carried out by Oscar, Sadik, Mali, Tochi and Jon. They will report back to the steering committee regularly during the period.

• Community Communication Specialist: Coordinating the creation of social media channels and planning, the strategy behind our social media presence.
• Community Management Specialist: Facilitating office hours, facilitating steering committee meetings and setting the agenda for those meetings, meeting with current volunteers and potential new members and other stakeholders.
• Technical Support Specialist: in charge of guiding newcomers and new language versions as they navigate through Incubator, Phabricator, and other Wikimedia projects. Responsible for building and designing language toolkits and Wikimedia resource documentation for language communities. Toolkits can be documents, video tutorials, and other materials that can reach out to the community.

Additional information

If your activities include community discussions, what is your plan for ensuring that the conversations are productive? Provide a link to a Friendly Space Policy or UCoC that will be implemented to support these discussions.

We will follow the WMF Friendly Space Policy and UCoC in all our community discussions.

If your activities include in-person events or activities, you will need to complete the steps outlined in the Risk Assessment protocol. Please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool.

N/A

If your activities include the use of paid online tools, please describe what tools these are and how you intend to use them.

Website design and hosting.

Do your activities include the translation of materials, and if so, in what languages will the translation be done? Please include details of those responsible for making the translations.

We are working with numerous languages, and there will be a need for translation especially for Media Wiki interface as many of the language communities will be working to build their language Wikis. We will make information available in the Diff blog for easy translation and communication across many of the language barriers.

Are there any other details you would like to share? Consider providing rationale, research or community discussion outputs, and any other similar information, that will give more context on your proposed project.

Additional information

Are there any other details you would like to share? Consider providing rationale, research or community discussion outputs, and any other similar information, that will give more context on your proposed project.

The initiative for the Language Diversity Hub was taken by Wikimedia Norway in 2021, after the Arctic Knot Conference. Due to changes in priorities and staff for WMNO, the active support for the Hub was discontinued in June 2023. One staff member, Jon Harald, has remained an active part of the steering committee.  

From June 2023 the steering committee was led by volunteers,until the WMF decided to support the coordination of the work. From October 2023 until April 2024, the focus was on elaborating a strategy based on the broad experience of the members of the steering committee,and the findings from the research project from the first grant proposal.

Budget

• Detailed description of our budget

Endorsements

An endorsement from community members (especially from outside your community) will be part of the considerations when reviewing your application. Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!

• I  Strong support this proposal by The Wikimedia language diversity hub Cdilalo47 (talk) 19:27, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• I strongly endorsed anything the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group is asking for, because of their hardwork and dedication to the work they do.
• I strongly endorsed this proposal Thank you. Abdulai Iddrisu (talk) 19:22, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• I Strong support this project Ruky Wunpini (talk) 19:45, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

• I  Strong support this project Sir Amugi (talk) 19:37, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• I strongly endorse this project Alooissah (talk) 19:42, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• I strongly endorsed this project,Language Diversity hub is actually up in doing!!!SIR SUCCESS (NAA JAHINFO) (talk) 19:45, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
•  Strong support -- I strongly support this application. Kambai Akau (talk) 20:21, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• I support this project because it will actively bring more languages into the Wikimedia movement. User: Fquasie 21:39, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• When you empower a language, you are giving it a new life, hence empowering the people. When this is approved and funded, it will be a gateway for advocacy and onboarding of new languages for digitization. At the end of the day, we would have achieved the providers of the total sum of human knowledge. I throw my  Strong support for this. Dnshitobu (talk) 06:43, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
• I  Strong support this project Azorbli (talk)
•  Strong support I support this project because language is life, power and instrument of culture. It is the instrument of domination and liberation and it is the reflection of ourselves therefore when this project is funded, it will give way for other languages to come into the light.154.160.0.130 14:45, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• I  Strong support this project Azorbli (talk)

•  Strong support I support this project because language is life, power and instrument of culture. It is the instrument of domination and liberation and it is the reflection of ourselves therefore when this project is funded, it will give way for other languages to come into the light.Jemima2019 (talk) 14:47, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
•  Strong support From the very beginning of the work with the Language Diversity Hub we experienced immense gratitude from smaller communities just for taking on this challenge. Although it has been hard to pin-point exactly what the hub should do, the need for a place to connect, get support, learn and share experiences with communities with similar challenges were clear. In the research project we documented barriers and identified a lot of paths we can go down. Through the next phase of this work we will try some of these paths, while growing and building this structure that we now know as a hub or a pilot. I am very grateful I got to play a part of this work through my role in Wikimedia Norge. Now I look forward to take part as a volunteer, leaving space for Sadik Shahadu to take on a leading role, supported by the amazing people of the Steering Committee and Wikitongues and the rest of this fantastic Wikimedia community. Not only is my support for this project strong, I also strongly believe in the importance of this project for many underresouces languages of this world. I am committed to support the Language Diversity Hub in all the ways possible.Malikbr (talk) 09:50, 9 June 2023 (UTC)
•  Strong support As a language activist and Wikimedian, I'm thrilled to see the beginnings of real infrastructure for expanding linguistic diversity across the movement, which is necessary to truly achieve the Wikimedia Foundation's mission. I'm so happy LDH exists and is growing, and I'm proud that Wikitongues will have the opportunity to serve as the Hub's fiscal sponsor. Bogreudell (talk) 17:55, 21 July 2023 (UTC)