Grants:IdeaLab/Build ethnical communities

Inspire campaign

Build ethnical communities
– not language communities

Wikipedia projects tend to be centered on a specific language, and this pose a problem for small languages. Instead of building language specific projects we should build projects that support an ethnic group with all their languages.

countryNorway

themedemographics

contact email• My emial is on my user page

idea creator• Jeblad

this project needs...

volunteer

created on16:07, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Project idea

What Wikimedia project(s) and specific areas will you be evaluating?

Is this project measuring a specific space on a project (e.g. deletion discussions), or the project as a whole?
This idea is an afterthought after several years of inactivity on the Northern Sami Wikipedia. The Sami population is a medium sized ethnic group with several closely related languages, where the Northern Sami dialect is the largest. Even if the Northern Sami language seem large enough to support a Wikipedia project, it still fails. One way around this could be to create a common Wikipedia for the ethnic group as a whole, thereby increasing the base for the Wikipedia project and perhaps also increase the probability of a working project.

The Northern Sami Wikipedia is only an example, but the same holds for several languages. There is a larger ethnic group with several smaller languages, each unsustainable by themselves, but they could be sustainable within a common site.

Note that a project that can't be sustained isn't healthy, and is in dire need of help.

Describe your idea. How might it be implemented?

Provide details about the method or process of how you will evaluate your community or collect data. Does your idea involve private or personally identifying information? Take a look at the Privacy Policy for Wikimedia’s guidelines in this area.
Take a small language project that is part of a well-defined ethnic group, and redefine it as a common project for all languages from this ethnic group. The project prefix would probably be the macro code for the languages, but the site as such would be multilingual.

Are there experienced Wikimedians who can help implement this project?

If applicable, please list groups or usernames of individuals who you can work with on this project, and what kind of work they will do.

How will you know if this project is successful? What are some outcomes that you can share after the project is completed?

If a test project gets increased influx of content it would be a good indication whether this approach works.

How would your measurement idea help your community make better decisions?

After you are finished measuring or evaluating your Wikimedia project, how do you expect that information to be used to benefit the project?
If this work, then it should be a pretty clear indication that the current approach of creating projects for smaller and smaller languages is an error.

Do you think you can implement this idea? What support do you need?

Do you need people with specific skills to complete this idea? Are there any financial needs for this project? If you can’t implement this project, can you scale down your project so it is doable?
Probably, but if it is to be done then it should start with finalizing the scripts for moving projects. Also, this will also imply that articles should be merged somehow, perhaps through the translation extension, which is not easy.

It is also not clear if the languages should be set up in an incubator-like environment, or as alternate languages.

Get Involved

About the idea creator

I'm a wikipedian.

Endorsements

• I agree, there may be value gained in getting people who speak similar languages to collaborate. Woscafrench (talk) 19:21, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
• See Grants:IdeaLab/Assembly line editing and see wikiProjects for community forming--Havang(nl) (talk) 10:22, 28 July 2018 (UTC).
•  Support smaller population groups need to band together Ne0Freedom (talk) 13:26, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
• Any community sans a commonly agreed code of ethics cannot survive and flourish Subhrajyoti07 (talk) 15:56, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Expand your idea

Would a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation help make your idea happen? You can expand this idea into a grant proposal.

Expand into a Rapid Grant

No funding needed?

Does your idea not require funding, but you're not sure about what to do next? Not sure how to start a proposal on your local project that needs consensus? Contact Chris Schilling on-wiki at I JethroBT (WMF) (talk · contribs) or via e-mail at cschillingwikimedia.org for help!