Grants:Project/Rapid/Dagbani Wikimedians/Activating Local Language Communities/Dagbani/Bachinima

Briefly explain what are you trying to accomplish with this project, or what do you expect will change as a result of this grant. Example goals include, "recruit new editors", "add high quality content", or "train existing editors on a specific skill".

Add new content to Wikimedia Commons
Recruit new editors on Wikimedia Commons
Engage existing editors on Wikimedia Commons
Continue efforts to activate Dagbani Languages Wikimedia Community

Project Plan

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Activities

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Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing?

Continuing GOI Foundation's initiatives about Improving local language content on Wikimedia projects, this project ultimately seeks to create audio recording of all words in Dagbani language on Wikimedia Commons.

Similar initiatives have been carried out in the past on larger Wikimedia languages, albeit in an uncoordinated/unstructured manner; but this is the first time a small language community will systematically leverage Wikimedia as a language preservation platform to document all spoken words in a language. Hence, we consider this project an experiment that would inspire other small language communities, especially in Africa, that are still struggling to become visible on the internet. The applications of this project include

Support for Dagbani Wiktionary
Words can be added to Wikipedia articles
Words can be added to describe items on Wikidata; e.g. Q98185154#P443 or Q105#P443
Support for Wikidata:Lexicographical data

Application developers can reuse the content in building their tools, etc

The organizers and participants will spend time:

Preparing a list of words
Verifying their validity and spelling
Recording words
Uploading the words to Wikimedia Commons using appropriate labels

How will you let others in your community know about your project (please provide links to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions)? Why are you targeting a specific audience?

Global Open Initiative social media spaces and Dagbani WIkimedians subpages

Facebook: GOI Foundation | Dagbani Wikimedians
Telegram group
WhatsApp group: GOI Foundation | Dagbani Wikimedians

Targeting these groups will enable us to:

Recruit people who speak at least one of the 16 Mole-Dagbani languages to participate in the project
Provide general Wikimedia Commnons training for people from other smaller non-Dagbani languages who may be inspired to replicate this project in their own spaces

What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

At the end of the project, we would have

Uploaded all Dagbani words to Wikimedia Commons.
Provided Tabular Data of all Dagbani words such as this on Wikimedia Commons so that future projects, even those that are not Wikimedia related, will not have to reinvent the wheel or go through the difficult process of extracting Dagbani texts from PDF's and web pages to work with (we estimate that there are 4000 words).
Introduced and provided training for newbies (and old users alike) to Wikimedia Commons such that they can freely add new media to the platform.
Participants can properly label newly uploaded media so that they are discoverable
Participants can properly add descriptions to newly uploaded media so that re-users can understand what the files mean (as is the problem with much interesting media on Wikimedia Commons that become unusable because it is difficult to understand what they are at a glance).

We will follow up with people that are involved with the project by:

Adding them to our mailing lists and various communication channels.
Continue to engage them to use the skills that they have acquired to upload more content to Wikimedia Commons.
Guide them to add the uploaded media files to sister Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata lexemes, Wikipedia pages, Wikitionary, etc (For the purposes of this specific project, we are aiming to stress less on including the activity of "reusing the audio files on sister projects" and only concentrate more on creating the content for now. Our learning from previous projects has taught us that concentrating on a specific task per project is a more efficient way of creating rich content and managing expectations of what we're going to be able to achieve).

Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

No!

Impact

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How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more specific to your project:

Number of total participants: 30
Number of articles created or improved (if applicable): N/A
Number of audio uploaded to Wikimedia Commons: 4000
Number of photos used on Wikimedia projects (if applicable): N/A

Resources

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What resources do you have? Include information on who is the organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

The project will crowdsource efforts from the niche Dagbani Wikimedians language community that is currently around 140 people strong. However, we do realize that media upload and general activity on Wikimedia Commons is heavy on internet data demands as compared to sister projects like Wikipedia that are mostly text-based. We, therefore, identified 22 different tasks ranging from text extraction from PDF's, reformatting special latin characters that render incorrectly, and the actual audio recording, and thereafter put out a call for volunteers who have agreed to take responsibility for these tasks, as outlined at Bachinima. While everyone can freely participate in different tasks, the sub-project leads for these tasks will actively ensure that they get done.

The sub-project leads are as follows:

Create the list of 4000 words - Din-nani1
Verify that the words do exist - Alhassan Mohammed Awal
Correct spellings to standard Dagbani writing system (apostrophe, latin characters, etc) - Karimba Asani
Record words - Dhee jah
Examine condition of sound - Shahadusadik

Other general support

Masssly - Provide general support to tasks leads, facilitate training, etc
Nate Angell - Provide general support for funding, strategy, and communications

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense:

Item	Details	Unit Ghc	Quantity	Total Ghc
Workshops data allowance (participants)	We will have 3 total separate all-day training workshops for Wikimedia Commons. One of the workshops will be dedicated to project management and clarifying tasks for participants/volunteers	20	25	500
Surfline internet routers and/or data allowance	Router (and/or data allowance) for the 22 core volunteer members	500	22	11000
Bank charges, miscellaneous	Transfers and Reimbursement charges	n/a	n/a	150
Based on Oanda Exchange (1 November 2020)			Ghc	11650
1 USD = 5.82523 Ghc			USD	1999.92

Endorsements

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Strong support I endorse this project.Din-nani1 (talk) 09:17, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
Strong support Shahadusadik (talk) 10:27, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
Strong support I endorse this project. Alhassan Mohammed Awal (talk) 14:24, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
Strong support I endorse this project on behalf of Art+Feminism. --Kiraface (talk) 21:27, 25 November 2020 (UTC)