Grants:Project/Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation Inc./Grassroot Language Documentation in Nigerian for Wikipedia and its sister projects/Midpoint


Report accepted
This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.



Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary edit

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

  • We had visited all the identified locations to produced 52 high-quality episodes of audio-visual content for this project.
  • We have produced of the initial 32 non-subtitled videos+19 subtitled videos in English by the post-production team.
  • We have organised two edit-a-thons for uploading content and creating new articles for languages with no existing articles on Wikipedia.
  • We have uploaded 32 non-subtitled videos + 19 subtitled videos (English) with an average duration of 4mins to commons.
  • The audio-visual content has been archived on Wikitongues/languages, and it will be ingested by the Library of Congress in the first week of October.

Methods and activities edit

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

Setup and research edit

  1. Our team identified the problems that we desire to solve around language documentation. It requires; list of the endangered languages, solutions to be adopted and the communal impact of the project on Wikimedia communities and the focused wikimedia projects eg Wikipedia and its sister projects
  2. We carried out community-wide research about the group,and individuals or organisation that might have executed a similar project in the past.
  3. We scheduled meetings with mission aligned groups, individuals to understand challenges, opportunities, knowledge gaps, required skills to execute the project.
  4. Build a repository of endangered languages with a focus on the existing content gap.
  5. We developed a standard elicitation protocol in conjunction with the team from Wikitongue for interviews of the featured native speakers who participated in the production.
  6. We held a virtual meeting with the Wikitongue team and the head of and the video production crew as part of the kick-off meeting to discuss our plans and establish the main elements of the language documentation.
     
    Virtual meeting with Daniel of Wikitongue+ Tunde Oladimeji, Producer/director of the production
    .
  7. Content are divided into two categories; subtitled in English and non-subtitled. The content subtitled in English were used only on English Wikipedia while the non-subtitled videos were used on other languages except English Wikipedia.
  8. We created a gallery for all the final production.
  9. We created a landing page as one-stop to learn about the project by the entire community.
  10. We created caption for each content and we ensure that captions were translated into different languages where the content will be used.
  11. The translation were done by announcements on various translation mailing list, social media and through our friends who are native speakers of the focused languages in other communities.
  12. We worked with the Wikidata community in Nigeria to collate data about all the articles that were featured on various Wikipedia for our edit-a-thon.

Field work edit

  • All the languages, locations and details of each contact person were well itemized as a guide to the trips. We ensure our contacts at the different locations were reached before we embark on any trip.
  • All tasks were properly allocated among members;
  • Collation of meta-data items for each video were collated on an excel sheet and uploaded on daily basis on google drive by the documentation officer. See the list here
  • Producer/Director; The team comprises the producer/director who handled the interview of the featured native speakers for each language while its associate handled the gadget used for the recording.
     
    Behind the Scene shooting of Nigeria Oral Language Documentation
     
    Behind the scene- associate producer on set
     
    Behind the scene event of Sepeteri episode
  • Location manager: Ensures contact are established with our next visit ahead of each trip. Also, he helps to secure a comfortable hotel and also ensure CIVID19 compliance for each trip.
  1. Raw content from the field is stored in a device and transmitted at the end of the day to the post-production for editing, sound mixing, sound mixing, colour correction and related activities
  2. The finalised content from the post-production team are delivered to our team ( Wikimedia Nigeria) in MP4 format through "WeTransfer" because of the size of the content.

Community engagement and edit-a-thon edit

  1. The project core team and the Yoruba community are working on the improvement of the existing and creation of new articles for Languages without/with articles to have more Wikipedia articles where the content can be used. See the link here
  2. Due to the sensitivity of meta-data of the produced videos on Wikimedia commons, upload sessions were done by the core team while the usage of content on Wikipedia was done by the community members.

Midpoint outcomes edit

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

  • We designed a landing page for the project.
  • We run a Wikidata querry to generate all the Wikipedia languages in which the contents generated would be used. See the query below.
  1. query: https://w.wiki/3aHX
  2. result: https://w.wiki/3aHb
  • The production of 32 non-subtitled and 19 videos subtitled in English were produced at this stage of the project. See the list here
  • The audio-visual content were used on over 90 articles on Wikipedia. See the link to the list, here
  • The videos were archived on the Wikitongue.org/languages website and they will be transferred to the Library of Congress during the first week in October.

Finances edit

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

  • We have spent our funding as planned in the final budget so far.
  • All our trips have been completed, and we have settled over 95% of the budgetary line items on travel logistics.
  • Only one-month payment has been settled for the Project Manager, Producer and Documentation Officer.
  • 50%of the budgeted amount for the Post-production team has been settled.
  • We have settled all the line items for the organised edit-a-thon as well.

Learning edit

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges edit

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • The New Normal and the COVID19 pandemic;

The emergence of COVID19 has changed our original ways of doing business and interacting with people globally. For example, the act of handwashing, face-masking, sanitizing, social distancing are new to us and have negatively impacted the estimated time required to shoot an episode of a video.

  • There are no sample cases where the Needs and Guides for documenting languages in Africa can be found. For example, we required the expertise of the team @ Wikitongues and the production crew to develop a customized Elicitation Protocols for this project.
  • The project involve long travels. Due to the distance apart of the speakers of this languages, the production team required to embark on long journey for this project.
  • For effective time management, completed episodes should be forwarded to the post-production team for sound editing, colour mixing and other post-production related activities at the end of each day via the internet. Unfortunately,data most of the field works were done in remote places, where there is little or no internet.
  • Challenges in securing the service of an indigene that will be willing to speak a language and also understand the history of the language and its people.
  • One of the key goals of the project is to use the produced content on related Wikipedia pages. Unfortunately,some of the articles do not have Wikipedia pages.

What we will do differently in the scenarios mentioned above edit

  • We will ensure the estimated time consumed by COVID19 protocols are factored into an average time to complete an episode of a video.
  • We need to expand our network and searches around the likely technical partners to support the project.
  • We will ensure the post-production crew travels with the core team to the field to avoid transmission of files by the internet at the end of each day. Although, this process might increase the operational cost of the project and go a long way to expedite the completion of the project life cycle.
  • We will identify and partner with Wikimedia affiliates that focus on languages to ease the challenges of translating the video captions.
  • Aside from the proposed content uploads, we will intensify efforts to identify articles with no Wikipedia pages.

What is working well edit

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

  • Your learning pattern link goes here

Next steps and opportunities edit

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • We plan to complete the post-production activities of the final twenty-two (22) audio-visual content.
  • We plan to host the final editions of the edit-a-thons where the produced content will be uploaded and use on Wikipedia pages by Wikimedians, and interested members of the public.
  • To finalise the archival repository of the entire Fifty (50) content on the Wikitongues website and US Library of Congress.
  • To launch a writing contest to fix related articles, not in good shape and create pages for languages with no articles yet on Wikipedia.
  • To promote all the produced content on social media.

Grantee reflection edit

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

The project presented an opportunity to review and appreciate the diversity in local languages in Nigeria. There are over 500 languages in the countries shared among 300+ ethnic groups. Aside from the language documentation, our trip to different locations help to appreciate people's values, culture, attitudes, thoughts and ways of life. Working with the production team also help to understand the modalities behind film production.

Lastly, I am glad that 10% of languages in Nigeria will be preserved from going to extinction and making them available for use under free license for education and research purposes.