Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Research Fund/Building an integrated workflow for reviving a minority culture with Wikimedia

If possible, please keep your input concise. We'd particularly like feedback on the following questions:

1. From what perspective or in what role are you providing your input? (For example: a Wikipedia editor, a representative of a Wikimedia chapter, a member of a regional committee)
2. In what ways do you think this research can support members of the Wikimedia communities in their work on Wikimedia projects?
3. Is there a particular project or affiliate in your country/region/project that can benefit from the result of this research and/or you recommend that the applicants seek to coordinate or collaborate with? If so, please provide details including the name of the project or affiliate and a short description of the relevance of the proposal to the needs of the affiliate or project.
4. Do you have any other comments or feedback you would like to share with the Research Fund chairs?

Some questions

Hello,

It's great to see efforts to preserve and dynamize the struggling Mirandese idiom. However, I have some questions:

• The only Mirandese Wikimedia project that currently exists is the Wikipedia in Mirandese, created in 2010, which failed to develop a community and has been basically dead for about a decade. It's not clear if your proposal even includes this Wikipedia, as it doesn't seem to be mentioned there. Do you have any plans or expectations regarding the Mirandese Wikipedia?
• This proposal states that one of the involved/target groups is the "Mirandese community". Given that the whole universe of Mirandese speakers is currently numbered at 3500, the vast majority of them of advanced age, very limited scholarship and very limited technological literacy, what are your plans to find and reach out to the apparently very few (some dozens?) Mirandese speakers that seem to realistically comprise the whole universe of the target/participant community you've defined?
• To what extent do speakers of this subset of Mirandese use written Mirandese? This question arises, especially considering the University of Vigo research mentioned in the linked article, which indicates that access to written Mirandese materials appears to be extremely limited, if they exist at all.
• With no existing Mirandese Wikimedia community, and the only Mirandese Wikimedia project being basically dead or comatose for long, almost the entirety of the requested funds (97%) seem to be allocated to pay for content production and research on the Mirandese language ("the description and conservation of the Mirandese language and culture"), specifically a student at their dissertation stage and an academic to support them, which will then be uploaded or otherwise carried to some Wikimedia projects, and eventually used in this context. How can this not be framed as the Wikimedia Foundation paying not only the upload of content to the Wikimedia projects (paid editing), but the very research that will produce it (lack of neutrality, unfair promotion)?
• More concretely, how do you expect this approach would resonate in terms of fairness and neutrality with the many thousands of volunteers, including several academics - among them, many linguists - who edit and contribute without receiving any monetary compensation from the WMF administered funds, let alone to fund research of a specific Academic field and related content production?

Thank you, - Darwin ^Ahoy! 01:11, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your support for this struggling language.

- The Mirandese Wikipedia didn´t fail to create a community, otherwise it wouldn't be an official project. Like many minority language projects it stalled somewhere in time, and it needs initiatives to start again a community. As a research project, this proposal was focused in helping to further standardize this low resource language, like the Quechua language, that also doesn't have a community (https://qichwa.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Qichwabase). Standardization usually means more prestige, and consequently more use.

- The University of Vigo study was made in loco during winter and pandemics, those numbers are very underestimated, do not account for heritage speakers in the diaspora and new speakers (e.g. the current Miranda mayor is a new speaker). Younger speakers may be found in urban environments like Lisbon and Porto and other places outside Portugal, like France and Switzerland. Unlike University of Vigo, University of Porto has a class on Mirandese that is taught by an heritage person that learned the language in family context in France. University of Coimbra also has Mirandese classes aimed at Portuguese teachers. That is a typical situation in poorer rural areas - other iberian minority language wikipedias have a significant input from contributors in the diaspora. It should also be mentioned that one of the most prestigious Mirandeses translator and writer lived in Lisbon - https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeu_Ferreira.

- Thus, as any sociolinguist would tell, minority languages tend to have a diglossic use. The frequency of its written form depends on its prestige. Its prestige also depends on the frequency of its written form.

- Regarding the last remarks on fairness and neutrality (as well as other underlying assumptions in the whole text),those may be considered offensive by the minority language communities and undermine linguistic and cultural diversity defended by the Wikimedia project. It should be also mentioned that the proposal also intended to benefit other minority language projects from Oficial Portuguese Speaking countries, like East Timor Tetum, as well as other minority language speakers that study and teach at the University of Porto. Some of them already contribute to Wikipedia, and the proposal intended to design a wokflow to further engage and grow these communities. Tigr3tao (talk) 00:17, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

@Tigr3tao Thank you for your reply.

As far as I know, the Mirandese Wikipedia never had anything even close to a community, and was created in the hopes that it would eventually appear, with a single Mirandese speaker, the very Amadeu Ferreira which you mentioned above. Amadeu Ferreira unfortunately died in 2015, bringing the project into a permanent comma since then. If you know otherwise, please substantiate your claim. In any case, I understand from your answer that the Wikipedia in Mirandese is not part of your project.

I couldn't understand from your reply any answers to all my other questions, about the challenges on reaching the proposed target population, and its extremely low numbers, how many actually write Mirandese and so on, as it seems rather vague and dispersive. You even added that "the proposal also intended to benefit other minority language projects from Oficial Portuguese Speaking countries" without caring to explain how that would happen, a pertinent question given that the Mirandese context seems to be considerably different from those.

Finally, you also failed to answer the questions about paid editing, fairness and neutrality, other than saying they "may be considered offensive", which is not really anything.

Anyway, good look on your project, though personally I don't think this will be a good use for the WMF donated funds. - Darwin ^Ahoy! 11:01, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

The proposal itself is very self-explanatory in its limited space, even regarding wikipedia and research goals and purposes - it was classified in a section outside wikipedia... I think we may agree on desagreeing if this would be a good use for the WMF donated funds. Good luck for your projects too. Tigr3tao (talk) 13:08, 16 February 2024 (UTC)