Grants talk:Project/Global Voices/Strengthening Indigenous-Language Wikipedias in Latin America/Final

Final Report accepted

Dear Barrioflores,

Thank you for submitting this Final Report. I am accepting it now, with my very sincere apologies for how long it has taken me to formally mark it complete. Despite the delay in completing this step, which is purely due to staffing shortages, please know how much we appreciated all your work on this project.

A few comments below:

• Thank you for compiling these 11 case studies. It was very instructive for me to read them and gain a sense of the dynamics unfolding on these Wikipedias. I thought you did a good job of providing a very brief, orienting overview of the language itself, the history of the Wikipedia project and the issues most important to understand in the project and in the editor community. Reading them left me more informed about the nuances of some of the issues faced by editors seeking to create encyclopedic content in indigeneous languages.
• I enjoyed hearing about the way that the project team ended up serving as "a resource for connecting, advising, and encouraging different communities demonstrating interest in reactivating their project or exploring additional ways to increase the number of editors and articles." This kind of resourcing is so important to support the growth of volunteer communities, and the Wikimedia Foundation is exploring multiple strategies to support more of this type of exchange among volunteers.
• Are you aware of whether the Final Report has been translated into English? If it has not been, I would like to create a translation, with your permission.
• It's helpful that you have included the lessons learned from the research mapping. I appreciate this short summary of recommendations.
• In order to give your Final Report its full due, I drew from the support of Google translate to make this rough English translation I am sharing the link with you in case you might have a use for it. I am happy to give you editing rights to the document, if desired.
• You provided so much good information in your Final Report, but I especially appreciated reading your Guidelines for Development. I really appreciate your efforts to articulate the difficulty of meaningful, useful translation in a context in which translation forms the overwhelming bulk of content. It’s very helpful that you have taken such pains to lay out all the reasons this approach fails to meet the authentic needs of the native speakers, and sketch out some achievable guidelines of how to improve going forward.

Thank you for your contributions to the question of what role Wikimedia projects might best play in relation to indigenous communities and indigenous knowledge.

Warm regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 03:14, 11 March 2020 (UTC)