OKA/Letter of intent

OKA User Group

Date: 23 November 2024

To: Wikimedia Affiliates and the Global Wikimedia Community

Dear Wikimedia Affiliates and Community Members,

We are excited to announce our intent to form the OKA User Group, a new Wikimedia User Group with a focus on providing grants for people to translate Wikipedia.

Mission

Our mission is to improve the availability of Wikipedia articles across languages. We do so by providing modest stipends (grants) to professional translators, often without prior experience with Wikipedia, to translate articles.

This user group aims to coordinate the disbursement of grants to translators, assist them on the use of Wikipedia (incl. training for people without prior experience to Wikipedia), help them review (and improve where needed) their work, and ensure respect of all Wikimedia and the relevant Wikipedia sites' guidelines.

The OKA User Group is composed of the volunteers that coordinate these activities, and of the grant recipients who translate articles.

Focus Area

Our group covers translation across all languages and themes. Our translators are free to work on any topic that interest them, however we provide them with an optional list of articles to translate. In this list, we prioritize (1) high quality articles (based on "featured" and "good" designations), (2) articles with high pageviews, and (3) articles on "stable" topics that are unlikely to evolve much (e.g., geo-features such as mountains, historical events). More detail about our prioritization principles are available here.

So far, our translators have only published into the English, Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedias but we plan to expand to others. Our translators currently cover English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Russian.

Setup

Our grants are currently funded by the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a Swiss tax-exempt non-profit. However, our User Group is open to all Wikimedians regardless of affiliation to the OKA non-profit. For example, in the English Wikipedia, the OKA User Group is hosted by the WikiProject Intertranswiki, with which we collaborate closely; our instructions for translators are published on Wiki and can be edited by anyone, even if not part of OKA.

Call for Collaboration

We welcome collaboration and support from other affiliates and individuals across the Wikimedia movement.

If you would like to learn more about our user group, share feedback, or explore opportunities to collaborate, feel free to contact us via our talk page (please tag 7804j) or at info@oka.wiki.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely,

OKA volunteers