Oral knowledge

Various Wikimedia projects have requirements that content be sourced to published sources, while much knowledge is in oral form and is not recorded nor written down yet. This page is a collection of sources, thoughts and people that are working on making oral knowledge citable in Wikipedia. A focus is on only representing oral knowledge in agreement with the communities involved. The idea derived from a discussion session at Wikimania 2019. This page should serve as a linking of people interested in the topic and a first point of exchange on the topic. Please feel free to contribute to it in any language.

Organization

As this page is derived from the previously mentioned discussion, the people currently mainly involved in this project are:

• Felix Nartey
• Kimberli
• Lucie-Aimée Kaffee

Ideas

Various universities have oral history programs and projects, for example The Houston History Project of the University of Houston, Chinese American Oral History Project at California State University, Delta State University Oral History, and so on.

Therefore Wikimedia chapters and universities could partner with universities which have the know-how to record oral knowledge (not only oral history but other types as well). Users could propose ideas for oral knowledge projects and the UGs may seek universities who may partner with them.

Resources

• Etherpad with documentation of the Wikimania session
• Blogpost summarising the Wikimania session
• Bringing Wikipedia Alive: Using animation for storytelling, a new way of preserving oral history.
• People are knowledge research project of 2011
  • People are knowledge film, resulting from the research project
  • And media on commons from the project
• Oral citations experiment on English Wikipedia
• Oral history page on English Wikipedia
• Wikimedia México: Tradición oral y Wikipedia (in Spanish)

People interested

Please add yourself here, if you are working on the topic or are generally interested so that we have a first point to connect people working around oral knowledge in Wikimedia projects.

• Psubhashish (talk) (works on documenting many oral, indigenous, endangered and marginalized languages mostly from South Asia and around the world, and have been building a toolkit OpenSpeaks based on the learning from these documentations. Also, founded Marginalized Community Council, a group to work on marginalized issues and advocate for community-led media development])
• lirazelf aka Sara Thomas (WMUK) (works with community heritage groups, interested in any work being done on making things like oral histories citable / how to use oral history in the Wiki projects).
• Lyokoï (talk) : cofounder of Lingua Libre, contribute about french minority languages (around 90+), French Wiktionary Admin.
•    ManosHacker ^talk In Wikipedia Community Schools Association Greece 's projects oral content is mandatory, within our scopes and unfortunatelly still missing as a Wikimedia project.
• MassiveEartha (talk) oral history and community archives. Oral knowledge and intangible heritage in the African diaspora.
• Pharos (talk), developing and supporting a prototype platform for oral knowledge on Wikispore.
• YusufuAM (talk) As a history student, I'd really like to get together with passionate people who love history, whether it be through oral tradition, written records, or discoveries from archaeology that I can freely share with the world regarding my local community and beyond.
• Vahid Masrour (talk) I'm interested in promoting the development of the representation of indigenous knowledge and cultures.