Wikimedia Language Diversity/Sustainability

To implement any of the tasks below, we need to attract more motivated volunteers, help them master the Wiki-Way & respective tools.

Wikimedia Language Diversity A project to support indigenous, minority, marginalized, less-resourced and other underrepresented language communities to have access to their at-risk knowledge

Key resources Mailing list (click to subscribe): languages@lists.wikimedia.org IRC channel: #wikilangconnect Telegram group: join chat

“	If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.	”
— Nelson Mandela

“	"The paradox related to preservation of language and culture is that they can only stay active by welcoming changes. Only dead languages and cultures can be fully preserved against change."	”
— Annika Pasanen, Janne Saarikivi

“	[T]he time has come when ... a language has become only a tool, another means of expressing reasoning patterns. ... A language that continues its development is usually being used in all areas of life. Excluding the language from use in some field of human activity, be it some specific scientific discipline or a type of artistic pursuit, an industrial or services sector of economy, i.e. from generating more reasoning patterns, is blowing an irreversible damage that promotes language death. ... It's very important to aspire towards such a state of things, when any news are expected to be expressed by that specific language means.	”
— Gaynulla F. Shaykhiev

“	There is a lot of work to be done: it is estimated that in order to cover all human knowledge, an encyclopaedia today should have over 100 million articles.	”
— Wikidata: the new Rosetta Stone

“	So what's the conclusion [from 1% rule]? Only that you shouldn't expect too much online. Certainly, to echo Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. The trouble, as in real life, is finding the builders.	”
— Charles Arthur

The priority goes to such tasks that increase:

• Readership of Wikipedias & other Wikimedia projects in respective languages.
• On-wiki activity

Attractiveness

• Main page must be exciting and inspiring
  • Visually
    • Main page design (f.e. see BasqueWP)
    • «Picture of the day»
    • «Multimedia of the day»
  • Informationally:
    • «On this day / This month»
    • «Do you know?»
    • «In the news»
    • «How to get in touch with specific language onwiki-community»
• Existing articles should be illustrated and enriched using Wikidata linked infoboxes
• Materials balance:
  • Past, present and future
  • thematic, gender, ideology, cultural etc. kinds of diversity
  • various thematic lists (f.e. see the list of articles every Wikipedia should have)

Improving ease of discovery

• Search engine optimization (let's help Google, Yandex, Bing, etc. tell others about content we have)
  • Tools to access degree of connectedness:
    • Article creation and updating is clearly important, but without intraproject and interwiki-linking of existing pages (categories, articles, templates) they won't be found by neither human, nor a bot. This is also important for improving such SEO indicators as PageRank regarding results in respective languages.
  • Main housekeeping tasks
  • additional aspects
  • Categorization - for navigation & related topic articles discovery
  • placement of navigation templates
• Increase content utility

1. Basic article stub with interwiki - an element of multilingual glossary
2. Longer stub with interwiki - an element of multilingual encyclopedic dictionary

Supporting participant and community development

• Promoting welcoming and collegial environment on and off wiki (expectation)
• Setting up intra-wiki reference system with links to Meta-Wiki or regional auxiliary language wiki reference materials
• Regular recognition of onwiki participants' efforts (f.e. WMRU-way)
• Organize regular Wikimeetups
• Support creation of Wikimedia user groups per each language edition of Wikipedia and their evolution into Wikimedia thematic organizations - discuss possible project roles
• Promoting active participation in Meta-Wiki activities and making it more multilingual
• Helping Wikipedia and its sister projects in the incubator
• Interface translation - not only for convenience, see Mandela quote above

Communicating existence & importance of respective communities

Cheatsheet

Let the community know

• Internal communications
  • Using Outreach Newsletters to promote and showcase efforts
  • Promoting chapter Wikis to have mainpages in regional or other minority languages present within the country (WMRU website & its multilingualism project)
  • Cheatsheet, Wikipedia & other leaflets and posters in respective languages – translation and regular distribution.
• External communications:
  • Language-specific social media – regular well planned posts (advice)
  • Regular well-prepared press releases in respective language oriented mass-media (advice)

Engaging existing readers to participating in respective Wikipedias

• Systemic work on achieving, improving and effectively communicating engaging team spirit among existing participants of the project
• On-wiki recognition of constructive contribution, some examples
• Using CentralNotice system for engagement
• Promoting use of Wikipedia environment in Education
• Including different languages into article writing competitions with prizes and other forms of recognition

See also

• Wikipedias in the languages of Russia