 Hello, can you hear me? Welcome to this session. My name is Sadeq Shahadu and I will be presenting this session on behalf of the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub. And I have my co-presenter online, Sadeq. He will be joining us shortly. So I will be talking to you about the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub's works and research that we did in 2022 in October. And I will be sharing more with you the findings, the background of the hub and the method that we used in the interview and then also the findings and then the next steps. So the Language Diversity Hub initiative, it was the initiative started in 2021, building upon the existing Wikimedia Language Diversity Network. We started way back in 2012. And the purpose of this was to like support and connect affiliate and volunteers to new and smaller language versions of Wikimedia projects. And we have been working on this project since 2021. And we have a steering committee from a very diverse linguistic background and also from different regions of the world. So this is the list of steering committee members. And I'm sure some of you may be familiar with their usernames. And Amir and Amkwe Ayumo John from Kenya, Norway and Mali Oscar Sadeq, who is my co-presenter, myself. And then that is the steering committee members for the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub. We also have an observer steering committee who are members from the Wikitonks. And art and feminism and also Wikimedia UK. So what exactly were we trying to discover or investigate? So the research was focused on understanding the limitations within the smaller language community communities. And we wanted to understand what is limiting the contributors of new language Wikipedia editions. That is from the stats in the incubator to when they are approved. And the method we used to conduct this research was semi-structured interview with contributors from different countries. And we were looking at identifying, you know, four types of barriers that these communities are facing. Prior to that, we had conducted like a survey within ourselves to see some of the topmost priorities as far as the research is concerned. So when we talk about the challenges faced by smaller language community communities, we are talking about challenges that most of us are already aware of, especially those who are working closely with language communities. Some of them are challenges that we can simply address by working collaboratively together. Some of them are also like challenges that foundation can work to support. And we had like open questions where we invited contributors or participants of the research to exchange their information via Zoom. And I also conducted some of the sessions in person, especially at the Wikimdaba. I engaged like some committee members from the Igbo and Nigerian Wikimedia communities. And but largely we conducted most of the interview sessions online because of the different time zones that people were on. And also the fact that we did not get the opportunity to travel to meet most of these people because of limited funding support. So most of the interviews already like uploaded on our YouTube channel that you can watch later. And in terms of identifying which community we should work with, we try to look at how the community are involved in the Wikipedia project. We also wanted to make sure we are having a globally represented community. And then, of course, we wanted to make sure that there's somebody that we can speak to who is already involved in these communities. So if you look on my screen, you will see languages that we engage from South Asia, Middle East, the Caribbean, Issa, Northern and Western Europe. We have from Middle East, Dagbani, Gurini, Igbo, and Nigerian Pigeon. And then Issa, we have Taiwan and Mon Wikipedia. And the other languages from different parts of the regions. So like I said, we wanted to engage them to understand the real challenges, not just like a survey. We could conduct surveys like most companies do, but we wanted to get like in-depth information from them. And we wanted them to share these information personally with individuals who are part of the company, especially those that are already familiar with. We believe that this will allow them to share more information, and we will be able to use that to analyze our data from the research. And there's a YouTube channel that we've created for this. And you can find all the research in-person and online research that we did by going to this tiny URL. And so yeah, we needed somebody who is very closer to the community and also the possibility of getting the approval of the committee that we were engaging so that we can get a smooth flow of the work. And this took quite a long time between August and November in 2022. So what we also wanted to understand was like, even though we selected random committee members from different language groups, we wanted to understand why their motivation of accepting to be part of this research program. So most of them shared that they want to bring knowledge about their language and culture to the next generation and the rest of the world. And others shared that they are interested in conserving the knowledge about culture, history, and tradition from their language companies. And most of them were also sharing about revitalizing their language and then doing something for their culture and people. So now let's talk about the barriers. So when we talk about the barriers, we're looking at technical barriers, economic barriers, social and education and knowledge related barriers. So for technical knowledge, technical barriers, we're looking for other, what are some of the technical challenges that they face in terms of like language. We know when we talk about language, most of them would have different you know, keyboards or maybe they have like some special character that are not currently supported in the Wikimedia ecosystem or if they have, how do they easily navigate through these keyboards? Then in terms of technology, again, we looked at the incubator. If you are currently working on the incubator projects, you will realize that it is not user friendly as people would think. Like if you are very new to Wikimedia movement or you are just starting up a new language project, it is not really as easy as we wanted it to be. So we wanted to see some of the challenges that people face in these projects on the incubator. So we also looked for like those who are really interested in getting basic knowledge in terms of training how they can effectively organize online and in-person training for committee members. So these were technical skills like training people how to use Wikidata tools, training people how to use specific gadgets on Wikimedia or Wikipedia projects. And then we looked at the economic barriers. So economic barriers, most of the committee members we engage complained of not having enough time to contribute to Wikipedia. And some of them complained about the cost of internet data and equipment. I know most of you are already familiar with these challenges as far as communities from the global south is concerned, especially in Africa. And there's also like unemployment issues related to these economic barriers. And then the most surprising thing was the lack of interest in volunteering. So what exactly is stopping people from contributing to Wikipedia or being like volunteers? And then we talked about the social barriers with few of the participants. And we realized that there were too few contributors to these smaller language projects on the incubator, especially. And then the gender imbalance at the early stage, they are very small language projects. And we already see like a huge gender gap like the number of female contributors, for example, were very limited as compared to the male contributors. And also those who contribute to biographies of female content we try to like identify their username and engage them to learn more about why they mostly like contribute to articles related to women in Africa. And then we talked about education and other knowledge related barriers. We discovered that the language is not taught, most of the languages that we engage like the Dabani is not like taught in schools, even though it's one of the government sponsored languages. And the other challenge is that there's no like rich online resources for teachers or students who want to teach Dabani in schools. For example, so in Ghana we engage like the Dabani community and also the Gruny community which I'm closely connected to. There's also not like standardized written version of the language, which is very, very challenging for most people to continue to contribute to Wikipedia and then challenges with language knowledge and also in the community. Even though we have so many like students and teachers within some of these language communities, but there's still like limitations to what resources they can get to contribute to Wikipedia in their various languages. So in summary, the work that are done by smaller language Wikipedia contributors is really, really remarkable. And I think there has been like an increase in the number of people who contribute to smaller language Wikipedia projects. And there has also been like a lot of new language incubator projects coming out from these language communities like the Dabani. When I engage them at the initial stage, they had only two language communities like the Gruny and the Dabani. Now I've seen like a few more languages coming from the group, which is very great. So the largest barrier for many emerging Wikipedia communities are even outside the Wikipedia community. So these are some of the things that we want to discuss and also learn from the community how we can connect like non-Wikimedia communities to Wikipedia communities or affiliates to be able to work together and provide like solution for these communities. And we looked at how we can also connect linguists and also language technologies outside the Wikipedia movement and those who are like professional background, especially technology that are related to, you know, languages or language revitalization. And within the movement we have most of the resources needed. I know we have a lot of, let's say, money to support these communities, but we don't know where to channel that money to and who need these resources the most. So what is our next step? My colleague, Sadip will be joining us. I don't know if he's online. Okay. So Sadip, if you are ready, please let me know. And our next step we have proposed a grant proposal and the grant proposal is through the movement strategy grant. And this grant proposal will help us, you know, restructure, keep building the hub and also organize like more regular meetings to engage more of these language communities. It is also a way to foster collaboration among the language communities and also provide like technical support and language support for these communities. We have already started engaging, you know, you know, individuals and organizations that are interested in supporting us. Galingo from Norway, who are, you know, they are very much interested in providing support like keyboard support for these language communities that we work with. So as part of our next grant program, we would like to provide like a robust solution, especially those who need support with keyboard for their various languages. And then we also focused on need assessment, how can user groups or chapters better understand or support the smaller language community communities. And then we engage most of the steering committee members who are also members of the Wikimedia Language Committee to understand what exactly we can do to improve the incubator and if that is still necessary for smaller or test weekies. For me personally, when I started engaging most of these language communities, it was really difficult to, you know, teach them how to, you know, do basic things like adding references on Wikipedia in the incubator. The fact that you have to like use templates on Wikipedia, the incubator is really a big challenge, especially for those who are just joining the movement. We assume that not everybody would have the technical knowledge to be able to create templates or use templates on the incubator. So this is one of the things that we want to see improve within the Wikimedia and Cubeta interface. And then we are trying to build a network of linguists and language technologists with Wikitons who already have like a large community base that are working to support language revitalization. And as most of us are already aware, Wikitons is one of the affiliates who are working so much with language communities and want to, you know, partner with them to improve our work and also support their initiatives, especially the language accelerator program that they are currently, you know, doing within the Africa communities. And we want to expand this work. We want to keep engaging people via interviews to document and build a solid foundation for other people to, you know, leverage on. We also want to help document resources for the incubator. There is currently no like resources available for people, especially those who are working with smaller language communities. So we want to see how best we can collaborate to create like more resources and documentation for those who need it most. Most of times, community leaders have to always like reinvent the world. So if you are working with, for example, language A and after supporting them to get out of the incubator, you have to go back again and start doing the same thing with the next language. So if there's a possibility of us like having a documentation or rich online resources, either on Wikimedia commons or maybe YouTube or other forms of documentation that people can easily find and learn from so that we don't have to always like start from scratch. So this is very important to us as a hub. And we want to see this implemented in the next phase of our program. So another thing that we want to do is to define the governance of the hub and also answer the questions of how a hub should look like. And we are also interested in building, as I said in my earlier presentation slides, we want to build an infrastructure for keyboard and language technology. So if you are interested in, you know, collaborating with us, you have like any community that is working to support these challenges will be very happy to, you know, have you on board. Now my colleague Sadiq would join us to discuss. I'm also looking for feedback, comments, suggestions on how we can improve the work that we do and also the possibility of collaborating with other athletes as a hub. Yeah. So over to you Sadiq. Thank you so much Sadiq for having me here. Thank you so much everyone for attending this conversation. I'd like to acknowledge all the support that the initial hub discussions that we have been having and the research that we did for that all the support we had from the steering committee from, especially from Mali and John Harold from the community of Norway. And, you know, I'm not sure how much time we have, but I'll just like to open it up for a conversation. I'll also invite you all to read the proposal for what the hub is to do in the coming years. But so far on what you've heard, I'll just like open up the space if you have any questions or feedback based on what you what you heard so far. Are we missing something? Should we be focusing on something else? Then let's say working on the Wikimedia Intubator, should that be someone else's responsibility? But then who's responsibility? Can we better support the different communities across the globe? How can we do that? And finally, are there affiliates or individuals in the room or beyond who would like to join forces with this hub experiment that we're doing? Yeah, so just want to open it up as much long as time we have. It's supposed to be more of a conversation around anything that you think would be most useful for now. Thank you so much for having me here. Thank you so much Sadiq for the presentation. I will just remain here to listen to any questions and if needed to respond to anything. Thank you. Thank you so much Sadiq. So we are looking for feedback as I said and this is going to be like an open conversation. If you are working with an affiliate that is interested in supporting the hub who will be very much excited to hear from you and if you have any feedback for us as a hub, what can we improve on? What can we change as a hub? This will be very, very useful to us. It was supposed to be like a panel session but unfortunately only a few of us are here and my colleague Sadiq will be joining to hear more and if you have any question for me, I will be happy to answer them. Thank you. So the floor is yours. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, my name is Geoffrey from the Wikimedia Community User Group in Uganda. So yeah, we do have a local language Wikipedia called the Loganda Wikipedia that we're trying to grow in the country and yeah, we are very much interested in the initiative and joining hands with the hub. So thank you for the good work so far. I think my question is yeah, how do you see this hub working with other hubs because the other hubs that are also being formulated and maybe they are also trying to see how they can support local language Wikipedia's in their region. So just trying to think like yeah, how do we, how do you plan to avoid duplication of efforts when those regional hubs are also trying to support local language Wikipedia's. Have you had like discussions with them and how do you envision that working out? Thank you so much for the question and I'm so happy to hear that there are new language companies also coming up in Uganda and my colleague Sadiq would like to maybe Sadiq, are you ready to speak about this? I know he has been working with a few other hubs who are also interested in collaborating with us. Yeah, sure, I think that's first of all that's a really important question that we all should sit together and think about. But a very simple answer would be that most of the regional hubs kind of will be addressing more regional issues. For instance, bringing in new communities and maybe addressing some of these concerns like let's say economic or social barriers, maybe they can address those. But then the hub at more of a global level can kind of support the infrastructure. Let's say if we are improving the incubator, if that's something that we do, that would then support languages across the world, not specific to any region. So I do see that there are opportunities to collaborate. But then again, there is a lot of work needs to be done and I don't have the sphere of that there's going to be a situation where we are duplicating. I see more like an image I remember from the movement strategy, which was often orchestra. We're all working or playing a different instrument and making beautiful music together, I hope. Thank you so much Sadiq, anymore. So as I said, we are looking for affiliates to join us. We are looking for affiliates who are interested in collaborating with us. They necessarily do not have to be like a language affiliate or an affiliate that is working specifically on language. But any language affiliate or chapter that is interested in like supporting our work, we are also currently looking for fiscal sponsors. So if you know your help comes help us improve our work, receive support from foundation, this will be very, very useful to us. Any more questions, suggestions, comments? Okay, I have five more minutes left. Oh, my time is up. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much.