 Hi, everyone. My name is Mohammed Kamaljin Fuseni. I go with the user name Dianne Shitovou and I'll be co-presenting this with goodness. Would you want to introduce yourself? Okay. Hi, everyone. My name is Goodness Ignatius and I'm from Nigeria and a member of the Igbo Comedians user group. Thank you. Alright, today we're going to be talking about engaging with underrepresented languages or underrepresented communities. And a lot of us have heard of this term and would be wondering what it is. And we just delve into that right away. So when we say underrepresented languages, we're talking about languages. That are not widely spoken or studied as compared to other dominant languages. For instance, if we are looking at the Gwani and also English language or Igbo language against English language, you will find that there's a huge gap when it comes to the the commonness of these languages. Again, we also have indigenous languages that are languages spoken by indigenous people who are original inhabitants of a particular regional country. Most of the languages in Africa and across the globe, except the popular ones that we know, they are just spoken by indigenous people. Those people are not widespread. They are usually found in a particular community or town or city or in a particular region or geographical zone. Then the lowest in all, that is also very marginal and also always at the point of going into extinction are the minority languages. And they are the languages spoken by a minority group within a larger society. More often than not, we find these minority languages leaving their own language and speaking the languages they are surrounded with. Most of African languages fall victim of this particular challenge. All right, goodness. All right. And it's very important to engage with underrepresented languages because it promotes cultural diversity and preservation. It also promotes linguistic diversity. We have so many languages, so many people from diverse languages, getting or communicating via different languages. It also promotes communication. It promotes equity and inclusion. It encourages equity and inclusion. You know, languages is one of the diverse thing about culture. So it promotes equity and inclusion. If someone understands or if someone gets information in his own language, the person understands it. Or they understand it better. And it gives the person a sense of inclusion. It also promotes knowledge and it bridges gaps. Like we find out that most times when information is passed in maybe official languages, those that do not really understand these languages will not understand the information that is passed across. So local language, indigenous language promotes its bridges gaps. So now wider people are reached more information is passed to a global body. Thank you. Next slide. Yeah, so why is this important to all of us? It's important because Wikimedia Foundation has given us the platform to digitize these indigenous languages, these minority languages, and all these underrepresented languages. But how do we engage with these communities to ensure that the languages they speak are actually documented based on just the way we want them to be documented so that someday somehow, even cobaless, seamstress, tailor, name whatever profession that we have in the world, people would be able to learn all these trade or handicrafts in their own local language. Someone should not be left behind just because he's not able to speak a particular language. So in an attempt to engage with these communities, we usually collaborate with the community organizers. So, for example, we are from the Dibana Wikimedia Inc. group and the Igbo Wikimedia Inc. group. So we get to connect with members from these communities, these indigenous communities. There are a lot of people who don't even know that Wikipedia exists. Some of them know they exist, but they don't know that they can also contribute on to Wikipedia and its extra projects. Other people know it exists and they don't even know they can contribute in their own language. And in doing these, we try to address the language and technical barriers they face. And because in Africa, especially Ghana in Nigeria, we have faced with a lot of internet issues. Internet service providers have made it so difficult for us to get internet connection because of high cost of data. And also, because of the sort of IP addresses they give to our devices, when we go online, especially on Wikipedia, we have all these IP blocks because on Wikipedia and in the online space, we are seen as like the same person coming from different devices because there's only one gateway through a particular and so we try to provide technical support for our communities. Again, we provide training and resources thanks to their foundation for supporting us with funding and logistics to be able to organize editor tons and other programs. That would help communities document their full culture, the cultural heritage, and all the rich information they have about themselves that someone else would have written about them. We again also try to provide technology solution. And by so doing, we try to help them come up with translation softwares or translated versions of very useful softwares. Goodness. All right, thank you. Okay, there are challenges faced by speakers of underrepresented languages amongst which are the lack of awareness, the lack of awareness in terms of not knowing that this language is going extent and it's underrepresented, knowing the technical know how of how or the ways to contribute to open access platform. This is one of the challenge. Then access to technology, internet connectivity and digital literacy. In this part of the world, the internet connection is not really so favorable. So we see that people in rural areas are always challenged with internet connectivity and even access to technology, how to use this technological tools. And having time to dedicate to the community project. We are all volunteers. And when we talk about bridging language gaps or engaging with underrepresented languages. These experts in these languages or the natives in those languages have other things to do. So the availability of these natives would be a challenge when things like outreach and community calls and different things come up for engagement. Then low levels of literacy. Yeah, we found out that most natives know most natives in rural areas would have would need a certain level of literacy to, to, to communicate properly to contribute, you know, if that level of literacy is not available then it would be a challenge to engage with these natives or the people in rural or urban areas that, that has other speak a particular language. Then we have sustainability which is always a big challenge when, when, when these maybe initiatives is not sustained when it's not done regularly. There is always a challenge of people not improving or forgetting what they've done, or even not carrying on with what they've learned in the past. Yes, we're trying to engage with underrepresented languages. We're trying to bridge the gaps. Sustainability is a key factor. We do it repeatedly. We make sure we get to diverse locations, diverse people, diverse languages. We engage them. We continue the process. It's a continuous process. Information and learning continues. So when these, when it continues, then there should be a process that also engages these underrepresented speakers continuously. Thank you. Next slide. Now, we're going to be looking at some of the initiatives that small, weakies or underrepresented communities have come up with. We have a lot of them. This doesn't represent the totality of all the initiatives they have come with, but we've just sampled some of these. We have the Wikipedia language diversity. We also have the Afro sports that people gets to write about footballers or people in the area of soccer and sports in general. We also have the indigenous language project where people do the 100 West challenge. We also have we can ask women where people try to document information about women on very small language Wikipedia, like the one Wikipedia, Google Wikipedia, and other language Wikipedia platforms. We will call it have the Wikipedia ACM month that is celebrated across Africa and across the globe. The one Wikipedia is also another initiative where people that are going to media and so we'll try to use digital media. Just public digital media to teach people about Wikipedia. They've also come up with natural language processing projects where we can mediums use the data collected on Wikipedia or the arts cost creator on Wikipedia to be able to to work with natural language processing experts to train is a model for AI to be able to translate from English or popular languages to underrepresented languages. Again, most of the underrepresented communities participate in programs like the WikiLabs campaign, including the Wikipedia, the WikiLabs folklore, WikiLabs ads, WikiLabs Monument, WikiLabs Africa and WikiGab. All these WikiLabs campaigns help in promoting and also archiving indigenous content on Wikimedia commons, including media files, pictures, videos, audio, name them just so that people can have a better representation of their culture online and in the digital space. There's also the Wiki let's go craft call data where some communities I know of Ibu, I would know of Dagwani, I know of the Yap language. There are a lot of languages that are currently being experimented with the Wikidata let's go craft call data, trying to make Wikidata more inter problem when it comes to dictionary such that when you enter one word in the particular language, you will seamlessly be able to get the translation of that in as many languages as as they are supported by Wikipedia projects. Thank you. Okay, to. Thank you, to engage with underrepresented communities or languages, there are community led efforts under the Wikimedia foundation that communities engage in which some of them are Wikimedia editor tones, photo walks, community engagement activities like the monthly meetings, office hours, working hours, translation initiatives, outreach and campaigns. Then we have the collaboration need there are numerous collaborations and partnerships under the Wikimedia foundation like the Africa no filter Africa knowledge initiative and so many others. We also celebrate these, the common common, the, the, the, the days where these like a one Gary Manthai, the AU day, the Nelson Mandela day the women's day, different days that we that encourages community to bring in their expertise their communities, you know, to bring in their, their community members to contribute to these Wikimedia projects. Thank you. Next slide. Yeah, so in the conclusion we are calling on everyone to come join, let's promote this indigenous languages, because when we promote them, we are going to make the digital space, more inclusive. We are going to use the language barrier that we all face. We are going to get more people feel respected. There will be equity. People would get to innovate in their own language. Imagine if the whole world had a had a unique language, or if we could just use on technology to be able to translate everything from one language to add to the other. Look at the kind of innovation that would have been getting people have a lot of innovation, but they just lack information. And once they get the information, they will be able to come up with better ideas. And once they have the better ideas, the world is not going to be the same. So thanks to Wikimedia projects. It has come to stay and we call on all languages across the globe to rise up and join the work on while the iron is still hot. If your language is currently not digitized, this is the right time for you to liaise on Wikipedia. That's starting point is translate wiki. Thank you so much for the audience. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us via email or out of pages. And we are really grateful for the audience. Thank you so much. Bye. Thank you so much. Bye.