 I am from South Africa, I contribute in the Seswati wikipedia and I don't stress about contributing there actually, but I am another guy from the United States but who's originally from Swaziland who are very much active in that wikipedia currently. So we want to talk about a subject called the quotation of oral sources in a decolonized context as we all know that this conference is based on this subject of decolonizing the internet. So we also wanted to have our say and our say started when we went through a lot of reading and we also went through a lot of research to look at what is it that we can that other people saying regarding this subject of the quotation of oral sources in a decolonized content. I'm sorry, I'm dyslexic. I just found out like two months ago about that. So my reading is anyway. Yes, so we're going to be talking about that now and do you want to continue? I said as Bobby, I'm passionately irritated by the other representation of oral knowledge that I found in the different countries I lived in and I was searching for it in wikipedia and I couldn't find it. So I started being passionately irritated by that problem and I had a conversation with Bobby and we said okay we would like to talk about that topic today. We don't have solutions but we would like to make you think about certain topics and certain questions. Yes, so as I've mentioned earlier on that this is a subject that has been researched a lot about scholars they have actually tried to find the connection between oral knowledge and written knowledge and then to me especially it touches me directly because I am from a lineage of family that is very much oral orientated. My grandmother for an example is the one who chose the second and the third wife for my grandfather and I asked my mum would you do that to my father and then choose the second and the third wife for my father? She said never, I'm never going to do that and it told me that something is dying there because according to our culture from my mum's side the first wife is the one that is supposed to choose the second and the third wife to look after the kettle, the other one will look after the kettle, the other one will look after the land and the other one will look after the kids. So it's a matrilinial structure in my mother's side of the family and in my father's side of the family something different but one other thing is that my grandmother again whenever there is a funeral or whenever there is a wedding what happens is she will tell you that okay fine we want to organize food for the people and then you ask her how do you know that there's going to be how many people are going to be attending? She said no just just invite everyone else but there's one amazing thing that's going to happen there she is going to be able to fit everyone else without even knowing how many people are coming to the event and you ask her how do you know that no I just know she's going to tell you it's going to rain. How do you know it's going to rain? She's still alive she's going to tell you it's going to rain how do you know it's going to rain? No I just know that it's going to rain because the gods and then she's saying the gods told me that it's going to rain we know because we've been living here We know that when, during the time of September, the gods, it was this time when the gods, because in our culture we don't have 12 months, we have 13 months, so he's telling you because in this month it's named after a certain god that provides rain for us, so they are happy this year and it's going to rain. And when you are looking at what, at the weather pattern using your education, but you cannot, you want proof, something that is tangible, but for her she does not, but eventually it rains. And then you ask yourself how does she know, she's not educated, she does not even know how to write a name. So it forms part of a very close relationship with me because of that reason. And I had to then go to look at the many research that has happened over time by scholars, by people on the open movement, by everyone else to see how is it, what is it, what are the list, what solutions did they have in order to reach the two, what is it that I can do. Then that's when we started this conversation and the solutions are right here. These are the solutions right here. Yes. Do you want to talk on that? Yes, exactly. We don't know what the solution is, what we would like to reflect about with you and these are the examples that Bobby were giving is that there is a big difference between oral knowledge and written knowledge. And it's two different information systems, it's completely two different cultures and sometimes they are not, they're incompatible, you can't combine them. So that's one of the big problems. We don't have a solution yet, but we also are talking a lot about so-called indigenous knowledge and we were asking ourselves what is this. Isn't knowledge knowledge and don't we have a global knowledge? Why do we have to talk about western knowledge, indigenous knowledge and different knowledge? And isn't that maybe a Eurocentric and a volunistic approach and idea that societies have to develop from the primitive to a higher level. So what we would like you to do is to question also your wording when you're talking about knowledge or indigenous knowledge about so-called developed countries and underdeveloped countries. At this stage of our presentation we want to throw the question to you then to tell us the difference or what is it that you think exists between indigenous knowledge and the knowledge that is accepted. Anyone that can tell me what is indigenous knowledge and what is, I don't know whether to call it western knowledge or what, but what do you understand about indigenous knowledge? Anyone can tell me what is indigenous knowledge? Hello again. I think I'll just say it's all about culture to me. I'll make an example of one of the articles that I have translated about marriage and while I was translating I said in my culture this is not marriage so we have to differentiate. So I have to go to Professor Neema who is working, one of my colleagues is a specialist in the indigenous knowledge system is that what is the manner in which marriage is described in another culture might be different in the other culture. So I decided to start a new article which will say indigenous South African marriage and then translate that. Then if you can look at it you will see the difference because in our case marriage is not only about you and me, in fact you started a very big relationship between the glands, your glands and my glands. So it's a long, long process. So I would just say it's about culture. It's about culture. Someone else want to weigh in here? I hope you didn't google there. I think knowledge and specifically indigenous knowledge is something which is about the indigenous perspectivism and about that this perspectivism could contradict to the hierarchy of western or global northern knowledge and knowledge which should be accepted as it is and should be not categorized into western categories. Like one short example, anthropology, so eating humans in western culture referred to as cannibalism. And if you look to specific cultures which when you look from the western side people eating people, but what they think about when they're eating people that they're no different to animals and if they're eating animals they have to get out the human out of the animal in order to make it eatable so they have totally different categories than we do have animal nature and so on. So this should be respected looking at these indigenous knowledge sources that they are sources one of their own and they should not be compared or put into a hierarchy. I love that. Yes, over there. Thank you. I love this question because it's a seemingly straightforward question but once you start looking and start unpacking it you find layers of issues that you have to deal with it. So I would also in order to answer it I would also like to turn it around and point out that one of the issues is that we make the assumption that there is a single corpus that we can put fit stuff into and these have been because of this assumption we keep running into these challenges so maybe what if we start from the other end with the assumption that there are many parallel worlds, many parallel cultures and it's not about putting them into one box but finding ways of allowing them to coexist and interlink. Thank you. Okay, indigenous language sources, I think there's three things that come to mind. The issue of power, exploitation and disappearance. And I think that the issue of power is something we must acknowledge as middle class, western educated people that we can go to a woman in the village, a storyteller, get her stories, I can go there and I can then get published and then I hold the copyright over that work. So we've got a great power to exploit and so how do we work in bringing the knowledge and wisdom, indigenous knowledge and wisdom to make it widely available without exploiting the sources. The fact that they are disappearing as well, the fact that governments don't invest, we've long talked in Africa about indigenous knowledge systems but actually we haven't put our money where our mouth is. And I think the contribution from the Namibian comrade there earlier on about the long history of exploitation and that we may not be meaning, we may be well meaning everyone in this room and I think Wikipedians are the most well meaning people I've come across but we still have the power to exploit. So we need to be sensitive to that power and look for different ways of working with this. Thank you very much. So the question that we are asking ourselves is how an equal exchange between the oral and the written can be made and how to build a bridge between oral and Boston written dominated knowledge systems. And I also attended the decolonize the internet conference last two days and another topic that we would like to talk about is the question of criteria and criteria of relevance and notability. Before we engage in this one, there was a point that you mentioned there at the back that about categorization because once you take the indigenous knowledge then you want to categorize it according to your western knowledge then it changes everything. Why do you have to do that? Then I come back to Mrs. Sulu's response. So what we are aiming to do now is to make us think, I don't want to say make you because it's something that we are still trying to figure out ourselves to say what is happening. We acknowledge all of us in the room I guess now as we are standing here that there are differences between the two knowledges. There are differences between indigenous knowledge and let's call it the western knowledge, the general knowledge that is written that you go to Wikipedia and read about. And we also acknowledge that it needs to be documented somehow but in the documentation process there is power as she mentioned that I would go and want to extract that indigenous knowledge but I would hold the rights to the work that has been done. And while the person that is actually owning the work is not a owner of that work. So yeah we can continue to the next slide. During the conference the colonize the internet I was surprised how much frustration there was about articles having been deleted, having been written and rewritten and then having been deleted. And we were starting intensively to think about the criteria of relevance and notability and the question linked to these two is do we maybe need a discussion about policies. The internet yesterday we were talking about at the colonization of the internet conference we were talking about setting one of the things that hemp us the growth of small language wikipedia is because of the policies that are there. And it's one of the things that people wanted to change. Am I right? What is the truth? In my personal opinion at least in smaller languages or smaller wikipedia is it is easier to have a discussion around which norms should govern that and they should not all be required to copy the English, the French or the top ten languages. And so they can look into their own norms and what makes sense within that culture or the language of that particular wiki. In South America and the Aymara language for instance I don't think that the requirement of written sources makes as much sense as it would make in the Spanish language. And we just as a caveat we just created these slides like this so that anyone can come in whenever they want to come in. A small command for sourcing and notability way back when we were writing French Wikipedia I'm French in 2008 we just had 50,000 articles when I landed on Wikipedia we didn't have the we were not putting source on every sentence. We were not putting source on articles or some people did it and some people didn't. We had good articles which were four pages of text well written with no source at all. We didn't care that just after when we had some controversy in the media that we started to add the requirement of sourcing every fact. But at the beginning and up to 50,000 articles we didn't have such rules for our Wikipedia. So I don't see why the small Wikipedia with 500 or 10,000 should be sourcing all facts and deleting articles if they don't have source. No no we were much more careless ourselves so the small Wikipedia should take it easy on this side. I'd be drawing back to but forgive me for whatever reason. There's a problem here. I experienced this problem several times. The information that I get about the things the way we do things the way things have been done long ago in the Klosakulcha and Amambondo. That information you can get if you go to the elderly people in the village. We still have the one who was born in 1914 and really he can still tell you remember how did you do this culture. What is a polygamy Makul when you ask him he will tell you how did they practice all those things in their own way. It's a very interesting information and it's very positive. It can build us if we can go back to those rules. You take this information you record this grandmother and then you go and transcribe as it is to develop a monolingual corpus. That's what we do as well and then you write on Wikipedia. So somebody else sees your article she said no man that's rubbish. I think that's what she said and then she delete everything and then she rewrite it. And then she will put the references list of references according to research. And it means those people who conducted this research they are more important than the person who practice the culture itself. So it's very very very difficult. I think we should address that. I don't I don't say allow anybody it's also wrong just to go there and write and write and write. I might write rubbish even myself or I might lie you see for whatever reason. We need sources sources are important but let us not be choosy in terms of sources. That grandmother is very important. We depend on her. We go to her when things are wrong and she will tell us no this is not a closer culture. This one is lying. So we need a very good guidance on that. Thank you. Okay let's go to the back and then go together. Thank you. We have the problem that unfortunately our time is up. I don't know if someone is going to come to pull us out from the stage otherwise we go on. Okay we'll give. Sorry. Okay we can go on. Great. Okay I will just stay in for five minutes and then after we move out. There's a very pertinent. Okay so there's this thing called feedback. Next to the speakers. One two three. Okay it looks okay. So I'd like first to support whoever something said there in the front about the French Wikipedia. The reason that the Wikipedia is in large languages want a lot of sources is that they are so large. So many different people writing and these are huge communities. They went beyond being communities. They are societies. Lots of people there don't know each other. So many of them. So when somebody else writes something it's likely that you don't actually know this person and you don't trust them. So you need a third party verification in these very large communities in smaller communities sources are probably less important. So the demand for sources is not the thing that gets in the way of developing Wikipedia's in small languages because they don't really exist. The demands for sources developed in each of the large languages separately in English and French and German and so on. They don't really apply to the Wikipedia's in small languages until they actually develop inside them. So that's not the thing that gets in the way. The thing that gets in the way as far as I see it the thing that gets in the way of developing Wikipedia's in smaller languages is the fact that the people who would be most of the people who would be most capable to write in the Wikipedia's in small languages usually tend to also know another large language such as English or French. So when they need some information that they would find in Wikipedia they would probably find it in English or French. They wouldn't even notice that the information is missing in their language. That's a highly problematic paradox. Somebody called it the decease of knowledge. You already know something so you don't even notice that somebody else who doesn't know it doesn't know it. So it really depends on people like you. You know a small language and you know small by the presence on the internet. Your language is spoken by millions of people. It's not that small. But you know this and you can write in your language and it's good that you are aware of this and you should just encourage your friends to do it more. And this demands for sources that's a problem in the Wikipedia's in big languages. It's not a problem in your language. I am glad that we all recognize that there is a problem. I want to move quickly. The point is we all recognize that there is disparity between oral knowledge and oral citation and the standard way of our knowledge that way. I don't know what to call that knowledge. The knowledge that you know. Is it a western knowledge? It's not a western knowledge. It's just knowledge, right? Because it's acceptable. Anyway, yes. Published knowledge. Can I comment? Yes. What is small? How small is small? Finnish language Wikipedia has more than 400,000 articles and the Finnish language speakers are 6 million. Yoruba language Wikipedia has some 1000 articles. It is spoken by 30 million people. I suggest we speak about oral mediation, oral cultures and literate cultures. It's not about small or big. It's about literate culture background and oral culture. We do, however, agree, whatever it is. We say, we see it as small, we see it as big, we see it as the number of people are contributing. They are small or I didn't get your second point. But we do agree that it needs to be documented, right? Somehow we need to document that. You do agree with that. I think this notion of small Wikipedia is a very imperialistic notion. It's more like looking down on the small Wikipedia. You can be careless. Everything is okay. I think that's a very bad way of thinking. As you just mentioned, what happens when either that small Wikipedia gets larger or what is the perspective in relative size? We should get back in the discussion on how are we going to accept this oral tradition. That is the important issue. You have your little playground, you still go on. That's not what we should be discussing about. Very true. I'm going to have to close. Just peace and then we close. I wonder, is it correct to think about it as a problem rather than as an opportunity? I mean, this is the occasion when you can document whatever was so far just oral knowledge and you can start interviewing the other people, whoever is the people who has the knowledge and which is recognized by the community of the speaker of that language as the people who traditionally, I don't know, I'm not familiar with, but I think from what I refer that there are people who are recognized as the owner of the knowledge and you can interview them, you can take a movie and you can document and you create the basis of having the sources, the former sources and then you think as a second step to put them in Wikipedia. Peter Khaled has actually done that. I was part of that project and we actually have done it exactly like that but there is a problem there that I wanted to highlight quickly. The previous speaker has just made the point I'm about to try and nail down a little bit harder. The difference between documentation and recording. We have technology to record in non-documentary form that is just as valid as evidence. Oral traditions should be recorded as words that are spoken. People that are seen in video format in spoken word recordings, not documented on paper and as digits that become or as bits that become letters of words. That is a different way of recording and it's perfectly valid if you've got that recorded. The other thing about not bothering to record citations in our that has a problem in the future when new people come in and see this stuff and they say where did this come from? We don't know these people, they're not here anymore. If you have got it recorded in some form, you've got your evidence. For oral recordings, for oral knowledge use oral recordings. That's to me the obvious way. The point of this presentation is actually what Peter has highlighted right now. We want to bring to ourselves or to you as the audience and ourselves as editors of Wikipedia to say does really oral knowledge belong to Wikipedia per se? I don't believe that it belongs on Wikipedia per se. I don't believe that when my grandmother tells me about the rain that is going to rain but she does not know how to explain how she knows that and I need to capture it in written knowledge. It's equal as when she is telling me orally. I don't believe that when my surname in our culture we have the way we have been documenting, the way we have been documenting our history is through songs, praise poetry. So everyone with my surname will have some praise poetry that is the same with everyone else that is having my surname. So I don't believe that whenever you do that you need to document it down somehow. There is a death. You have to wear somehow differently. You have to have a particular dance when you are doing a particular citation or doing a particular praise poetry or something like that. That you cannot turn it into words that are written down. It cannot be as equal as when that person is actually performing that. So perhaps Wikipedia is not the right place to record oral knowledge. That's our argument standing here. And it's the end of our presentation without going to the other slide. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.