 Jean-Philippe from Wikimedia Canada and Wikimedia Canada is doing Aboriginal communities outreach projects and the goal is to reach Canadian Aboriginal communities and to familiarize indigenous languages speakers with Wikipedia and Jean-Philippe is also a member of the Sami advisory group Wikimedia Norway have and Johan Hagerl will tell you a little bit about that afterwards and this is Johan Hagerl from Wikimedia Norway he works as a community manager and is also in charge of the Northern Sami Wikipedia projects we have been working on since 2017 and the last person is not here who wanted to present that's Eddie from Bolivia I will do my best to be Eddie and present his slides and Eddie is based as I said in Bolivia and he works as the director of an organization called Rising Voices and Eddie is also part of the Sami advisory group we have okay so first out Johan Hagerl thank you all right so we committed Norway we are having a project to improve the Wikipedia in Northern Sami a lot of people don't know that Sami is actually not one language but a language group as you can see on the map there are nine different languages and arranging from two to twenty thousand speakers so a few of them are practically dead and they're spoken in Norway Russia Sweden and Finland and out of those nine languages and Northern Sami is the biggest one and approximately 90,000 of those who speak a Sami language speak Northern Sami so like yeah all the other languages are much smaller so we're thinking of doing maybe a project in one of the smaller languages but we're advised against it because the people who know those languages have more important stuff to do than write to Wikipedia like they need to write textbooks for kids and and stuff like that instead and the Sami languages are a in the Uralic language family so they're not related to Norwegian or Swedish at all they are related to Finnish but very distantly so there's no mutual intelligibility between them and the Sami people in Norway Sweden and Finland have something called a Sami parliament which is like a and you know how to explain it yeah it's sort of like the government for the Sami people and they get the money from the respective country governments every year and they allocate those money to like some purposes so when we started our project we decided on a two pronged approach the one goal main goal is to get more contributors to the Northern Sami Wikipedia and the other goal is getting more Sami content to we can meet the projects and we chose this approach because we know that getting more contributors can be hard so that shouldn't be the only goal we still want to have something to show for it in case we fail miserably so getting more content is also something we're doing so and on that we often rely on institutional partners which I'll talk about here so from the National Library they have something called a Sami bibliography which is a collection of you know all books about Sami people or in Sami languages that have been released in Norway and some other countries as well and there are actually 30,000 works in that bibliography so we're uploading all of those to Wikipedia and we also have the Norwegian mapping authority has like place names in Sami languages which we're also going to put on Wikipedia and we've got some image materials from the National Archive and yeah and there's also a Sami university where all the instruction is in the Northern Sami language and so we're hoping to like we're starting to establish some good ties with them to you know have hold editing courses and stuff like that and finally I've put the Sami advisory group here which is a group of experienced Wikimedians from other minor language and small language Wikipedia's that are helping us Wikimedia Norway with you know various just giving us feedback and yeah helping us in any way they can so the challenges for this project there are a few one of them is Norwegian station because the Norwegian government had a policy for like almost 100 years or something of trying to assimilate the Sami people like you know you probably know the story like taking kids out of their homes and putting them in faster homes or boarding schools or whatever and you know punishing them if they use their native languages so that's been going on in Norway and Sweden and Finland as well so we need to be you know sensitive to issues relating to that and just you know trying to be well actually as my last point about we are not native speakers so we're coming in as outsiders and that's sort of an added challenge with regards to Norwegian station because you need to be you know sensitive to cultural issues another issue is a distance because Norway is a big country and most of the Sami people live way up north while we have we're based in Oslo so it takes a lot of time to travel back and forth to do you know meetings and editing courses and stuff and also finally a an interesting challenge that I think might be a bit unique but maybe not is that people who know how to write Norden Sami they often get really well paid to do that to translate the government you know government websites and papers and stuff like that so a lot of the attitudes are like okay I want to you know write but I don't want to do it for free so why should I write on Wikipedia so we're actually thinking we need to catch them young like in high school or University yeah and some of the lessons we have are that we need to tap into like for other people who want to work on minority languages in their countries is it a need to tap into existing structures and using your existing skill sets so I mean if there are institutions or organizations for the native language or you know minority languages you should try to work with them as much as you can and like establish a good report there and also you need to use your existing skill sets but I don't mean like if your organization or whatever are doing a lot of glam stuff or yeah you need to like use those skills for for the good of the minority language as well like for us the National Library and the National Archive are longtime partners of ours and you know using them for for this project as well was just a natural next step and then I have meeting people face-to-face that one's a self-explanatory I think and there's persistence because this isn't done in a day or even a year so you need to like you know just keep at it even though it might seem difficult at times so yeah thank you so a good day run as Astrid said I'm a Jafilip from volunteer from Wikimedia Canada and Wikimedia of North American indigenous languages user group so in Canada we have it echoes a lot of what he said from Norway we have around 60 indigenous languages that are still alive speakers and it's ranging from 2 to 35,000 speakers so you can see the challenges with some of the languages currently we have out of those was 60 languages we only have three wikipedia that are existing outside of the incubator and only one of those three is active which is the atomic wikipedia which I will talk about today and most of the 60 languages are in danger because only the elders speak it and the younger generation don't speak it so why is it important I have a quote here from the Assembly of First Nation of Canada languages is the main tool permitting to enrich the culture to receive share and pass on knowledge from generation the key identity to identity and to conservation of the culture of a person is his ancestral language so that's where we come in so the project that we did with the wikipedia that's the name of the wikipedia it's kamek we started in 2013 we started in the kree wikipedia since it's kamek was in the kree family I wanted to avoid incubator for the reason that the previous speaker already talked about so I cheated and did the it's kamek in the kree wikipedia and the way we did it is we went in a high school and the computer teacher made the students write articles in it's kamek and just to avoid political issue we asked the student to write about sample stuff like a chair or a table so like that there was no issue about the politics or something else like that in 2016 the it's kamek community decided that they wanted their own wikipedia they didn't want to be part of the kree since they are a different culture so we move everything in the incubator and then finally last year we were able to move out of the incubator so here's a quote from one of the main contributor from the it's kamek is actually a teacher in that high school he said this is a way to pass unancestral knowledge using computers and it allows to preserve traditional practices and it is an educational tool for how so what's need to be done to create a new wikipedia that was a very hard work and it takes a long time so as he said we need persistence and patience so we need to have an active community of contributors so this is that minimum of three contributors that do a minimum of 11 contribution every month and then we need to have article obviously and then we need the hardest part was to translate media wiki because you need to translate the interface and some words don't exist yet in most of those languages so as the previous speaker said the wikipedia was not a good way a good place to do that so how they did it they went on a facebook group a private facebook group and they go chat and discuss and get consensus to get new words to to translate things such as categories was one of the artists work to translate because that's not a concept in the indigenous community is what what we consider we categorize knowledge it wasn't a concept for them so some advice you already said it meet in person and that's not to take it lightly because I started back in 2008 I think with the first another nation and he didn't go anywhere because I was doing everything online we created maybe three articles and translated some words but then it died out with that comic we went there we met them in person we trained them in person and then we got the trust that the previous speaker was talking about it's very important let them lead our own projects it's not our projects as he said we are outsider so we need to give them the control we need to let them make their own rules English wikipedia or the French wikipedia where I'm from we have our own rules but those rules doesn't apply don't apply to a new wikipedia there's five basic principles for wikipedia that's how everything else like you need a written reference that's not in the five basic principle so when when we arrived there then we told them that they can make their own rules for their own wikipedia then another advice is to get support and approval from their authorities so they have national counsel they have been government so it's important to have approval before we go in and try to be the the savior of their language you know what I mean so it's important to have their their support then we need to be flexible because what we think they need may not be what they need so for example we went to to see another nation called the Inuit in northeast Quebec and we wanted to do the same thing as the which is created the wikipedia in their language but then we were talking about and other wikimisia projects and what we talk about lingua libre I would say what it is in a couple slides and and that's where they catch on or something else that the wikipedia ready catch on it's to exit the French wikipedia and the English wikipedia to add the names of the toponyms the rivers the lakes the mountains in their language on the existing wikipedia okay so the last point we already talked about it so before coming here I asked them what is important what I should tell other people that want to do the same thing and then I asked three different people I got three three different answers now it's the same training training training and in person so we really need to go there and train them the challenges we already talked about it but one I want to to point out is oral tradition we talked about it a lot in this conference but there's nothing against oral sources in small wikipedia we have it in the it's chemical and it works it works really well they put the note they put the name of the elder and it works you can come see me if you have a question is lingua libre I will just say it very fast what it is it just to record what words in the native language and then we can add it to a wik tionary or they can use it for their own dictionaries and then another thing with that we did and it just to gather momentum and get the community together it's photography contest and you can see at the top right we do upload the workshop so that's easy easier for the community to take pictures and write articles but once they are in the wiki media sphere then maybe we can get them ok and write articles and and it's a way to share their knowledge to using pictures and I think that's it so we were over time so I'll try to do at this slide super fast from Latin America as you see there are approximately 522 indigenous people peoples they speak approximately 420 languages and make up around 10% of the population there are wikipedia projects in indigenous languages and a rising voices around wiki media foundation supported projects mapping project to learn about the current state of these wikipedia projects there are four official projects and 36 projects on incubator and these are the names of the four official projects and languages I will not try to pronounce them and I will skip to the recommendations that they gave me and what he told us was that while it was difficult to pinpoint the exact process in which these four official and the other incubator projects got started the mapping project concluded that none were started by native speakers most of them were started by well-meaning people who thought that by creating wikipedia in these languages that they would attract native speakers by doing so and for some of the projects non-native speakers that learned these indigenous languages as second languages were very active in the development and I skipped one so what they have been experimenting doing is creating a user group and these activities will help raise awareness and the visibility of the current projects especially on social media and as you see on the slide the user group will also complement the work being done by affiliates and as wiki mania is going on there is an editathon taking place in Guatemala city for the wiki wui I hope I say that right projects which has been in the incubator project status they received a rapid grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to run this editathon which included some pre-meeting activities and interface translation and this is an example of activities that the user group can help support especially in country like Guatemala where there is no Wikimedia affiliate okay thank you we have more questions we wanted to discuss so if we can go over time we will be very happy to do so or we can cut here so I prepared some questions for Sean Philip and Jon Hagel so let's take the first one and I will ask Sean Philip first what is your advice on the very first steps you need to take when you want to work with indigenous languages and Wikipedia where would you start so where where do you need to start if you want to is really to get involvement from the local community because you need local people you cannot do it and you need to go in person so my advice is to start with do use our model because it work for us it's to go in the high school where the language is spoken and use the teacher as your partner and then and then ask the student to write content because after that when you have a basic for the Wikipedia some articles and the students are involved then you can you have something to show to when you go see the National Council or the Tribal Council like you have something to show if you just go with good idea and you show them the French Wikipedia or English Wikipedia it'll be over the hair that gets too much and rightly so they cannot achieve the same thing so my advice is to start small and then you have something to show and then you can expand thank you it seems like we have a couple more minutes so we will take some more questions so you know girl how do one best approach the communities you want to work with and I think Sean Philippe had some ideas and maybe you have some more from our project I think a good idea to approach people are to you know show them what is already like in our case the Northern and some of the Wikipedia already exists and it has seven thousand articles which is pretty good but the activities is very low because most of the articles were created by formerly active contributors who are not active anymore so we can show them what already exists and show them okay this is how you can contribute you just click edit and you fix this you delete what's wrong and you know just show them how easy it is and in our case it's it's easier than in the case because the Wikipedia already exists so you don't have to go through all the hurdles of the incubator and you know stuff like that so yeah yeah if we use the visual editor I'll let you both answer when I'm showing people how to edit the northern some of the video I show the visual editor at first to show them that this is how easy it gets it's super easy but if you want to do more advanced stuff I you can use the source editor but normally I skip the source editor stuff unless they tell me that they're you know super experienced with computers or programmers or something like that for in incubator there's some challenges with the visual editor because as the previous speaker said you need a prefix and does everything else you need to teach so we and when we started the project the visual editor were not implemented in the incubator so we didn't use it but maybe in the future we will because I think it's easier for everybody but it creates other challenges because of the prefixes and everything else that is in the incubator do you have it can I ask one more question do you have any notions about how people use uses are they aware of the Wikipedia's how are they popular or how you have any comments on for this so your question was if the people are already aware that there is Wikipedia in their language right yeah so for the northern some people northern some of people I don't think it's very well known that there is actually Wikipedia in northern some we were at the festival last week in northern Norway and we had like the front page of northern some we could be open on the computer and people are like oh there's a Wikipedia in northern some me I didn't know that and these were you know some people and you know they're all you know they all have a high high standard living standard living so they all have computers and phones and use the internet a lot but still they didn't know so yeah I guess we need to do some more PR work as well to make it more known so in our case every everywhere we went with whichever is the etiquette make or they knew they said the same thing they all know the Wikipedia they all use it in French and or English which whichever is their second language so but they didn't know they can create their own and how we get it known that's really true their Facebook group because they were really the community is all together talking in Facebook so that's how we promoted it and I went fast in the project but the idea was the high school student were writing the articles and the end goal is to use the written content so the kids in elementary school have some written material in their language to use so Wikipedia will get known like that and we they also made the shows about it in the local community radio promoting and the photographic contest is actually a good a good vehicle to make it known because people are happy to take a photographies and have the chance to win some prices and then they get to know Wikipedia in their language at the same time thank you so thank you for coming to our session and I think the next speaker is waiting thank you