 Okay, hello to the small audience this morning. I'm Tony Ristovsky and this is Kirill Utsinonovsky from Macedonian Wikipedia. This presentation is about our movement strategy proposal that we have implemented during past year in Macedonia working with underrepresented communities in our movement. It was not on, okay. So with which communities we worked during past year about this project, it was regarding two small Wikipedia communities, Romanian and Romani communities. And when we speak about Romani communities, we have this project that was conducted with Balkan Romani language. And also in the project, we have worked also with the users of sign language, specifically with the Macedonian sign language community. About why we picked these communities and we started working with them because they have like a small population in our country, less than 9,000 people. And as we started to work with them, we faced immediately like a challenge because not that all of them are like capable to write in that language because these languages are not like taught in the schools. And they learn only at home or in their families or like training that is provided by some NGOs. And they know how to speak but the written form is mostly it is not standardized or it is with very differentiation between groups in the country. Also we have a lot of problems with them working because it has like a real challenge to find written materials along, not just in hard copy but also especially in the digital form. And in the first phase of our project, we focused mostly on this challenge to write, to find literature about and materials on these languages. And because in the project it was included also Macedonian sign language, we are doing the research phase that we, I think we speak like a minute for now, but it was, we need to find like a solution to how these users to be included in the project. And that's why we experiment with new methods of their like engagement. And with this group, with the language, with the Macedonian sign language users, we created our videos instead of like them to write articles in the project. The project timeline was last year, it was conducted completely during the second half of 2022. And only like January this year we have evaluation phase when we concluded our research project implementation, and Kiro will speak how we learned the 10 lessons from the project. In the research phase that we highly recommended about this project to, like when you work with two unknown communities to start, this first to start research phase, we have conducted a server and interviews, and the interviews were much more useful than server, because we learned a lot from the real native speakers from these communities. And in the interviews phase especially we speak with community organizers from these communities, and like organizers of the NGOs, so like these interviews were very helpful for us. Also it was distributed thanks to our partners, external partners from these communities, from the Romanian and Balkan Romani community in the country. And we end up with more than 20 or 300 users that fill our server, which was like a good number when you take the amount that it is very small populations of just 9,000 people in the country who can speak the language. In the implementation phase like every other project, and also because these participants were with the basic Wikipedia skills, we started like working with them like usual, with basic tools like workshops, and after that it was followed with editing contests on their wikis. And also with ATSA I mentioned with the Macedonian Sign Language community, we worked with them like on a special seminar, and training how they can learn about Wikimedia Commons, how can they upload videos on that project, and it was also, it was a recording of these videos during the session. Working with Macedonian Sign Language, it was like working with the people with problems with hearing, and lots of, they cannot hear what you speak, and it was an unusual event for me, like for lecture, because in this situation I can speak to you and you can understand me, it goes smoothly, but in that case we worked with interpreter, and it was unusual for me because you should wait a little bit, so she can take over from you, and you need to wait for them to understand how she understands me, and it was because in terms of Wikipedia, sometimes we use our own terminology, so for her it was also the challenge to understand how she can interpret some of the terminology that we use on Wikipedia, but overall that session went quite good, we filmed, we recorded over, I think, more 15 or 20 videos in one day, and the users were very content with the recordings, and it was a happy event for them. About evaluation phase, my colleague Kiril will talk much more about these 10 lessons that we learned during the project. Okay, thank you. So far Tony talked about what was the project and how we implemented it, and now I'm talking more about what we learned from the project because it's also very important, it's not only to tell the story, but also to tell the learning from the story and the main result. So the first lesson that we learned from this project is that communities require thorough research in order to get more information and to gain better familiarity with them, and with their own distinct expectations. As Tony mentioned, we shaped our research with two primary tools. The first one was to launch a survey, and the second one to organize interviews with experts in the languages. This ought not to be the main way to go. Every community willing to work with such underrepresented groups in different countries may have a different approach on how to shape the research phase. I know that there are many affiliates in the movement who have done this in different ways, and my main recommendation would be to get a better sense and to experiment with many different things that you should make work. The second lesson is that every community is different with specific needs and expectations. In this project we included three of them. Two of them were pure language communities, while the third one was a community for sign language. This means that from the beginning there are two different ways that we should go through. The first one was to deal with people who can speak and write in the language. Even though this seems like one group, at the end it appeared that the needs of the Romanian-speaking and Romanian-speaking communities were quite different. For example, even though both communities had problems with materials in their languages, at the end it appeared that the Romanian-speaking communities even had problems that they could not publish books in their language, even by the NGOs because the government required to have specialists in the language so that a material could be published. This was something that we learned during the interview and primarily this community wanted to gain some advocacy efforts to the government in order to make it easier for them to publish books. This reflected with the overall result of the project because the Romanian-speaking community was not that interested in writing articles on the Romanian Wikipedia but rather to boost some reforms and changes in the society. The third lesson is that fluent speakers of such languages with very small communities are difficult to find and it's even more difficult and challenging to inspire them to edit Wikipedia. I have to say that it was a very big success that we attracted a dozen of people who speak the Romanian language fluently to try and edit Wikipedia and this even resulted in an even bigger success that we had this year because the Romanian-speaking community continued to be active and they participated in the Sea Spring Writing Contest in which they wrote articles about the other participating Sea Communities and we are lucky that we have still contact with them and we hope that the Romanian Wikipedia would continue to grow in the future. Next, as we already mentioned, the availability of reference books is pretty scarce and it's very difficult to find knowledge bases and works that could be used as references across the Wikipedia articles. In most of the cases, the people used works in either Macedonian or English because in these languages there was a lot about these communities and this was really a barrier because usually people tend to prefer their own language to document some cultural things, traditions and other things that are related to their community but in our case we were restricted to what was written in Macedonian and English so that they can use while writing the articles. Next, this is something that we specifically had in mind with the Romanian-speaking community because at the beginning they told us that they would like to work on promoting their culture in other languages but not specifically in Romania. They firstly wanted to have a better coverage in English, in Macedonian and in the other world languages instead of writing in the Romanian language. The main reason for this is that they knew that there are many mistakes and inaccuracies in the English Wikipedia about their community and they even pointed out some prejudices in a couple of articles and their wish was not fully covered by the goal of this project to promote their Wikipedia and this is perhaps one of the main reasons why they didn't participate actively in writing articles on the Romanian Wikipedia. Then we also learned that organizing hybrid events is the right way to go when working with these communities. This is mostly because the geographic distribution of these people is too wide. It's impossible to gather people from different parts of the country at one place and organize in-person events like workshops and editor-tons. This was really helpful because we also had a Zoom link. We allowed people to participate on an online platform and also learn how to edit Wikipedia and write articles by following it virtually. This was in particular helpful with the Romanian and Romanian-speaking communities but not that much with the Macedonian Sign Language community because we had to work in a different format with them. Okay, so the lessons learned so far were mostly about the language communities that were involved and the ones coming after them, beginning from this one, are mostly about the work with the Sign Language community. So the first and most important thing is to find a language interpreter, a sign language interpreter who can facilitate the communication between us and the users of the sign language. At the beginning we were lucky to find a language interpreter who worked at the Cabinet of the President. She was really a high professional and she was even aware about the state of the sign language community in Macedonia and she also provided a lot of useful information in the research phase. Then a major learning was that the sign language users are not proficient users of the written language. So even though the Macedonian Sign Language is based on the spoken Macedonian language, the fact that these people have never heard how the Macedonian language is spoken means that they could not develop proficiency in writing it and even the level of comprehension of the written text was lower than, for example, for ordinary Macedonian speakers. It means that practically the Macedonian language for these people is like a foreign language and that's why they prefer to have recorded materials in the sign language so that they can easily get the meaning of the content in the articles. Then, as we already mentioned, working with these kind of communities requires experimenting and introducing innovations. The main innovation that we introduced in this project was that we recorded the gesticulations in the Macedonian Sign Language, which interpreted the content from the Wikipedia projects. All these materials that were produced are available in Wikipedia Commons and have been used across articles in the Macedonian Wikipedia. And then the last lesson learned is the famous quote by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. L'importance participe, which means the important thing is to participate. We really didn't want to have very high expectations when we started working with the project, so it's impossible to predict how many articles will be created, how many people will get involved as we mentioned. We were working with very small communities and the most important thing was to get them involved in the Wikipedia movement in some way. And at the end, we also would like to mention something about the follow-up of this project. So, given that we had different experiences and different levels of success in implementing it with the three different communities, we decided to set different goals for the future. For example, regarding the Romanian-speaking community, we wanted to further integrate them into the C region, into the C network, and to provide them with the newly established C hub. And we managed to get a lot of success here because the Romanian-speaking community participated in the C Spring Writing Contest, and we also expect to have a delegate from this community at the upcoming C meeting next month. When it goes to the Romanian-speaking community, these activities were not that successful. And first of all, we decided to go with more promotional activities on other Wikipedia's in order to write accurate content on the English Wikipedia, on the Wikipedia's of other world languages, and on the Macedonian Wikipedia, because this is what the members of this community indicated is very important in the research phase. And at the end, when it goes with working with the Macedonian Sign Language community, the members of this community requested to record videos documenting illegal and economic terms. So, this is a completely new project which intends to increase their literacy in legal and financial terms that these people need to know, because every day, as we learn from the language interpreter who participated in the interview, every day these people are subject to manipulations when they go to a bank, when they visit a public institution, because when people perceive that they use the sign language, they try to exploit this difficulty and manipulate them so that they lose money or they can't do the job that they went for. So, the idea was to identify two lists of legal and economic terms to better interpret them. For example, with regards to the economic list, we identified some simple words like money, loan, deposit, interest rate, because these are terms that people don't fully comprehend, but need to know when they want to do their everyday activities. If you have a question, now is your time. Please go ahead. Hello, I want to ask what was more important for these communities to write articles? Articles only about their own culture, to inform their own people about the culture, or were interesting to write articles about general knowledge, to give them the possibility to learn about physics, for example, in their own language. And the second question, how to prevent own research in this kind of small communities, especially when writing about their own culture? They are only using references from scientific papers, mostly in other languages, or do they are using their own knowledge, which is not written down? Thanks for the questions. For the first one, we prepared a list of articles that we proposed for the participants in the workshops and editons, so that they could choose and edit. We mostly focused on topics related to these communities, because that was something which was requested during the research phase, even though we also encouraged people to write articles on any other topics, and this is exactly what happened during the editons. Not all of the participants wrote from the list that we proposed. There are also people who wrote articles about different topics, in geography, in culture, in religion. And when it goes to the Romanian-speaking community, I have to mention the fact that they participate in CE Spring, means that they focused on writing articles about anything else as well, because participants in CE Spring could not write articles about their own community. On the second question, as I previously mentioned, it was difficult to find reference works in their own languages, because there are not a lot of works available. They chiefly used materials in English and Macedonian, and we mentored them during the programme that they did not change the factographic accuracy of the articles. So we're not speakers of either of these languages. We cannot know if they did not use own research in these articles, but we trust them that it's not in their interest to do it. A comment and a question. Thank you so much for this. It's incredibly interesting and also really important, the findings that you're sharing. So if you haven't already, I hope that you would consider at least writing a Diff blog post so others can also take advantage of the lessons that you've shared. My question is, and I'm sorry I came in late, so perhaps you answered it. You had a slide that mentioned it's also difficult to motivate members of small language communities to participate in the projects. Can you explain the why behind that, why it was difficult to motivate them and what you think some of the blockers were? When it comes to, it is already published on Diff, that I can say, about motivation. We have a different motivation in different communities. For example, the Romanian community, maybe this is a small history, but the Romanian community in our country is most well established. And they're working in education now, in banks, institutions. They are working class. They are doing their job, and the poverty rate is much less, maybe even non-existing. So in that terms, in this community, we don't face lack of motivation, but other rights in the Romanian community, and it is not that it's only a case in our country, but in the whole Europe, they have a pretty much high percentage of poverty rates, and they even have a computer, like they don't know how to use computers in the first place. So in that community, we face lack of motivation, because they expect to earn money, not to volunteer to something, and maybe that was the problem that they don't want to engage in this phase of the project. To put it simply, the main reason is that when you work with small communities, for example, counting only 9,000 people, then if you apply the rate of participation in any other community, it's very low. It's very difficult to find someone to take part, and as Tony mentioned, there are differences between the social status of these people. The Romanian-speaking community is well-off. We had the Prime Minister, there are a lot of CEOs of many well-known companies who are Romanian, and they have different views of the world, and usually don't want to participate in such things. On the other hand, when working with the Romanian-speaking communities, these people are in a working class, and they don't have a lot of ways to use their leisure time to do such activities. Many of these people even don't have electronic devices that they can use to contribute to the Wikimedia project, so there was a completely different set of reasons to participate. Okay, last question, 30 seconds left. Thanks. I think you were mostly talking about Wikipedia in your project. Did you consider other Wikimedia projects, such as, for example, Wikimedia Commons, which might be an easier way for some people to interact with Wikiprojects? Yes, we trained, especially the Macedonian, the users of the Macedonian Sign Language will train how to upload images to Wikimedia Commons. But we also taught the participants in the workshops in Romanian and Romanian language the same thing. We also considered training them to edit Wikidata, but we figured out it's more advanced than Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. About lexems, but it was late to found out and to include it in the project, but it will be nice to have it. Okay, that's it.