 Alright. Hello everyone and welcome to this session about the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub. We will be talking me and Sadeek. Let me just share my screen. Here we are. Alright, so this is to talk about Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub and the status of our research results. So my name is Ion Haralsöbi. I work in Wikimedia Norge and have been a Wikimedean for about 15, 16 years. And for most of the time I've been working with, amongst other things, with small language communities. And I've also been part of the Wikimedia Language Committee since it was started in 2006. And I'm also an administrator on the Wikimedia incubator and trying to help out with some technical stuff there. And with me I have Sadeek who can introduce himself. Hi everyone. I guess everyone can hear me. My name is Sadeek Shahadi. I am based in Tamali Ghana. I'm currently serving as the West African Language Coordinator at Art and Feminism and also co-founder and the Executive Director for the Darbani Wikimedia User Group. The Darbani Wikimedia User Group is Wikimedia Affiliate Language User Group based in Tamali Ghana and our work cuts across multiple indigenous languages like Darbani Language, Bruni, Mori and many other Moli Darbani languages. We are currently working to support about 16 Moli Darbani languages. Our main focus is Wikipedia and Wikidata and sometimes we contribute projects related to Wikimedia Commons. I am also a steering committee member for the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub. I am currently working with a tuitionist at the Social Media Manager. Thank you. All right. So a lot of you are probably wondering what the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub actually is. And the idea is that it's an initiative to create a hub for everyone in the Wikimedia movement who is working on small and underrepresented languages. And if you're wondering what the hub is, that's kind of a bigger question, but it's one of the initiatives from the 2030 strategic process to create Wikimedia Hubs. And this is an idea for a hub that is for small and underrepresented languages. And our goal is to make it easier to start and contribute to small language Wikimedia projects and to make the voices of the contributors to such projects heard. The idea for a hub was, well, we started the hub idea late last year, but it's not an original idea because it builds on the amazing work that's been done already in the Wikimedia Language Diversity Group on Meta, which was started in 2012. And that's a lot of interesting people already. So we're not working in a vacuum here. But a lot of the idea for a more formal structure like a hub came from as a result of the Celtic Nut Conference, which were organized by Wikimedia UK. And during those conferences, we had a lot of talks with people who were working on smaller languages and realized that a lot of people were doing, you know, if not the same, then very similar work across many different languages, but not necessarily knowing what other people were doing. So we thought it was a good idea to try to, you know, get a better coordination for all this kind of work. And the Wikimedia hub currently is led by an interim steering committee with members from different parts of the world, some from Europe, some from Africa, some from North and South America, and some from Asia. So we have a pretty good geographic spread at least within the steering committee. And late last year, we applied for a grant to conduct a research project, which Sadiq will tell you a little bit more about. Can you hear me? Okay, so if you can hear me. So last year, we applied for the moment strategy implementation grant. And we're one of the selected communities to embark on the research project. Part of the project includes working with indigenous languages communities selected from various parts of the world to understand how the hub project will look like and how we can better support these communities. We are at the early stage of the research, even though we have started like engaging some of the committees, and I will be sharing more about the committees that we have selected to work with. The selection was done by the steering committee and other partner groups to make sure the committees are truly diverse and we can get the people from every part of the world. We want to have more representation for this particular set. We had a committee that reviewed the proposed committees that were shared and we finalized that by making sure that we have selected the right committees to work with. So I'll be sharing more about the list of committees that we have selected who will be taking part of the research. As I mentioned, we are at the early stage of the research and we have already engaged some committees in Asia and currently engaging the grant within their committees. So John, if you can move me to the next slide where I can share more about the committees that are participating in this research. Next slide. John, if you can hear me. So we have these selected committees we have based in the East South Asia and Pacific region. We also have Mon Wikipedia based in East South East Asia and Pacific region. We have the Uyunaki Wikipedia which is still in the incubator in the Latin region, Latin America region and the Caribbean. We also have the Dabana Wikipedia which is in the Middle East and Africa. We have Ibo Wikipedia which is also in the Middle East and Africa. Then we have Greeny Wikipedia incubator also in the Middle Eastern Africa. Then Nigerian Pigeon Wikipedia still in the incubator also based in Middle Eastern Africa and we have the Talish Wikipedia also based in Middle Eastern Africa. We have the Inaris Sami Wikipedia based in Northern and Western Europe. We have Dika Wikipedia in South Asia. We have the Kashmir Wikipedia in South Asia and then Atikami Wikipedia based in the United States and Canada region. Then the final one we have the Nahuatl Wikipedia based in Latin America. So these are the languages that we have carefully selected to participate in the research project. As you can see we have so many committees coming from Africa and Middle Eastern Africa. We also try to work with both existing and incubator languages so that we can understand the different challenges that exist in Wikipedia phase and other incubator communities. As I mentioned the idea generally is to understand how it would look like and how we can support these Wikipedia language specific communities and at the same time providing robust solutions and also supporting them with the necessary skills and resources needed to improve or expand their scope of work. So this is what I can say for now about the communities and how we intend to involve all the selected communities in the research project. John do you want to add more? Yes thank you. Just go to the next slide. Yeah so we are looking for more people to get involved in this work because obviously this is a group endeavor and we know that there are a lot of affiliates and communities who are working with smaller languages and we would very much like to get them involved in the hub. And yeah and that's not only for affiliates but also for individual contributors. So if you go to the link on the slide you can sign up to be informed and there are no strings attached like there's no nothing you have to do but just to stay updated please sign up on that list. And also if you have technical skills we need to improve the Wikipedia incubator so if anyone wants to help me do that then it would be much appreciated. Yeah I think that's it. Thank you very much everyone. So if you are participating in this session you can follow us on Telegram and everyone is welcome to join the community whether you are working with a language community or you are involved in language specific project just reach out to me or John so you can be involved in our projects.