 Good evening and welcome to the record how culturally diverse communities are using Wikipedia. My name is James Gort. I'm communications project coordinator for Wikimedia Australia and I'd like to thank you all for joining us tonight. I first want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the many lands are on this evening. I'm on the traditional land of the Rundri Warung and Warung people of the Kuala nation, and I pay respects to the elders past present and emerging and acknowledge them as the first knowledge holders of this land. I'd like to now hand over to Steve. What are the greetings. I'm a lot of men from going in the morning to Nile and and I just want to pay respects to the lands of the under people are in the nations. I'm residing on and work in Central Australia, and also the neighbouring Walpry literature and I'm looking to jar people's from central regions. Thank you Steve. If you'd like to acknowledge the name of the country you're zooming in from please feel free to share it in the chat. We also acknowledge any First Nations people joining us on this call this evening. So welcome to everyone who's been coming in the meantime. The presentations tonight are being recorded and will be made available on YouTube over the next week. We invite you to leave your camera on so our presenters can see your faces but you're welcome to have them off to microphones have been disabled but the chat is open. During the presentations we invite you to share your questions in the chat and at the end we'll gather them together to share with our presenters. I know that our time will allow for every question to be answered but this may not be possible. Please also note the Q&A section will not be recorded so you can ask anything. So this event is part of the record Australian music on Wikipedia, a partnership between Wikimedia Australia and the Australian Council for the Arts to increase the visibility not invisibility, the visibility of Australian content on Wikipedia specifically around music. I'd like to thank everyone from the Australian Council for their support. We have presentations from around the world sharing how they use Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects to share their cultures and histories. I hope that tonight will inspire you to think about ways that we can all contribute to these projects and please reach out to us at Wikimedia Australia. If you'd like to discuss ways we can support you so it's just been put in the chat as well the record link. Any details and further opportunities later on. But first I thought I'd start with a bit of an intro. I'm sure you all know what Wikipedia is you may be asking though what is Wikimedia. Is it the same as Wikipedia who are Wikimedia Australia and so before we kick off our main presentations I'll just give you a quick introduction to Wikimedia and the movement. So this will be a very quick overview but we do have events across this month if you'd like to learn more about how to edit Wikipedia so see our website for details. So let's start at the beginning. In January 2001, Wikipedia was launched as an encyclopedia open to everyone to edit or create new articles on and by December 2001 there were 19,000 articles on Wikipedia already. On February 6 this year that had grown to over 6 million articles on English Wikipedia because yes Wikipedia is also available in other languages. In fact there's over 300 languages now. And there's an average of 381,000 editors alone on English Wikipedia across the world. And in January they made six million edits. In addition, Wikipedia is in different languages. Here's just a few of those you can see the full list on the Wikipedia website as well there. So the Wikimedia Foundation was established in 2003 as a nonprofit way to fund Wikipedia and other Wiki projects. They're mainly financed through the millions of small donations from Wikipedia readers you probably saw that little pop up at the end of last year asking for your money. The Wikimedia Foundation companies employ thousands of people the Wikimedia Foundation are quite small as a community such as the Wikipedia editors are all volunteers. So the Wikimedia Foundation fund chapters around the world like Wikimedia Australia. And last year, Wikimedia Australia hired their first two staff members, but including me and Blinda Sprich is on the call as well. Obviously it was run completely by volunteers. We provide training and support for people across the country. And we'd love to hear from you if you've got some ideas for other things we could do. But it's not all about the encyclopedia. It's not all about Wikipedia, as many other Wikimedia projects. And so I'll just highlight two. So we've got Wikimedia Commons, where you can upload photos audio video and share it under creative commons license. And then we have Wiki Source, which is where for example public domain books can be uploaded and transcribed by volunteers. So one of the things we try to focus on is improving content on Wikipedia, either by adding new articles or perhaps just adding better references to those existing articles so that better resources. But why does this matter? Why does Wikipedia matter? Because it's one of the most popular websites in the world basically. When you search for something online, it's often one of the first results and the information on Wikipedia is also used as a source for Google's info boxes. Basically it's popular and often the first place that people look to find information. So it needs to be accurate and represent the subjects written about. Unfortunately, there are biases. So this map is showing Wikipedia articles which have been tagged with location. So for example, the article about Sydney Opera House has a location data. So we can show a map. As you can see by the white areas, the articles written about tend to be focused on Europe, the East Coast of America and likewise East Coast of Australia. So, while this map specifically shows location data that was included in articles, it also highlights a Southern Hemisphere, not bias and Northern Hemisphere bias and that the Southern Hemisphere is very unrepresented on Wikipedia. So there's articles on North American subjects, which tend to be quite larger than those written about Australia, for example. There are also gender gaps on Wikipedia. So on the English Wikipedia, just 19% of biographies are about women and approximately 80% are about men. So biographical articles about women are also more often nominated for deletion. And part of this comes back to available references. So it's really difficult to find reliable references for people who haven't been written about or who haven't been given the same coverage as others in society. So in this way, society's biases are very much reflected on Wikipedia. There are projects on Wikipedia which aim to amend those biases. So one of them is called Women in Red, which promotes creating new articles about women. And they're also like a really lovely community to be part of. There's other projects as well, which have their own subject interests. And they're focused around different cultural identities or the arts, things like that. So Wikimedia Australia is committed to providing training support for First Nations people or organizations wanting to add or improve content on Wikipedia. So today we announced a new opportunity, which will be perfect for any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people interested in research or music, or just wanting to spend more time improving Wikipedia. So as part of the record, we are launching a First Nations Wikipedian in Residence. Applications are open now with full details on our website, link in chat, I think. So the successful applicant will have a space to work at the State Library of Queensland for 10 weeks with support from their First Nations librarians. The resident will also be provided with $5,000 and training from Wikimedia Australia. And they'll be able to improve Australian First Nations content specifically around music. Yeah, so I hope some of you here tonight will apply or pass this on to anyone who might be interested. So let's see end of my quick overview of the Wikimedia movement. I'm sure it's raised a couple of questions. So please feel free to get in touch. As mentioned, we do have events throughout this month to give you a bit more of an overview, teach you how to edit Wikipedia, show you how to add references and all that. So I hope that you can attend those if you're able to. But now I'd like to hand over to Rhianna Patrick, tonight's moderator. Hi, everyone. I'd just like to acknowledge also the lands on which I join you virtually from tonight and pay my respects to the traditional custodians and owners of these lands, the Jagra Jagra and Yogruppal peoples of now so-called Ipswich region of southeast Queensland. I'd like to acknowledge their elders past and present and their continuing connection to the lands, waterways and skies and as a Torres Strait Islander, I'm acutely aware that I live and work on lands which are not my own. And to which I have no bloodline too. It gives me great pleasure to introduce our first presenter who is Steve Bumbagie, hot or what. Now Steve has already mentioned that he's a little man from Gunna and Gunana, which is Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. And Steve currently works for First Nations Media Australia or FNMA as a digitization support officer and provides assistance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to assess and manage digitization of their media archives which, as you can imagine is a massive job. When you think back to how long Indigenous media has been going in this country. And Steve himself has worked in Indigenous media for over 20 years and has also lived in remote and regional central Australia for 30 years. Don't forget that if you do have any questions for Steve to pop them into the chat as they come up in your head. And we can ask them to him at the end of all the presentations so over to you Steve. What are under greetings again. Yeah, thanks for the intro and thanks for joining us. I'll try to keep it pretty casual and just go through I guess, as Rihanna said, the, I guess, mountain of work that we're trying to get going towards digitizing some of the analog archives. As Rihanna said, I've been with First Nations Media. It used to be ERCA, the Indigenous Remote Communications Authority, which only serviced remote community media organizations in Australia. Up until, oh geez, I'm testing myself now, about 2012, which then became First Nations Media which took in also metropolitan and regional areas as well. So taking in our National Indigenous Television Service, as well as print media, Cori Mail, which is the pretty much the national Aboriginal newspaper here in Australia. Yeah, I've been with FNMA doing the digitization coordinator's role, sorry, since September 2021. And yeah, we've just had some funding confirmed at our last national conference in October, late October. Yeah, we've got some money from the dark side. Rio Tinto has come to the party. And so now we can actually work towards expanding our digitization service or being able to travel nationally. Before we only had ABA funding, very specific NT-based funding where we couldn't travel outside of the territory to provide our services. But now we're going to go national, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. So as part of our role, as I was saying before, UNESCO says that by 2025, all magnetic media, analog media on the old video cassettes and audio cassettes and film reels or audio reels will be worn out or start to deteriorate by 2025. So yeah, it's a bit of a mammoth mission for anyone to try and coordinate and then get everything digitized. Let's look, oh, there we go. Okay, so I stole this image from Wikimedia Commons to show some of the locations remote communities that we service to as well. So as you can see in the center there is where we're pretty much based in Nimbando, Alice Springs. And, and yeah, so you can see that trying to get out only a team of three of us at the moment trying to get out to cover all these places. Yeah, it does take a bit of work. We've also got to deal with the obsolete media that we're trying to source and players, the albedo cam tapes mini DV VHS. So yeah, we're partnering up with I access. This is our team here. Penny Watson's manager of the archiving. The chuparola Charles up on the other side of me is our waltry and a mudra language speaker specialist. So a couple of the collections that we're working through at the moment. One of those comes from the PAW media collection that's pw is pinned to be a major and waltry nations. So it's the Northwest of Mandela Springs, going up towards Western Australia. And so yeah it's crucial that Aboriginal people are language speakers sorry first language speakers are crucial in being able to not only digitize the media, but have that cultural knowledge and and language skills to be able to generate that metadata that no one else has. So I've got a bit of a video coming up. That's that focuses on, you know, the importance of having first nations language speakers driving that and you know, it's it's pretty basic for all of us to know that the communities themselves have to be really driving how that data sovereignty happens. Oh yeah, we've also been teaming up with NFSA, you've got Jillian there used to be first nations, or still is first nations filmmaker, legendary female first nations filmmaker now running the indigenous unit at the National Film Sound Archive, and Mark Danbo who's setting up a new at this facility here in town that we're also going to be digitizing from. Having a nice pad to be able to get all the equipment out and everyone coming in to be able to digitize all their media as is crucial to be able to try to get it all done. If you're not aware, then some of the analog media tapes, these are video tapes beer cam, you Matic VHS VHS C and mini DV digitizing them using the old analog machines with digital converters. And then what what I guess we're alluding to here is something that isn't as much of a priority for us at the moment, trying to get everything digitized but obviously communities importance is being able to access that media once it is digitized so yeah I guess accessing is an issue and priority for the people's it's, it's you know on our on our terms of thinking it's well. You know, you're not going to have anything to access if you don't get a digitized but then for them it's well if it's digitized how we're going to get our hands on it. So here's us at the NFSA gallery in Canberra last September. And I think, oh, this is a little cartoon one of our indigimob teammates did up. We're in the NFSA archives, and here's a little animation that that hasn't been put out public yet but yeah we'll be working on it once we get a place. Sorry, this is Dennis's video. Yeah, I have to try to get the tapes off onto computer. How do you enjoy doing your work? We're going to be working on it once we get the tapes off onto computer. So we presented the video at First Languages Youth Forum. Just before our national First Nations media conference called Converge that we had last November that you said. But yeah, I think it just proves how how crucial it is that, you know, the YAPA Aboriginal people really drive the digitizing and links back to that data sovereignty as well. Do I need to share this one? Yeah. We'll get to the next one. Is it going to go? It's not letting me out now. Oh, here we go. Yeah, as I said, so here's me taking some of the old media tapes back to PAW media in Yundamu. Here's our setup we had some of the old analog media players. This is presenting at Yundamu School to the WET program. Some of the WALP Re-education Training Trust here in Canberra at IATSIS, which is our National Indigenous Archival Institute. These guys are actually in town at the moment working on our new pad. I probably haven't got that much more to add at the moment, happy to bounce back if if anyone wants to add anything else in. I just wanted to make the point to that someone raised on Twitter a while ago now. You know, when we talk about being on country, for me personally, I think that links back to our homelands where we're from. But someone pointed out on Twitter that who actually also works in similar spaces as well with libraries and archives. I mean, I don't consider myself I come from more the media side. So it's been interesting trying to realize some of the archiving and catalog cataloging world and all the metadata and how crucial some of that stuff is. But this person really pointed out that, you know, we're always on on country. And I guess this really also applies in the digital space as well. So really crucial that, you know, we consider what's important for us as, you know, First Nations and marginalized groups that that links back to that data sovereignty. Oh, I think I'll finish on this little little animation. I thought I was playing earlier. So go. Time to sort out all these old tapes in the story. Thank you to call. Maybe I'll go online and have a look. See what I can find. Here we go. First Nations Media Archive. I'll give them a call. What can I do with these old tapes? We need to get those old stories off them tapes and onto a computer because the tapes will be no good soon. That was easy. I'll just go grab a box of tapes to check. It'll be good to get them sorted out. We need to get these ready for digitizing and we need to do it in the right way too. Let's go and take a look together. Your story looks like this. You've got old tapes with important stories that you want to keep. Give the First Nations Media Archiving team a call or email archivingatfirstnationsmedia.org.au or call 0889526465. Hi, I'm Steve. Hi, I'm Penny. We're the Archiving team. Get in touch to talk more about your old tapes. He's been in love with some of the 70's music. Sorry, all right. That's it. I'll finish on that. Thank you so much, Steve. I did like the P-Funk towards the end. Wonderful animation. and just a great idea. And thank you so much for filling us in on I guess the amount of work that you have ahead of you and that timeline that's really ticking down and knowing that a lot of those important conversations, those important songs, important language pieces, a lot of them are still sitting on magnetic tape in some way, shape or form, whether that's real to real or as you showed their videos. And I guess I just had one question because I just want to be sneaky and sneak one in and ask you Steve, but I mean, in the time that you've been doing this, what have you discovered when you've been going around of just some of that footage that you get the privilege of seeing and what are some of those things that you've discovered that some of our Indigenous media organisations have in this country in their archives? Yeah, I guess, yeah, obviously being culturally sensitive to start with is a priority for us. And like we say, we're just the conduits in a way to be able to get the digitising done. We don't retain any of the copyright. Everything we get goes back to the communities. It's almost like, we've got the kitchen, we've got the specialised ovens, you just bring the ingredients and we bake the cakes and give them back, it's up to you to slice them up and divvy them out however you want. But yeah, I mean, I guess it's pretty amazing and too, we're getting it pretty much from these RIMOs, the remote Indigenous media organisations who already knew this was coming or knew to have these archives ready and in place, so you don't have the compactus in the middle of the scrub somewhere out in the bush already in a climate-controlled room. So they had that ready and most of the stuff we're seeing at the moment so far, I mean, these are the other cultural considerations as well is on the restricted content and then how we go about trying to make sure that that's digitised in culturally appropriate processes as well. But you're getting like Country Road in Walpry. There was a great video, we were asked to digitise the Eumatic tape so you can tell pretty much the age of the tape by what format it was filmed or recorded on so the Eumatic tape goes back to late 70s, early 80s. There was a great tape we digitised that had the old ladies down in northern South Australia, the Anamu Pichajara, Yonkajara lands where they're rounding up all this, what do you call it, shrub seeds, getting all of these shrubs and then going through this whole process of shaking them out and it's all happening, no kitchens, no mats really, just on hard red earth, just grinding out these seeds and then the process of slowly pounding it down, grinding these seeds down and then what seems like taking forever and then the end product was just like this tiny little pilot shaped flat damper that all the chitchis, all the kids are sitting around waiting to have this tiny little piece of and it was just sort of, it made you realise how hard people actually worked to, to get that good bush tucker and I bet it would have tasted beautiful but it was just like this tiny little bit for that amount of work, it was like, shh, yeah, yeah. I love it, a bit jealous of your job, Steve, but thank you so much and I'm seeing questions start to come in but if you do have a question for Steve on anything that he talked about or anything you wish to know, particularly about Indigenous media, put it in the chat box and we'll definitely ask that at the end of all the presentations. It is with great pleasure and I'm so glad because I know what the time difference is right now in Aotearoa, New Zealand. So thank you, Sophia, for being here but our next presenter is Sophia Amore Cogchini and Sophia is a Nguyen, Tahitian, Maori, Italian and Hungarian woman who has worked on projects to increase Wikipedia editing knowledge about Pacific Island artists in Aotearoa, New Zealand. And don't forget, if you have a question for Sophia during her presentation, just put it in the chat and we'll ask it for her after all the presentations but over to you, Sophia. Oh, thank you so much, that was awesome. So, Aotearoa Helangin, acknowledging the land that I'm on, thanks to my, giving thanks to my Te Reo Maori and Pasifika ancestors who watch over us tonight and the traditional custodians of the Southeast, Queensland, the Jaguar, the Jaguar and New Yorker for people. Warm Moana greetings to you all. Okay, so big thanks to Reata Patrick for your introduction and to James and Belinda for this privilege to be, to speak alongside Steve Bandeghi, Hodo Bot and Ola Nio Ulu Shola Ishola. So, my name is Sophia Moraesiali to Helife Tukimi, I know it's very long. I'm a New Zealand born. My mother is New Way in Tahitian and my father is Maori, Italian and Hungarian. I call it the fruit salad mix. I'm here to talk to you about my participation in the Pasifika Aotearoa Wiki Project started by the fabulously Simone. So, I'm just gonna change the slide now. Cool. A little bit about myself. I'm from Wellington. I reside in the small suburban area called Canem Screek. It's small but large community, mainly populated by Pasifika people. Despite the smallness, there is 13 churches, eight schools and one college. This slide here shows you only a part of my family that are in Canem Screek. The rest I couldn't fit on the page. As you can see, I come from a large family so there's never a dull moment. I grew up with my maternal grandfather that taught us grandkids practical life skills. So, by the age of six, all grandkids could catch a fish four different ways with a reel and rod line and an old stick, mussels, corned beef, potatoes and whatever leftovers we had in the fridge. I come from humble beginnings that brought up the practice of Angawhaka New Wave, which is the New Wave, the New Wave way of life. Sorry. Here we go. Grandma would keep me by her side making Faikai Pitako customary New Wave dishes during the Umu, which is like a fire pit in the ground. We used to cook our food along with many other customary dishes too. Attending church every Sunday was something I never challenged as I saw it was part of Angawhaka New Wave. I moved in with my grandmother when university started four years ago, four for four years, studying fine arts at Massey University, Wellington during my honours and during my honours. Because of living with grandma, Angawhaka New Wave no longer became a practice but a way of life, a way of living. Grandma and her way of being became the inspiration to my work and projects that I took on and played a huge part of the involvement of Lisa Mill's Pacific Wiki Project. Doing things of Angawhaka New Wave in mind became my personal research methodology during the study, my studies and Wiki projects taking on Pacifica concepts such as Talanoa and Va, which I'll later go into when I start as there. A little background into the Pacific Aotearoa Wiki Project. This was started by Lisa Moore and she was aware of the close ties that existed between various forms and artists. Working in Aotearoa, New Zealand and their family back in the islands, she wondered if there were any Pacifica Wikipedians. She also questioned if there were any demands for Wikipedia to house Pacifica related content. She proposed an initiative to extend information about Creative New Zealand's Yearly Arts Pacifica Awards to Makareta Urali, who is the Pacifica Arts Manager at Creative New Zealand. Makareta had attended an editathon at the DAS Art Museum, so she had some familiarity with Wikipedia. Lisa proposed a Wikipedia in residency programme that would teach three Pacifica individuals how to edit Wikipedia by creating new articles proposing a pathway for Pacifica people to be creating content by Pacifica for Pacifica. Makareta backed the project as Creative New Zealand Wikipedia in residency with investment funding from their Digital Moana programme and sought three people to come on board. These three people are... There we go. Cool. So these people are Kasivalu, a recent graduate from Toya Fakari, the New Zealand Drama School and member of Choreographer and producer Tupe Loa Loa's company, Le Moana Arts, Le Lani Siu, a DJ and events manager who was working at Wellington Museum and myself, an art graduate and oceanic taltai internship recipient. Okay. The goals of this project were to increase accessible content about Pacifica artists through Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, to introduce Wikipedia skills to Pacifica artists, writers and researchers. I'm making this, sorry. The framework was a target of achievements for... The framework was a target of achievements for each editor, for example, five new C-class Wikipedia articles, at least 50% women, non-binary and gender fluid. Identified problem with five existing related articles and fixes problems stated. Learns how to upload images to Wikipedia Commons and Wikipedia articles and uploads 10 to 20 images to Wikimedia Commons when learns how to create new articles and Wikidata and create 20 new items with at least 10 statements each. I think it's important for me to note also that this project was paid, they paid us for our editing and our learning. This fast-tracked interest and commitment to the project and removed barriers such as paying for living expenses. Oatala noa, a new way in saying, which means don't talk stupid words. I would hear the saying now and then around the house. I used to Google at this with deeper contents and analysis and asking my grandmother what this actually meant. She said, it's a lesson, a lesson in knowing how words can be wielded, how texts can change in an instance and can be misconstrued. So the importance of finding where I stood as a Pacifica editor on Wikipedia was just as important to me as my own identity. Creating articles of living people, people of minority, people of marginalization, indigenous peoples. Oatala noa reminded me of the responsibilities that came when composing these articles. To do the research, prove the credibility, to do right by them in their communities. I had at my fingertips the identity of others. I'm unsure of Cassie Valo and Nalini had previous knowledge of Wikipedia before this pilot program, but I knew absolutely nothing. Editing on Wikipedia was complete jargon, not to mention throughout university was completely drilled into us that Wikipedia was not a reliable source to quote from. After a few hilarious breakdowns, a few Zoom calls of Lisa and others I settled down, but often became overwhelmed at just how big the gaps were in regards to Pacifica people, but also their customs that is not yet on Wikipedia. Many red links appeared and my to-do list became longer and longer. I'm still trying to complete it to this day, but it seems to have added more since then. Lisa knows about the many conversations I have with my family, one being about my grandmother and the concept of notability, something at the time that I just met myself. So grandma had given me a list of new way and artists, people back in her time of the 1940s. She pursues the time of the narrative with these artists stating where they were born, what they accomplished for the community, and what effect they had on new veils today. I got so excited and so I clicked and I was like, geez, man, I hope they got notability. I mean, my following questions were, what exhibitions did they hold, grandma? What was the day one or what were they a part of? I could feel her tense up asking me why I would ask those questions. Yes, they are notable, she's quickly said. Notable to me, your aunties, your family, your family's family and your family's family's family. We're talking about our people from new era, my people, the people I grew up with that is not, is that not notable enough? I agreed. I created drafts in honor of them, not yet uploaded to Wikipedia. I'm not sure what's worse, creating a Wikipedia page in honor of them and that being taken down due to lack of notability from lack of online sources or not making one at all. In this instance, my grandmother had so much information to offer. It was unfortunate that there were a lack of web pages to support her and her knowledge that she has. Newware along with other Pacifica, our histories are passed down through word-of-mouth, oral tradition, as opposed to written tradition. Wikipedia came as sort of written tradition, not necessarily the oral. This made it hard when we tried to capture information but then realized the credibility was not there. This was often seen in the articles created. This project helped recognize the difference in how Pacifica artists represent themselves. It's not just them that they will make reference to. It's to their whanau, family. It's references to their te puna, their community, their whakapapa, genealogy. They are bringing their whole positionality to the space. So making sure that Wikipedia catered to this was important for myself to capture because there was my reason and my motivation. Asi Lanani and myself noticed certain repetitive waves that were going on. Either there's not enough different information on our artists so that articles became rather monotone, robotic, cut and paste. No matter how many times you try to rewrite it, it did not cater to their whakapapa, genealogy, to their whanau and whanau, family, and the positionality that they brought was then gone. The information that is sourced is repetitive. Both of these things did not equal that article that we were happy with. It equaled an article that did not recognise Pacifica artist and their positionality as a whole. This was challenging. This also meant that we had to forget about the set goals in the project and focus on the artist and work with them. We all expressed and felt that time pressure made us look at the development of an article as data. It was just about getting something out there, forgetting that they are human. Time took their narrative away and if we weren't careful, oh, sorry, if we weren't careful enough, as soon as we felt this coming on, it was natural to choose the artist first. Luckily, Lisa understood. For us fostering the relationship is more important. This is where Angafaka New Ware helped me remember the usage of Pacifica concepts, such as Samoan Tongan concept called Kalanoa. Kalanoa means to hold face-to-face conversations. It involves fostering connections by establishing secure environments where we value diversity and welcome change that have a purpose. It refers to reducing hierarchy so that when we speak it's us, not you and I. Kalanoa recognises that individuals, that the individuals we engage to write about have a life form and that honours their story and their positionality. This was then another challenge is because this programme fell on hard times, such as COVID-19 lockdown. Sometimes face-to-face Kalanoa was not there and Zoom calls were not cutting it. Kasi Lenani and I expressed how this challenged our time management along, also the effect it had on us, not being able to work together as a team that slowed and led to self-doubt. Another methodology that helped is Va. I keep it on my slides. Cool. Our history, so Va is our history present and future. Despite our desire to find the Va, we can safely say that it defines us. It doesn't play as a physical shape. The Va is a space that always exists whether we acknowledge it or not. And even when we feel it's changed, connects us through all our interactions and manifests most vividly when we get together and engage in our customs. The Va within Wikipedia was brought out through this project, through the practice of Kalanoa, through the relationships built through the narratives told and uncovered how much this was needed and magnified the starting point to where we can now progress at the find out positionality. This pilot program was successful where Lisa, Kasi Va, Lenani and I have cut ways for now future Pacifica Wiki projects and the new possibilities to come. And just gonna finish it off with this. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Sophia. That was just absolutely lovely and so beautiful seeing your family as well in those slides. I really enjoyed seeing that and could definitely relate to not being able to fit them onto one slide. So, Steve and I laughing along with you, going, yeah, our family wouldn't fit on one slide either, I don't think. But if you do have a question, for Sophia, make sure you put it into the chat and we'll be asking all those questions at the end. So it's never too late to put a question in there. And our final presenter, and I'm just so grateful again that we could have someone from Africa, from Nigeria. I am not sure if this is right shoulder that it is, I think the afternoon there. Maybe the time zone is not as bad as it is. Thank you for Sophia, who's in the future. It's morning, good morning then, good morning then. Good morning, Mali. But our last presenter is Olanio, or Luwashola, or Shala for short. And Shala is with Wikimedia user group, Nigeria, who are recording the oral history of languages spoken in Nigeria as part of their Nigerian language oral history documentation project. Again, if you have any questions that come up while you're listening to Shala, please put them in the chat so that we can ask those at the end. And over to you Shala. Thank you Rihanna and the organizers of this program. I'm super excited to be here today and we've been craving for awareness for our languages. And I think this is one of the platform that can help to showcase to the world the diversity that we have in Africa and in Nigeria. When we were talking before the real events, I said Nigeria happened to be one of the most diverse country in terms of languages. However, most of those languages are not being optimized. We could imagine when we have a language that is over 527, which is 25% of the entire language spoken in Africa and out of all these 500, only three of the languages are recognized by the government especially in education. And also when they are even recognizing the education, they are taught like a subject. We don't use them as a means of teaching. So it's a big problem. So people are being taught in the language that they don't know. People are being taught in official language and we find there are challenges in learning from languages that are not your mother tongue. So this is one of the reason why we are into this project. I'm gonna start with a video to showcase something about the language. I hope it's gonna work. Let me try. I don't know what language I'm in. I don't know. I don't know what language I'm in. I'm the secretary. I'm one of the most diverse. I'm the secretary. I'm the best in the world. I have a career. I'm the most diverse. I have a lot of skills. I have a lot of skills. I have a lot of skills. Thank you. I'm going to then go to the slide for the day. So the project is looking at a unique way to keep a language alive. So what is the project all about? So there are three key components of the project. The project is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. As earlier said, there are over 500 languages in Nigeria, which represent 25% of the entire language in Africa. Our key objective is to produce an audio visual of the 500 language in such a way that they can be used to enrich Wikipedia project with free license content to support research and education purposes. Then with the team comprises of language expires, Icarvas, and the likes. So these are the three major components of, I mean, the three key areas that we set up to keep the project running. So the main aspects, why do we embark on the projects? As earlier mentioned, a country with over 25% language spoken in the entire Africa. Eight out of 10 of these languages are threatened with extinction. Only three of these over 500 languages are recognized by the government in education. So it's like the other languages do not exist. And also, quite a number of these languages, you can find their speakers. So it is also part of the major problems that we envisage and that we intend to solve. Aside from that, English is the official language in Nigeria. And basically, it is used for business transactions. And this also cuts into the challenges facing indigenous language because any other language that is not official, others are not recognized. So the majority of the speakers of these languages channel more of their knowledge and more of their energy in learning the official language to the detriment of the indigenous language because that is the language of survivor. English is the language of survivor. Since it's a language of business, it is what everyone is looking at. No, what then, what did we do? Now, this is our story. We started with documentation of 50 oral history of Nigeria languages by traveling to the southwest of Nigeria. Nigeria is, we have over 200 people in population. And the country is divided into six major geopolitical zones. We have the southwest, where we have the U-Bas. We have the southeast, where they have the egos. We have the south-south, where we have the component part of people and some other languages. And we have the snot, where we have the non-denominers, where Ausa is spoken. Within these regions, there are many languages that are being spoken. So we decided to divide the country into six geopolitical zones for the purpose of traveling. So so far, we have done over 100. And in doing that, we've started from the southwest because that is the region where the majority of the team members reside. So we started with that, and we focus mainly on the U-Bas. And sometimes last year, we traveled to the south-south, the Cross River State, where we also document over 60 languages to complement the earlier 50 that we have documented in the southwest. So what do we do to create to ensure that the languages, I mean, the awareness is, I mean, to create better awareness for the language? We have a landing page after the document, after the audio visual, already been uploaded to commons. I don't want to go through the technicality of the commons and the likes. The language after being produced by the cinematographers, we got it uploaded on commons, and we created the landing page. We are people that are interested in listening to those languages can go to, I mean, to view them. And also, we have used the language, the videos, on over 150 relevant Wikipedia pages in different languages. So what do we do? I'm going to show us in the presentation. And we'll also ensure that the video has been subtitled in, I mean, in 12 languages. The video caption has been subtitled in 12 languages. We intend to do more, but these are the languages that we have access to at the moment. OK. On wiki, we have done quite a lot of work on wiki. So what do we do on wiki? We identify where the video, the language in the video that we have documented, we identify wiki page. In wiki page, where such language has been published, then we make use of the video. If you see the screen, I mean, my screen, this video is about Ibadon language. And we have a page for Ibadon on Wikipedia. So we inserted the video on this page. So when you read about Ibadon, you can as well listen to someone using the indigenous language of Ibadon to talk about the story about the Ibadon. We have used this in over 150 wiki pages of different languages. And the project also helped in bringing together volunteers to help in contributing to creating new articles about language where we have their videos, but does not have a Wikipedia page. So we ensured that volunteers identified this language. We created such a Wikipedia page. And we also ensured that that page is translated into other languages, aside from English. And then we used the corresponding videos on each of them. So this is the gallery that I mentioned earlier. The gallery is like a one-stop gap where you could see the over 100 languages. Some are subtitled in English. Some are not subtitled. So you could click on them and listen to them. And another thing we do is, oh, I think, we also ensured that on weekly basis, these videos showcase on our social media handles. Because one of the core objectives, even after we might have produced the video, we want to ensure that there is awareness. Because even the speaker of some of this language don't even know that they exist. We got that we, there was an example of someone in the US that called, he is aware that he speaks this language. He's from this particular language, I mean area. But he does not know, he hasn't heard the language. Through this project, he was able to listen to the language and then he came to us. And this is an example of what we want to achieve. We intend to publish this video across the globe. So the speakers of this video that probably are not domiciling in Nigeria or the domiciles anywhere else can listen to them and can also help in supporting the promotion of the language. Okay, now another thing we have been doing is, I am my team, we've been donating these videos to institution, especially educational institution. We have donated over all the languages. So at least three core universities in Nigeria to support researchers in those languages and also another related relevant purposes. So the feedback from this has been quite encouraging because many of these institutions are looking for funding to do something similar. But we have done it and we are providing it. We need a platform where the video could reach more people. And I believe with this collaboration, many of these institutions have even helped to push. We're also looking at talking to mission-aligned organizations like embassies in Nigeria. We are looking at how to partner with embassies to donate the video to them so that it can also help to push it to their people to learn about the history of our languages. So that is all we have been doing. I want to thank you all for listening and you have many questions Amir to answer. Thank you. Thank you so much, Shola. I have been wanting to hear more about your project as well for a while. So it was so lovely to be able to have you along. And I mean, wow, you've done so much. Over 150 relevant Wiki pages. You've subtitled those videos into 12 different languages and the work just keeps continuing. So thank you so much. I do wish to just thank Shola, Sophia and Steve again for your presentations and for giving us this time.