Good day Wikimedians of ZA,
I'm sharing with you some of the esoteric, behind-the-scenes yet exciting
stuff happening within the Wikiverse. I believe we in SA have a particular
duty to engage with it because of our situation where there are such huge
imbalances between our languages and their Wikipedias (and related
projects). The texts I will link to explain better than I can, some of the
seemingly eccentric proposals I've previously made.
Abstract Wikipedia
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2020-10-07> (a
provisional name for a still-new project) aims among other things to
improve the functionality of "voice assistants". These have the potential
to make Wiki content more accessible to many people. Imagine if all South
African languages had something like this.
<http://techiaith.cymru/packages/macsen/?lang=en> Such apps are making
their way to cheaper "smart feature phones".
I'm not a web developer but understand enough of the issues involved to
urge our community at large to facilitate appropriate web development
processes
<https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/10/developing-semantic-web/>. For
example, by using Wikipedia's Content Translation tool (even when we
personally have no need for it), or translating labels on Wikidata (which I
suspect is one of the reasons this year's Wikimedian of the Year is from
Ghana; Wikimedia Ghana has held "label-thons") we are creating metadata
links that enable semantic tools to do their magic. Of course if anyone
reading this *is* a web developer, we look to you to take up the baton!
Best regards,
--
Michael Graaf, M.Phil (UCT)
Researcher, Editor &
Community Informatics Practitioner
Mob +27795487242
WhatsApp +27647754342
ORCID 0000-0002-1951-5739