Kaya

Well were to now, the noongar community met in good faith every condition asked of it during 2017 includinng those asked by the committee while I was in Berlin, In December we posted the final request after completing the required translations.  Following those request we received what can politely be describe as poor responses.  

 I wont be in Berlin this year to again find out what new hoops we will be required to jump through.  I can say the outcome has been very poor, there has been no existent communication from the committee as a committee.  At this stage does the WMAU abandon  capturing 50,000 years of Australian Indigenous knowledge from across 300 countries in their languages.  

The ball must now rest with the language committee because there is no way I could take what little comment we have received back to the wider Noongar community who daily deal with racism, knowledge appropriation, and being dismissed.   

The greatest lesson at the moment for Australian Indigenous knowledge is dont engage with Wikimedia Foundation, because despite them acting good faith the outcomes will be no different to past experiences.  

So why did we work with Noongar

• they wanted to work with us, ie language community driven
• its one of the largest language groups
• it has a clearly defined country
• it is supported by 5 Universities
• its the most influential Indigenous languages and culture on any Australian community with the greatest uptake of indigenous words into the locally spoken english so much so that both the language spoken and the Western Australia culture is uniquely identifiable from the rest of Australia.
• its spoken in some form by 25.m despite the statistics

Our challenges was in knowing that there actually 14 associated dialects, that they have spellings directly impacted by the european who recorded them.  My process has always been not to use WMF as means of enforcing one dialect over another, hence why we use a lot of english in the learning and a reluctance to do further translations because each choice should come when the community is doing it through consensus not at the hand of myself....

--

Gideon Digby

Vice President - Wikimedia Australia

M: 0434 986 852

gnangarra@wikimedia.org.au

http://wikimedia.org.au

Wikimedia Australia Inc. is an independent charitable organisation which supports the efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation in Australia. Your donations keep the Wikimedia mission alive.

http://wikimedia.org.au/Donate

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