Amir asked Kimberli Mäkäräinen (User:Yupik) if she would be interested in serving on the language committee. Since I have worked a lot with Kimberli over the years, especially on the Sámi project that Wikimedia Norge is working on, we thought it would be a good idea if I introduce her to the list.

Kimberli is originally from the US, but has lived in Finland for decades, where she studies for her PhD and works as a professional translator. She has been a Wikipedia contributor for many many years already, especially working in the Northern Sámi Wikipedia, but also in several other languages. In order to get details right I asked her to send me some, and she had this nice academic introduction ready at hand:

Kimberli Mäkäräinen graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA (BA in Linguistics with high distinction, 1994), the University of Helsinki (UH), Finland (BA in English Translation, 2015; MA in English Translation, 2016), and is a thesis short of a second MA in Saami Studies from UH (2016–). Ms. Mäkäräinen has combined her love of translating legislation, terminology, and the Saami languages in her PhD, which debates the ease of understanding the terminology used in Finnish legislation translated into Skolt Saami. Awarded High Distinction from UIUC for her thesis, A Papyrus in Fayumic Coptic, she is an authorized translator from Finnish into English, and received an NIAS SUPRA Nordic Scholarship for her work on translating legislation in multilingual legal systems involving lesser-resourced languages. Both professionally and personally, Ms. Mäkäräinen believes everyone should be able to read the laws affecting their everyday lives in their own language and more resources should be allocated to allow this to happen. Accordingly, she advocates through her work for the use of languages ranging from Tundra Nenets to Zulu in open-knowledge projects like Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, the Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences, and other dictionary and knowledge projects.

I believe Kimberli would make a great addition to the language committee, and hope you all agree. :-)

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