Proposal for a Wikipedia version for Inari Saami

We hereby propose that the Inari Saami incubator Wikipedia be converted into a full-fledged Wikipedia, smn.wikipedia.org

The language community

Inari Saami has appr. 450 speakers. This makes it a small language community in Wikipedia terms. It is still worth noting that Inari Saami is probably one of the most, if not the most successful revitalisation processes in the world. During the last decades the language community has organised language nests for a generation of Inari Saami children, and it has taught the language to key members of the middle generation. The third phase of the revitalisation, strengthening the literacy of the language, is now in its initial phase. This phase is named “100 new writers of Inari Saami” and has “1000 new pages of youth fiction” as one of its subprojects. The last decade has also seen language technology projects for Inari Saami, resulting in a spellchecker, comprehensive online dictionaries, keyboards with predictive writing, and programs for machine translation.

At present, Inari Saami is one of the four official languages of the Inari municipality and the Finnish Saami parliament. It is taught at all levels of instruction from kindergarten up to and including PhD level courses. The activists behind the “100 new writers of Inari Saami” are planning a campaign for children in high school to contribute to the Inari Saami Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia

Inari Saami has been in the incubator since 2012, with several quite good articles from an early stage. In spring 2020, the Inari Saami Language Association (Anarâškielâ servi) arranged Wikipedia writing workshops. Over the past six months, the Inari Saami Wikipedia version has seen edits every day, usually 30–50 edits a day. There are more than 1,000 articles and a substantial part of these are of good quality. The short articles form good and coherent article sets. Finnish municipalities, countries of the world, languages in the Uralic language family, Finnish authors, grammar and society are all such categories for which there is reasonably good coverage of short but informative articles. A list has also been made of the articles that are vital to the Inari Saami Wikipedia. As for localisation, the basic requirement has been met, as all strings in the set of core messages have been translated into Inari Saami.

We expect that a separate Wikipedia for Inari Saami will make it more visible than it is today, and make its users compare it with the much larger North Saami Wikipedia.