Thanks, Ewan, Delyth, Gerard and All,
Having studied at the University of Edinburgh in the School of Celtic and
Scottish Studies, and being familiar with its Professor of Gaelic Wilson
McLeod's (
http://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/wilson-mcleod - among so many others)
focus on regenerating Scots' Gaelic - "energy centers" or schools in cities
are one successful approach - I'm curious how to focus Wikidata's
structured knowledge in 358 languages to support the generation of all its
smallest languages (and indeed all 7,099 living languages re WUaS). In this
vein, would there be a way to plan for connecting linguists and
anthropologists studying among native speakers (of one language in multiple
locations) and all conversing, conceptually in Google group video Hangouts
/ Youtube, and then turn this speech into text, and then wiki-structuring
sucht data in the smallest languages in Wikidata?
Am heading from the SF Bay Area to northern California next week to visit a
friend who will work on the Hupa Indian reservation in the autumn, and also
to Yakima speaking areas in Washington state after this, and would love (on
behalf of World University and School too, which donated WUaS to Wikidata
in October 2017) to create, conceptually, "Google Hangouts' speech into
Wikidata" information structures for regeneration of Celtic (e.g. re these
WUaS wiki schools -
http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_language and
http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Cromarty_dialect_of_Scots_language -
in the main Languages' wiki page at WUaS - - planned for all 7,099), and
all indigenous, and minority languages.
Will there be a focus at this Celtic Knot conference on this, by any
chance? Is there a focus on this already at Wikidata (or Wikimedia)? In
what ways could World University and School help focus this? WUaS would
seek to create these processes in Wikidata and explicitly for (all)
minority languages.
Best,
Scott
https://twitter.com/WorldUnivAndSch
https://twitter.com/sgkmacleod
https://twitter.com/scottmacleod
scottmacleod.com
CC
worlduniversityandschool.org
On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 12:02 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hoi,
Another approach to supporting minority languages in combination with
Wikidata is adding labels to the language involved. At a Wikimedia
conference I did an experiment with a speaker of a South African language.
We used a popular SA politician [1] as an example and added labels to all
the statements as they showed as missing in Reasonator [2]. We then looked
up another SA politician and Barack Obama. It was really good to see how
quickly the effect was felt of adding labels.
When you look at the Reasonator in English, you will notice that a
passable text can be generated for people. It is a matter of some
programming and something similar can be created in many languages. It is
for this reason that I feel that an effort to add labels can have a big
impact for two reasons:
* The labels open up existing facts in Wikidata to that language
* It gives an incentive to add items and statements that are particular to
the people who speak a language.
Another thought I want to raise is this: when people create a dictionary
in a language, it is a tool that first and foremost helps study the
language. All the data is not useful, it is not linked and only serves as a
lookup function. When a word like "human" is added as a label in Wikidata,
it immediately serves all the items.. millions of them. Consider the impact
of adding a word like "politician" "psychologist" "town"
"Africa" even
"Wales".
When you really want to serve the smaller languages, study them in their
Wikipedia format. For many languages, Wikipedia is the biggest corpus on
the Internet. Personally I was astounded when I heard years ago that the
Bangla Wikipedia is the biggest resource on the Internet for modern Bangla,
This is a language with hundreds of millions of speakers, consider the
tipping point for a language like Xhosa or Welsh..
I do think that when a high school with children in any country with many
missing labels add labels for 4 hours per child, its impact on the
usefulness of Wikidata will be huge. There have not been experiments like
this so far to my knowledge. Research on Wikipedia has not been kind to
anything but English.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=8023
[2] when you change the language to the target language, you can add items
from within Reasonator.
On 2 June 2017 at 14:08, Jakob Voß <Jakob.Voss(a)gbv.de> wrote:
Hi Ewan,
Thanks for this interesting event. I just had a conversation with a
researcher who wants to create a dictionary for a small language that has
no dictionaries. We discussed the use of Wiktionary and Wikidata - it looks
very promising, but the current state seems not mature enough at least
until "Phase beta" of development:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary#Our_plan
Anyway, Wikidata and planned support of Lexemes should be made more
public at the event. The current program of Celtic Knot contains nothing
about Wikidata and only one talk related to Wiktionary, so it would be
great if Léa, Lydia, Daniel or someone else from the development team could
give an introduction.
Cheers
Jakob
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Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242,
http://www.gbv.de/
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