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@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

--
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de>
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de/

_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata