Dear colleagues, We need to talk about how minority languages are supported right now. The Celtic Knot Conference 2017 is the first Wikipedia Language conference focusing on how technology supports Celtic & Indigenous Languages. It takes place at the University of Edinburgh Business School on Thursday 6th July 2017. Booking closes 27 June 2017 so don't delay. All welcome. Watch this 3 minute videohttps://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_nr4uufq9 if you’d like to know more. The main objective for Celtic Knot 2017 is the coming together of those working to support Celtic and Indigenous languages in the same room at same time; strengthening the bonds into a 'knot' and leading into action. We welcome diverse attendees ranging from Wikimedians, linguists, educators, researchers, information professionals, media professionals, translators, learning technologists and more coming together to share good practice and find fruitful new collaborations to support language communities as a result of the event.
Keynote speakers
* Professor Antonella Soracehttps://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2017#Keynotes - Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburghhttp://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/%7Eantonell/ and founding director of Bilingualism Mattershttp://www.bilingualism-matters.org.uk/ will be speaking on ‘Bilingualism in minority languages: a resource and an opportunity’. * Jason Evanshttps://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2017#Keynotes - Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Waleshttps://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Expert_outreach/Wikipedian_in_Residence_at_the_National_Library_of_Wales will discuss his strategy for working with Wikimedia UK and the Welsh Government to develop the Welsh Wicipedia using a combination of community engagement, data manipulation and the implementation of Open Access policies. Confirmed speakers also include:
* Susan Ross – Gaelic Wikipedian in Residencehttps://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2017/01/wikimedia-uk-and-national-library-of-scotland-announce-new-gaelic-post/ at the National Library of Scotland on making the Uicipeid a hub for online Gaelic knowledgehttp://www.nls.uk/news/archive/2017/01/gaelic-wikipedian-begins. * Dr. Sharon Arbuthnothttp://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/sharon-arbuthnot%28519b4b40-d075-4b6d-9199-15a05d214165%29.html - Queen's University, Belfast. Presenting on the AHRC-funded eDIL projecthttp://www.dil.ie/ (Irish Language dictionary) on Wednesday 5th July. * Gareth Morlais – the Welsh Language Unit, Welsh Government. Gareth will speak about how mapping how much importance major companies (Google, Twitter, Apple) attach to creative activity on Wikipedia led to the Welsh Government helping to fund two Welsh-language Wikipedia initiatives. * Delyth Prys – Head of the Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, will speak on Welsh/Celtic speech technology and why text-to-speech and speech recognition are becoming increasingly important in our digital world. * Àlex Hinojohttp://www.alexhinojo.cat/en/bio/ – Executive Director, Amical Wikimediahttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Amical_Wikimedia on the Catalan language project. * Iñaki Lopez de Luzuriaga – Developing the Basque Wikipedia: From corpus expansion to outreach. * Astrid Carlsen – Executive Director, Wikimedia Norge speaking on Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and building a project to revitalize the Northern Sami Wikipedia. * Robin Owain – Wales Manager, Wikimedia UK, speaking on recent developments supporting the Welsh language community. * Mina Theofilatou presenting on The Kefalonian Dialect in Wiktionary and how Wikitherapy addresses social equality in open-source language projectshttps://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2017/Programme/CK125. * Duncan Brown - Llên Naturhttp://www.llennatur.com/Drupal7/llennatur/, presenting on ‘Y BYWIADUR: the dictionary of life’. * Ilario Valdelli - Wikimedia Switzerland, speaking on the Digital Library in Romansch and the new initiatives to map the archeological sites connected with Celtic culture in the Alps. * Subhashish Panigrahi presenting on Kathabhidhanahttps://github.com/OdiaWikimedia/Kathabhidhana, an open toolkit for anyone to record their language in a human and machine readable form. To find out more about the conference themes and how to book your place to join us then please visit the Celtic Knothttps://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2017 page. It promises to be a great event – including a panel on the Politics of Language Online, excellent papers, workshops and discussion spaces. Please feel free to forward this event to interested colleagues in your network. Very best regards, Ewan McAndrew Wikimedian in Residence
Tel: 07719 330076 Email: ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.ukmailto:ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk Subscribe to the mailing list: wikimedia@mlist.is.ed.ac.ukmailto:wikimedia@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk My working hours are 10.30am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday. Wikipedia Project Page for the residency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, Floor H (West), Argyle House, 3 Lady Lawson Street, Edinburgh, EH3 9DR. www.ed.ac.ukhttp://www.ed.ac.uk
Ewan McAndrew Wikimedian in Residence
Tel: 07719 330076 Email: ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk Subscribe to the mailing list: wikimedia@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk My working hours are 10.30am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday. Wikipedia Project Page for the residency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, Floor H (West), Argyle House, 3 Lady Lawson Street, Edinburgh, EH3 9DR. www.ed.ac.uk
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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
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
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@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@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
Hoi, For me it is simple; I have written an outline for a Wikipedia class [1]. That helps by writing stubs when there is not much there. Similarly you can take any subject found in an newspaper, decide if it is important enough and add items or add labels in Wikidata. Almost any article in a newspaper has things that are of value if only the neighbourhood of a place. I would seek the subjects in Reasonator. When an item is found I would have students add labels.
When used in context with newspapers, I would first do Wikipedia and only then add Wikidata.
When it is part of a computing class, I would have them construct sentences based on the present values. The point is not beautiful software but having students consider relations in their language.
NB for those who object because of a lack of citations.. Citations become relevant once you have reached a certain threshold. Please do remember that English Wikipedia in its infancy did not have the insistence on sources either. Given the wealth of factoids known in Wikidata typically this can serve as a template for new articles because the statements in Wikidata typically have a well sourced origin. Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2017/05/teaching-wikipedia-using-local-ne...
On 3 June 2017 at 19:38, Info WorldUniversity < info@worlduniversityandschool.org> wrote:
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@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@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
--
--
Scott MacLeod - Founder & President
415 480 4577
World University and School
CC World University and School - like CC Wikipedia with best
STEM-centric CC OpenCourseWare - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This transmission and any attachments are intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential, or exempt from disclosure under applicable federal or state laws. If the reader of this transmission is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify me immediately by email or telephone.
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GerrardM, and All,
Building on your approach, and concerning Celtic Knot, and the Celtic languages/WUaS wiki schools, for example, here - 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 - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Languages - planned for all 7,099), with WUaS focusing particularly on all indigenous, and minority languages, these wiki schools could become like Wikipedia pages (after WUaS begins to develop newly in Wikidata/Mediawiki), and people could wiki-add new sections for new items-into-Wikidata-from-Wikipedia (the idea you suggest), beyond the Newspapers' example, for which there is already a section on every WUaS Subject page. These language wiki schools could be further designed for the "Wikipedia class" format you suggest. The "Google Hangouts' speech/text into Wikidata" step would come later (at WUaS) and as Wikidata grows.
Thanks, Scott
On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 11:09 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, For me it is simple; I have written an outline for a Wikipedia class [1]. That helps by writing stubs when there is not much there. Similarly you can take any subject found in an newspaper, decide if it is important enough and add items or add labels in Wikidata. Almost any article in a newspaper has things that are of value if only the neighbourhood of a place. I would seek the subjects in Reasonator. When an item is found I would have students add labels.
When used in context with newspapers, I would first do Wikipedia and only then add Wikidata.
When it is part of a computing class, I would have them construct sentences based on the present values. The point is not beautiful software but having students consider relations in their language.
NB for those who object because of a lack of citations.. Citations become relevant once you have reached a certain threshold. Please do remember that English Wikipedia in its infancy did not have the insistence on sources either. Given the wealth of factoids known in Wikidata typically this can serve as a template for new articles because the statements in Wikidata typically have a well sourced origin. Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2017/05/teaching- wikipedia-using-local-news.html
On 3 June 2017 at 19:38, Info WorldUniversity <info@ worlduniversityandschool.org> wrote:
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.c om/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_language and http://worlduniversity.wikia.c om/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@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@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
--
--
Scott MacLeod - Founder & President
415 480 4577 <(415)%20480-4577>
World University and School
CC World University and School - like CC Wikipedia with best
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