Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce a new position at Wikimédia France (WMFR): Diversity and Francophony Projects Manager. Adélaïde Calais [1], already working for us on WikiFranca and the French speaking Wikiconvention, is in charge on that. This new position contains 3 main areas:

A. Support the structuration and development of francophone cooperation efforts 'WikiFranca' : Since 2013 and the creation of WikIFranca by members of Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia Switzerland, Wikimedia Belgium and Wikimedia France [2], we are committed to other French affiliates of the Wikimedia movement in a logic of mutual support. The WikiFranca [3] network has welcomed and supported the emergence of Wikimedia communities in other French-speaking countries by organizing unifying events. WMFR would like to continue to support the WikiFranca French-speaking collaborative network and develop friendly relations with the Francophone affiliates of the movement.

Ongoing projects: Francophone Contribution Month, French speaking Wikiconvention [4], Learning Days in French, rapid grants open to all French speaking wikimedians [5], WikiClubRFI [6]...

B. Languages diversity: We will focus on a territorial linguistic community and develop an annual project with the help of local associations. In 2019-2020, this will be the Occitan community whose version of Wikipedia has about 85,000 articles for 5 administrators. We hope to build a development and support project that will be transferable to other linguistic communities living in metropolitan France. This project also concerns the tool Lingua Libre [7] which has been developed to allow the oral contribution on Wikimedia projects especially for people who speak regional and minority languages. Since then, the project has evolved, grown and reached a stage of development sufficient to initiate recording workshops. It reached 150 000 recordings after a only year being up and meets expressed needs. We will, therefore, continue to support it, but we must also look at its future and its usefulness for the Wikimedia movement, particularly in the context of the 2030 strategy.

Ongoing projects: Lingua libre, Lingua Libre Sign-it (a Sign Language project that will be announced later), funding of MOOCs in Arabic and Shawiya...

C. Diversify participation in the Wikimedia movement: In 2018, WMFR launched a specific program for the overseas territories with the first edition of the contest "Photograph the Overseas" [8], in partnership with the French Ministry of Overseas and the French Development Agency. The objective of the Overseas project is to develop the participation coming from overseas territories in order to improve the contents on the Wikimedia projects related to these territories. They represent about 18% of the whole of the national territory, counting 2 million inhabitants. Overseas territories are as diverse as the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off Canada, Antillean islands or the kingdoms of Wallis and Futuna in the Pacific Ocean.

In order not to disperse our forces and thus weaken our fight against the gender gap on Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia France supported the activities of gender gap-bridging projects (Les sans pagEs [9]) and a monthly Wikisource editathons on women writers [10].

Ongoing projects: Photograph the Overseas, funding of gender gap-bridging projects...

I'm also thrilled to have Emma Vadillo [11], doing an internship of 8 months on Lingua Libre. Emma recently graduated from Science Po Paris and Columbia University in New York where she also worked at the Endangered Language Alliance documenting endangered languages. She wants to pursue studies in linguistics but before that, she is here to apply her knowledge of indigenous languages of Latin America and linguistic policy to developing Lingua Libre in its goal of facilitating the publication of audio content on Wikimedia projects. She hopes this will enable linguistic communities of regional and/or minority languages to share their knowledge more easily with the world, as well as appropriate themselves the new technologies of information and communication to be able to use them in their own language and for their own benefit.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ad%C3%A9la%C3%AFde_Calais_WMFr [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francophones_meetup_at_Wikimania_201...

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiFranca/en [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConvention_francophone/en [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_France/Micro-financement [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiClubRFI [7] https://lingualibre.fr

[8] https://outremer.wikimedia.fr [9] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Les_sans_pagEs [10] https://visiautrices.hypotheses.org/ [11] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eavqwiki

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Pierre-Yves Beaudouin

Président _MÉL __PIERRE.BEAUDOUIN@WIKIMEDIA.FR_

WIKIMEDIA FRANCE Association pour le libre partage de la connaissance

www.wikimedia.fr [1] 40 rue de clery, 75002 Paris [2]

Links: ------ [1] https://www.wikimedia.fr [2] https://signl.live/tracker/click?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.openstreetmap.org...