Kimberli Mäkäräinen

When people hear the word Wiki-, they automatically fill out the rest with -pedia. But for many language communities around the world, a Wikipedia of their own, in their own language, will never be a reality. This mainly stems from a lack of resources and launching a Wikipedia is nothing, if not resource-intense. Yet within the Wikimedia projects, there is a wealth of opportunities hiding in plain sight that have nothing to do with Wikipedia, ranging from identifying visual cultural heritage to helping revitalize languages by connecting Wikimedia projects with the language communities’ own projects. In the first part of our session we will discuss the strategies we have identified for working with the Saami communities and their culture in novel ways. We are gradually testing out how we can use the data, concepts, and lexemes stored in Wikidata and the visual cultural heritage in Wikimedia Commons to best benefit the communities. Our identified strategies range from creating activity networks within institutions, Saami communities and Wikimedia practitioners, through decolonising the Commons imagery in visual culture workshops, to investigating the opportunity for Saami language tagging by means of translated Wikidata concepts. In the second part of our session, we invite participants to discuss these and to brainstorm other opportunities together.

Other people: Susanna Ånäs

[https://se.wikipedia.org The Northern Saami Wikipedia] has three main quality issues that we are trying to identify and address: language quality, structural quality, and information quality. The language quality of material in the Northern Saami Wikipedia ranges from appallingly bad to native-level writing, some of which is caused by the proficiency level of editors, but also stems from a lack of reference material to use in writing articles or translating them. Structural quality encompasses issues like the interface, templates, infoboxes, fallback languages, and being able to use the language on all Wikimedia projects. Information is judged to be of dubious quality for many reasons such as poor-quality source texts being used in translations, outdated information, poor-quality or outdated images, inadequately sourced information, article stubs, and fake “Saami” material from the tourist industry being used as if it were real. Each of these issues requires its own solutions which Wikimedia Norway and Wikimedia Finland are working to address together.

Other people: Astrid Carlsen

The discussion about the use of non-traditional sources, particularly oral sources, in Wikipedias has been around for close to a decade, yet there is no end in sight to it. It is often stated that indigenous and minority communities can set policies in Wikipedias in their own languages to be what they want and that this would be one way of being able to access their oral tradition. This, however, does nothing to address the issue of the same sources being used in the biggest Wikipedias, which are the main sources of material used in translating articles for other, smaller Wikipedias. The absence of non-traditional sources leads to a hierarchy of cultures where those who have been provided with a Western education and can submit their work in writing to peer-reviewed journals, etc. are considered better sources than the very people whose culture, heritage, languages, people are being written about. In doing so, we also blindly trust that the peers reviewing these works know more about these subjects, even though they are also outsiders, than the communities themselves. Articles end up being one-sided and depicted and categorized mainly from the Western point of view, which clearly violates NPOV. Our job is to minimize this bias and close the knowledge gaps in articles that may not be obvious to readers who are from the same or similar demographics as the main Wikipedias’ editors are. One way of doing so would be the use of oral sources.

Other people: Lucie-Aimée Kaffee Felix Nartey