Lucie-Aimée Kaffee

Other people: Hady Elsahar

Other people: Hady Elsahar Nathan Matias Julia Kamin Max Klein

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: Felix Nartey Kimberli Mäkäräinen

One of the biggest barriers for accessing knowledge on the Internet is language. We tend to provide information in one or at most a few languages, which makes it hard for speakers of all the other languages to access that same information. This is also an issue on Wikipedia, a project widely and internationally used by all kind of people. But there are many topics that are only covered in few languages on Wikipedia. People who don’t speak any of these don’t have access to all the information available potentially vital to them. This is a huge issue we need to address.

Today we have Wikidata, Wikimedia’s knowledge base, which collects localized open structured data in one central place and makes it available to everyone. In this talk I will show you how we can give more people more access to more knowledge by making use of Wikipedia’s reach and Wikidata’s multilingual data.

See abstract.