2019:Languages/Minoritized Languages and Missing Languages in Wikipedia: An Opportunity to Increase Cultural Diversity in Wikipedia

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Languages/Minoritized Languages and Missing Languages in Wikipedia: An Opportunity to Increase Cultural Diversity in Wikipedia

Title

Minoritized Languages and Missing Languages in Wikipedia: An Opportunity to Increase Cultural Diversity in Wikipedia

Description

Each Wikipedia language edition adds to the overall Wikipedia cultural diversity with articles about their places, leaders, traditions, among many other topics. It is their genuine and unique contribution that is often not translated across languages generating what is known as a content gap. Leaving aside this gap, in the Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory project we find that cultural diversity could improve if we could 1) engage languages with a status of marginalization to represent better their context, 2) increase the number of Wikipedia language editions.

In this short talk I want to give few key figures on the overall linguistic situation in Wikipedia in terms of cultural diversity. First, for each Wikipedia whose language is in state of minorization I want to provide a list of articles about their geographical and cultural context that exist in bigger language editions but they do not exist in its language yet. Second, I provide a list of languages of the world that according to their number of speakers and social status could be candidate to start a Wikipedia and represent their context. Finally, I want to stress out the importance of representing each language's cultural context despite the possible difficulties in finding sources, among other problems. Because I believe that encouraging the growth of Wikipedias cannot be dissociated from the encouragement of representing their context and acknowledging their particular contribution to human knowledge.

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

In this lightning talk I want to bring some key results on languages in order to foster cultural diversity in Wikipedia. This relates to the sustainable development goals with improving education quality (SDG 4), and reducing inequalities (SDG 10) in general.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

* Find which Wikipedia language editions are from a language with a marginalization status and the articles about their cultural and geographical context they should have.

* Detect new potential Wikipedia language editions by examining those languages with a high social status and a large number of speakers.

* Look up which territories in the world are not covered by any Wikipedia language edition of a local native language.

Session leader(s)

• Marc Miquel, researcher (marcmiquel)

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Lightning talk

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room:

• Audience:

• Recording: