2025:Program/Allied movements for language and knowledge equity

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Session title: Allied movements for language and knowledge equity

Session type: Roundtable

Track: Diversity & Inclusion

Language: en

🎥 Session recording: https://w.wiki/F8Jv 🎥

What happens when two like-minded movements come together for a common goal? In this session, we’ll explore how Rising Voices/Global Voices have been collaborating with members of the Wikimedia movement, who are also supporting Indigenous, minority, and low-resource language communities in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe as they create knowledge in their own languages.

Description

What happens when two like-minded movements come together for a common goal? In this session, we’ll explore how Rising Voices/Global Voices have been collaborating with members of the Wikimedia movement, who are also supporting Indigenous, minority, and low-resource language communities in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe as they create knowledge in their own languages.

While this collaboration has been happening over the past several years, it deepened at the Global Voices Summit in Kathmandu in December 2024, where more than a dozen Wikimedians, who have also collaborated with Global Voices, were invited to the one-week event. The Summit was a space to reflect on shared goals and plan concrete steps for further collaboration.

As a result, several initiatives emerged, such as language digital activism workshops in India, Nigeria, Ghana, Indonesia, and Ireland, which were co-organized by local Wikimedia affiliates for their own communities. These workshops are based on material created by Rising Voices and UNESCO. In addition, the Global Voices Malagasy (Global Voices Lingua) team teamed up with Wikimedia Madagascar to organize a nationwide edit-a-thon utilizing openly licensed Global Voices articles as primary source materials. Other activities included facilitating spaces so that Indigenous Wikimedians from Colombia, Venezuela, and Guatemala can share their experiences with other Indigenous language speakers across Latin America, as a way to share how it is possible to create knowledge in their own native languages.

These collaborations highlight the deep commonalities across open knowledge movements that are working towards knowledge equity through digital literacy training and community support. In this panel, Wikimedians who are also active in the RV community will share their networked experience from these collaborations as a way to strengthen Wikimedia communities and projects, and beyond.

How does your session relate to the event theme, Wikimania@20 – Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?

The session will explore how collaborations can improve sustainability through support of language communities. With more speakers of these languages interested in promoting their language, not all of this work will fall on the shoulders of a few.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Resources

• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nXdJjo7V4QF6u9_3ZAW1-9AfpAx9lIcd/edit?slide=id.g3726140fa1d_0_13#slide=id.g3726140fa1d_0_13
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uaj31ynzs8WD4_QYLo138VNz5BzolM4W/view?ts=688fa3b7

Speakers

• Rising Voices

Rising Voices is the digital inclusion arm of Global Voices. Rising Voices has collaborated with numerous Wikimedia affiliates over the years. It has also received a research grant to explore the opportunities and challenges for Wikipedia projects in Latin American Indigenous languages. In addition, it serves as a Stakeholder on the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub. RV also was a recipient of a Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund grant.

• Sadik Shahadu

Sadik is a certified Wikipedia trainer, journalist, and brand ambassador for the Curationist Foundation. He is also the executive director and co-founder of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, a young not-for-profit organization based in Ghana and working to support the 16 Mabia languages on Wikimedia and the internet at large.

Outside Wikimedia, he serves on the advisory board of the UNESCO 'Open Education for a Better World' program. He was a Mozilla Open Leader X fellow, a MozFest wrangler mentor, and a former ambassador for the Mozilla festival. Sadik is passionate about open-source technology, open data, and open education resources (OER).

As a digital language activist, he works with individuals and organizations interested in digitizing indigenous languages and cultures on the Internet.

• Dimas Hardijanto

Dimas currently serves as the Deputy General Secretary of Wikimedia Indonesia. He has previous experience ranging from serving as an education coordinator at Wikimedia Indonesia, where he focused on building collaboration with educational institutions, to being a community coordinator responsible for developing the Wikimedia community in Indonesia, and as a grant officer for mini-grants to the community.

Outside of Wikimedia Indonesia, he's also an admin on Indonesian Wikimedia. He is occasionally involved in the Open Educational Resources (OER) program of Creative Commons Indonesia as a facilitator.

• Leonardi Fernández (Username: Leonfd1992)

Estudiante del 8vo semestre de antropología social y cultural. Activista digital de lenguas indígenas. Coordinador de proyectos para Wikimedistas Wayuu y administrador de la guc.wikipedia.org.

• Lucy Iwuala

Iwuala Lucy is a language professional and Wikimedia contributor with expertise in Indigenous language advocacy, digital literacy, and cultural heritage preservation. A co-founder of Igbo Wiki Fan Club, Alvan and Imo State University under the Igbo Wikimedians User Group, where she organizes workshops and mentorship initiatives to promote Igbo language and content on Wikimedia projects. She is passionate about championing women’s digital literacy and community resource development. She is currently a member of the Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Grant Committee, Member of ComCom, Member of the Afrika Baraza Working Group where she plays significant roles in the Production Team. Her engagements also extend to managing the social media channels of the International Wiki Loves Monuments campaigns and Wiki Loves Ramadan as well as contributing to global discussions on underrepresented languages.

• Miora Stéphanie RADIFERA

A Malagasy Translation Manager at Global Voices, I’ve been a long-time reader and user of Wikipedia but only recently took the leap into editing on the French and Malagasy Wikipedias. Since starting in March, my journey as an editor has grown at full speed! By late May, I joined the organizing team for “Wikiteny,” a month-long, nationwide edit-a-thon across four regions of Madagascar. There, I helped coordinate activities and mentor new Wikimedians, drawing on Global Voices source materials to enrich Wikipedia content.