Used for a workshop in Cambodia, August 2013, organised by Cobi Smith. http://www.slideshare.net/cobismith

1. Wikimedia Indigenous Voices

2. Three ideas
1. Build a new language community
2. Support an existing majority
language community
3. Promote interests of a cultural
community in dominant
languages

3. 1. Build a new language
community

4. New Wikipedias
A language community can create their own
Wikipedia, using their own language if it has an
ISO 639 code (http://enwp.org/ISO_639-3).
The steps:
1. Initialise an ‘incubator’ project
2. Write a large set of articles – 1000 pages
3. Build a consistent community of contributors
– 10 people

5. Example: Cham language
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham_language
– 1.5% of Cambodians
• No Wikipedia:
– http://cjm.wikipedia.org/
– http://cja.wikipedia.org/
• No incubator projects:
– http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/cjm
– http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/cja

6. Example: Mon language
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_language
• No Wikipedia
• An incubator project was initialised in 2009 by
‘Jose77’
– http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/mnw
• But it has zero (0) pages ;-(

7. Example: Shan language
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shan_language
• http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/shn
• 40 articles
– http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Prefix
Index/Wp/shn
• At least one consistent contributor
– http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contri
butions/Saiddzone

8. Example: Sunda language
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundanese_lang
uage
• Wikipedia:
– http://su.wikipedia.org/
• Statistics
– http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaSU.
htm
• Very low participation/growth

9. 2. Support an existing majority
language community

10. Existing majority languages
• Most national official languages have small
sustainable Wikipedias, but they need help
– http://km.wikipedia.org - Khmer
– http://th.wikipedia.org - Thai
– http://lo.wikipedia.org - Lao
– http://my.wikipedia.org - Burmese
– http://vi.wikipedia.org - Vietnamese
– http://ko.wikipedia.org - Korean

11. 3. Promote interests of a cultural
community in dominant languages

12. English Wikipedia
The biggest wikipedia, with the highest impact.
So many rules!
Dragons be there. Prepare for this journey.

13. European language Wikipedias
Most European languages have a ‘chapter’, that you can
collaborate with based on shared interests, such as:
1. Colonial history and language
Archives of SE Asian colonial history often exist in the
European GLAMs (Gallery, Libraries, Archives and Museums)
e.g. Wikimedia France
2. Aid funding programs
e.g. a Scananavia funding NGO in Thailand might want to
work with Scandanavian language Wikipedia in order to
communicate with the granters core demographic.

14. Resources
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Indigenous_Lan
guages
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Asia_Project/Cul
tural_Content_Exchange
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Promoting_the_South_Asia
n_languages_projects
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Promoting_the_Southeast_
Asian_languages_projects