Projects/Aboriginal communities outreach/Diary

This page aims to keep record of what happened in the scope of the Developing Wikimedia projects in Canadian Aboriginal languages' project.

Last update by:

• Amqui 2 October 2012

End of 2011 to August 2012

• Contacting of diverse Aboriginal persons and organizations to gauge interest by e-mails (started end of 2011).
  • Cree linguist from Carleton University have mentioned interest, she also mentioned bad experience before on the French Wikipedia related to adding Cree content where she received no support to guide her at the good place on the Cree Wikipedia (February 2012).
  • A Mi'kmaq speaker has expressed her interest in the project and that she will contact me later this Fall.
  • Discussion with the Cree Aanischaaukamikw Cultural Institute in Quebec, in particular with their language coordinator, to develop the Cree Wikipedia. He mentioned, as long as other participants in the discussion, concerns about having all dialects on the same Wikipedia and how to index them.
  • The Gwich'in Social & Cultural Institute in Nortwest Territories, through its Language Office, has expressed interest, the language coordinator has mentioned that he is one of the only fluent speaker of the language.
• Creation of multiple Aboriginal languages in the Wikimedia Incubator (see the Incubator log for exact dates).
• A Mi'kmaw elder have done some translation for the Mi'kmaq Wikipedia (she submitted the Mi'kmaq texts to me via Facebook), but she has mentioned that she is unable to contribute directly to Wikipedia because of her low-vision (February 2012).
• Explored the possibility and engaged the discussion about creating an international Wikimedia Thematic Organization for the indigenous languages with other Chapters and relevant outside organizations such as Google's Endangered Languages Project.
• Creation of Wikimedia Indigenous Languages (WIL) as an informal group for promoting and supporting Wikimedia projects in small languages
• Creation of a Wikimedia mailing list for languages related discussion : languages@lists.wikimedia.org

September 2012

• On-going discussion with the Cree Aanischaaukamikw Cultural Institute and the Institut linguistique atikamekw
• First meeting of Wikimedia Indigenous Languages on IRC
• Interest from a Cree speaker from Quebec to receive training on how to contribute to Wikipedia
• Beginning of cleaning existing Cree Wikipedia articles and indexing them by dialects and a new contributor from the Aanischaaukamikw Cultural Institute

October 2012

• On-going discussion with the Cree Aanischaaukamikw Cultural Institute and the Institut linguistique atikamekw