Record every language of the world village by village, with Lingua Libre

Record every language of the world village by village, with Lingua Libre

Notes

Etherpad (template)

Format

Presentation

Keywords

Languages
Audio
Pronounciation
Wiktionary
Wikimedia Commons

When and where

Sunday 22 July, 11:00
Duration: 25 minutes

London

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Presenter(s)

User:0x010C

Topic area

Technology & Software‎

Relationship to theme

Language & literacy
Knowledge forms

Back to Program

Abstract

Wikimedia projects are nowadays available in more than 280 languages. But this only includes their written standardized forms. We miss half of what ultimately makes up a language: its oral form, as well as all its diversity of accents and local variations. Furthermore, if our movement really wants to "create the sum of human knowledge", we have to include all kind of languages, including those with no written form at all.

The Lingua Libre project tends to fill those gaps by facilitating a lot the recording process of words in any language (even minor languages or dialects), uploading them to Wikimedia Commons and reusing them on other projects such as Wiktionary, Wikipedia or Wikidata. This tool has seen a major growth in its development this past year thanks to a WMF project grant, to finally be fully operational and easy to use at the time of Wikimania Cape Town.

In this presentation, we will introduce the Lingua Libre tool and the associated questions:

Why audio pronunciation records are key elements for the future of the movement;
How to use Lingua Libre;
What are the main challenges we faced and results we get today (metrics about files uploaded, participation, languages recorded, uses inside and outside the WM movement, IRL recording events);
What are the goals we want to reach in the future and how to help.

Outcomes

You will learn why recording audio pronunciation files is a strategic point for the future and how to do it with Lingua Libre.

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