LinguaLibre:Roles

Draft

This page is a work in progress (2021/11/15). I'm still actively changing and polishing things around on a daily basis. Please do not translate yet. But feel free to jump in, improve my English and write a section. --Yug

Language-based

Recording

See Special:Record Wizard.

Languages are part of our cultural heritage. The core mission we aim for is to record words in all languages. Every language matter, every accent matter, every voice has interesting features, including yours. In France, we push to record variations of French, South West and rural accent have a notorious musicality. In India, the Marathi community pushed with female voices, which are unexpectedly rare on Lingualibre. We got to conserve female voices more. We also look for younger voices, older voices, in or order to have a library of voices along human life.

LinguaLibre's Recording Studio (aka Record Wizard) makes recording easy and fast. It can be quite satisfying to periodically record a few hundred words in your language, which, in the long run, will build a notable record of your own voice, or family's members voices. If you feel doing so tempting, give it a try, welcome to you.

Lists management

See Help:Lists. See also #Botmasters.

LinguaLibre stands mainly on a Recording Studio and upon many lists of words, organized per language. Those lists need to be created and cared for. Some lists become obsolete and require deletion. Renaming may also be necessary. Etc.

The documentations about lists are also in an intermediate state, where one dedicated user could reduce redundancy, improve wordings. There is also a need to retest and update technical codes.

Lists can also be managed via bots.

Communication skills

Inward community building

See Special:ActiveUsers, LinguaLibre Server on Discord...

Welcoming new users, opening conversation with active users in order to help around, introduce each others, exchange ideas and visions strengthen our community. Accumulating such discussions is central to provide our project vision :

• Who are our contributors (therefore who are we missing) ?
• What our contributors need ?
• Where can we help and smooth things ?
• What unexpected skills do they have ?
• What straight forward opportunities are we missing ?
• etc.

Generally speaking, such gentle quests create happy places and wikis. When we help our contributors on the ground, know them and their needs, then we can discuss on how to help further: design heavy projects and got hunt funding to run those.

Representation bias: Our current audio assets are heavily biased toward middle-aged French or European men, which we really do not want. (The 2017 version of LinguaLibre was missioned to gather French dialects, creating an early-start's bias). Gently following up with new users, especially when they seem to be part of minorities such as rare languages, women, youth or elderly, could go a long way lot to diversify our community. Since LinguaLibre's notification system is not connected with other Wikimedia wikis, it may require a light message on their Wikipedia talk page.

Referent users: WikiLucas00 and Pamputt have welcomed hundreds of users with welcome templates, therefore doing some community building. But by far, most users barely receive further follow up. Help welcome :)

Outreach for awareness

See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost & others, LinguaLibre:Events, LinguaLibre:Workshops, {{Grants table}}.

Any Lili user can talk within her or his network of wikimedians, friends, institutions about LinguaLibre mission to records the voices and words of all existing languages via its rapid recording system. We mostly need willing and diverse speakers. We also need various other profiles and skills able to take on the various necessary roles on LinguaLibre, from speaker to programmers, organizers to fundraisers.

Public and tips
So far, the most productive speakers are either Wikimedians or (semi-)professional minority language activists.

To outreach to active Wikimedian users, several entry point are possible :

• the 244 Village Pumps, where we can post messages and news freely.
• the 28 Wikimedia-oriented news bulletins of various degree of vivacity. The English Wikipedia Signpost is run in a journalistic way while other allow us to post a LinguaLibre news ourselves for local active Wikimedians.

Outreach to non-Wikimedian language activists require identification of those networks, contact with these activists, sharing a direct link to Special:RecordWizard or a demo. It can be done in several waves or at once, depending on your assessment of the situation.

Outreach to academics and institutions, as well as outreach to the general public can be engaged but returns would generally be smaller.

Some success have been observed with outreach to family members, a motivation could be the will to record the voice of elder or younger family members.

Outreach for collaborations

See LinguaLibre:Ambassy.

Connecting LinguaLibre community with people and institutions relevant to our mission is of high importance. New opportunities raise from connecting actors together. There is need for chatty people, who love to go here, there, discuss things and others, and then have the vision to see possible synergy between those actors, giving them a gentle push so sparkles and projects could emerge. Create awareness among many, collaborations with few will then emerge.

Private initiatives are usually leading the way but must first be seeded. A Wikimedian in your town speaks a rare East Indonesian language ? Tell him about LinguaLibre's dream. A friend work at a university in Ethiopia which work on minority language ? Send her/him a Lili's flyer. Some family member speaks Macedonian with deep Southern accent ? Check with us if we have a word list for that language, tell them how you cherish this heritage and ask them if they would be willing to record the 1000 most frequent words with you. A friend is a teacher at a Computer Sciences faculty ? Let's see if they are looking for coding challenges and Open Source projects. We are contributing to world heritage's conservation, and we do have such challenges. Etc. Ask people what they do, what they love, find where the magic could happen and ask them if they would like to be our magician.

Institutional collaborations are slower to emerge. While LinguaLibre's mission is inspiring, workers are predictably risk-adverse within their institution. They will go slowly, hint here and there, to get a sense of their institution's actual friendliness or skepticism toward such a volunteer, open source, world heritage project. Emphasizing the PR gains from collaborating with Wikimedia on national and minority languages will help but will also take time to sink in. Past experience shown us that institutions are cautiously interested, then silent for a long time, then have some target grant or money in mind focused on cultural assets and come back to LinguaLibre for collaboration.

Organizational skills

LinguaLibre pages' improvements

See LinguaLibre:Administrators.

LinguaLibre's wiki pages still can be improved, on form, tone, structure, categorization, adding links and so on. Doing so, you may think of useful templates, procedures, or others ideas which could improve the place and feel. Those improvements are always appreciated. :)

Organizing events

See LinguaLibre:Events, LinguaLibre:Workshops, {{Grants table}}.

Events organizers are lowly visible on LinguaLibre.org wiki but have high role for the community. They may be part of the LinguaLibre community or external actors reaching out to us for synergy, usually on digital dictionaries.

• For online events, event organizers are usually people with familiarity with videoconference tools, broadcasting tools, and a will to gather the community online on around a topic. That digital tool, or platform, will be the meeting place. VIGNERON organizes weekly Wikidata streaming event on YouTube, some of which have been focused on LinguaLibre. Other online events have been organized by paid staffs from various Wikimedia Chapters, such as Wiki India Meet (2021), we then simply jump in for a presentation.
• For IRL events, event organizers could provide access to buildings and institutions best able to host physical events. While most such events lead within major urban centers for convenience, organizing such hosting event in rural area have been appreciated as well and de facto defends interesting complementary values. In all case, that event is a win-win between Wikimedians energy and the local institution, which display its modern mind and public-good spirit, thus the occurrence. This format generally implies funding for the attendees' meals, drinks, hostels and transportation. Such funding is relatively easy to get thanks to various Wikimedia rapid grants, but requires to "know the way". It's therefore important to jump in early and to mentor potential event organizers early.

Reference users: For event funding, please contact Adélaïde Calais WMFr (Wikimedia France), or volunteers Lyokoï or Yug who have experience in this field and can point out to the relevant Grant page. For institutional collaboration, please contact Adélaïde Calais WMFr (Wikimedia France), and volunteers Eavq and WikiLucas00 who have lead in-institution event (Contribuling 2021).

Event budget and refund

See meta:Wikimedia_France/Micro-financement.

Training class and other meetings or workshops generally includes several sides : event design, communication, booking and on-site organization, budget and refunds. A modest yet quick funding is often of great help for the project and defines the feasability of such events. Several options are there to support you.

• Wikimedia France Micro Financement : by writing a one-page proposal and budget, you can get within 2 weeks up to 2000€. This money should be directed toward facilitation : travels, hosting, meals, venues, hardware products and cannot pay salaries to contributors or organizers.

Call for projects, project design, grants

See {{Grants table}}, LinguaLibre:Events, LinguaLibre:Workshops.

Fundraisers may likely be the rarest roles. Within LinguaLibre, it's mainly connected to event organizers, and consist of users who look for small rapid grants for transports and food, within the context of various LinguaLibre:Workshops.

It also includes coordinators or programmers who, given a call for project and a project in mind, will lead the way, read the CFP's documentations, write down a project's proposal, budget, planning, and go on to get that funding. This requires some knowledge of the changing ecosystems of call for projects, which mainly turn around the Wikimedia Foundation (2017: 30k€), a bit around Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia France, while other local Wikimedia chapters may have some funds and calls as well. In France, the French Ministry of Education and its universities have also proven to be recurrent sponsors of LinguaLibre (Strasbourg University 2015: 30k€), a pattern which could likely work in other countries as well, given those countries are promoting local cultures and looking for online presence and impact. Recording national minority and major languages' words in Open Licence has proven to be seductive for such MoE and languages-oriented Universities.

The table below list few such possible grants. Please, help us to monitor coming grants and call for language-related projects of all sources, then contribute to this table accordingly. See meta:Template:Grants.

Coding skills

Bot masters

See LinguaLibre:Bot, Github, [Phabricator].

Web developments

See LinguaLibre:Technical board, Github, [Phabricator].

95% of web developments have been done already. Yet, there are always UX (user experience) to improve, create, tests, tiny gadgets and tools to develop, etc. As the community is small we are easily friendly, open to guide newcomers, friendly to tests, demos, hacking, etc. Recent arrivals (Poslovitch, Olaf, Seb35) have been welcomed, guided, empowered and quickly contributed in impactful manners. The main ideas is for volunteers to come over and have fun, so the team keeps rolling. Tell us where you want to improve or create things, we will help as possible to make it happen.

Languages and entries points: LinguaLibre's front technologies at their lightest levels are CSS and HTML, then JS, VueJS, PHP together with MediaWiki APIs and Wikidata Sparql Queries. Our entries points are the following, classed by language, then sorted from easy to harder dive in:

• CSS : User:Me/Common.css (doc); MediaWiki:Common.css (doc•admins only) ; our CSS projects on Github
• JS: MediaWiki:Common.js (doc•admins only) ; Gadget namespace ; our JS projects on Github.
• PHP: our PHP projects on Github.
• VueJS: RecordWizard

In a more transversal way, Lili's stack touch :

• MediaWiki APIs.
• Wikidata's Sparql Queries.
• MediaWiki Gadgets.

Referent users: Yug, Poslovitch, Pamputt are suitable users with whom to start light discussions on such matters. You are also welcome on the main room or on LinguaLibre:Technical board to hello us all and discuss your interests.

Institutional support

Institutional support have been critical to set up organizational alliances with universities : University of Strasbourg 2017, Clermont Ferrant 2021.

WMFR and WMF also sponsored LinguaLibre's representations various events such as the 2017 Zurich hackathon, 2017 Montreal Wikimania, 2018 Barcelona Hackathon, 2018 Captown Wikimania, 2019 Prague's hackathon and 2019 Stockholm Wikimania, 2021 Online Wikimania and 2021 Online WikidataCon.

Wikimedia France

Wikimedia France, the France-based association supporting Wikimedians contributive efforts in France and French-speaking countries via a dozen of full time employees, is the historical support of LinguaLibre. WMFR therefore provides to LinguaLibre :

• legitimacy within the Wikimedia world
• legitimacy to create institutional collaborations with universities
• critical online infrastructure : web servers, servers fees, server management
• critical, long term coordination via its "Diversity and Francophone project manager", Adélaïde Calais WMFr

Open Source features includes a long lifespan thanks to open license, as well as periodic activity highs and lows. WMFR, its benevolent staff and funding support us in lows times and high times, so we can both raise above difficulties and seize opportunities.

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation has, as of now, only a distant role and influence upon LinguaLibre. The WMF provided a decisive 2017 Grant (~30k) which allowed 0x010C to create the current Wikibase website of LinguaLibre. They also positively support LinguaLibre, inviting us to Wikimedia conferences, hackathons, and offering associated travel grants.

See also

• LinguaLibre:Events
• LinguaLibre:Workshops
• LinguaLibre:Bot
• Code of Conduct – also applies to LinguaLibre.