Roles

You want to support LinguaLibre's mission and do not know what to do ? Aside of recording words there are various calm ways to contributes. Below are a list of classic roles and activities you can lead to push our recording mission forward and may match better your personality, experience and skills.

Draft

This page is a work in progress (2021/11/15). Please do not translate yet. --Yug

Language-based

Recording

See Special:Record Wizard.

Organizational skills

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 usually are people with familiarity with visio-conferences 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 usually are material or institutional 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 are relatively easy to get thanks to various Wikimedia rapid grants, but requires to "know the way". It's therefor 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).

Rapid refunds and larger grants

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 include 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.

Communication skills

Inward

See Special:ActiveUsers, ...

Welcoming new users, opening conversation with actice users to exchange ideas and visions. Accumulating such discussion allows to give the project vision : what is needed for our contributors ? where can we help and smooth things ? etc.

Outreach

See 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.

Actual 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 togethers. 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. A Wikimedian in your town speaks a rare East Indonesian language ? Tell him about LinguaLibre's dream. A friend work at an university in Ethiopia which work on minority language ? Send her/him a Lili's flyer. Some family member speaks French with deep Southern accent ? Ask them if they would be willing to record the 1000 most frequent words with you. A friend is teacher at a Computer Sciences faculty ? Let's see if they are looking for coding challenge and Open Source projects. Etc. Ask people what they do, what they love, find some magic.

Coding skills

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 list become obsolete and require deletion. Renaming may also be necessary. Etc.

The documentations about lists are also in an intermediate state, were 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.

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 develops, etc. As the community is small we are easily friendly, open to guide new comers, friendly to tests, demos, hacking, etc. Recent arrivals (Poslovitch, Olaf, Seb35) have been welcomed, guided, empowered and quickly contributed in impactful maners. The main ideas is for volunters 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 a 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.

LinguaLibre