Sangoguna:Slaia/New Wikimedia projects main challenge and the possible solution

Moroi ba Wiktionary
The crowd worked together to transport "Daro-daro" megalith in Bawömataluo, Nias Island, for 3 km including pushing it up the hill until the top where the village lies. This crowd work describes the Wiktionary/Wikipedia projects perfectly, as they cannot succeed without the "crowd" effort.

The Nias language community went into this new year with a special present to Christmas 2020: Wikipedia/Wiktionary Nias were approved on 17 December 2020. I know this is just a beginning and a lot of work lay ahead. However, looking at the challenges we have faced I would like to share one that would improve the way of working on Wikimedia projects, i.e. the application(s).

We started our wiki projects with the drive of preserving and developing the Nias language for the digital era. It all started with the concerns people expressed in social media posts, that more and more Niassan did not speak Nias any more and if they did they would make not only spelling mistakes, but also in sentence construction. The titles and lyrics of many YouTube videos, the Instagram and Facebook's posts as well as the title and lyrics of music albums on Google Play Store are proves for this "chaos" state of Nias language.

Those concerns translated quickly into action. We then formed a Nias language WhatsApp group and in June 2020 I presented the "Nias Language Development Programme for the Digital Era 2020-2025". The programme concentrates on three components: documentation, standardisation and promotion.

In standardisation, we aim to promote some standards in writing and grammar (sentence contruction). Even more we also want to provide some tools such as an Android keyboard that has characters ö and ŵ. Those characters appear so frequently in Nias words that it becomes quickly uncomfortable to type in Nias language with the common available soft keyboard on the smartphone screens. People either use the number 6 to indicate character ö or avoid typing in Nias language all together.

In this past 6 months we concentrated on the documentation. We had identified that people would prefer using Indonesian to Nias because there are many words, terms, expressions, which are not available in Nias language. It was and is a real challenge to write articles for Wikipedia with limited vocabulary on disposal. Therefore, we have been focusing on Wiktionary: collecting names and terms (animals, plants, anatomy, diseases, business, government, etc.), exploring old words, creating new ones or adopting foreign words.

However, there is one main challenge we have been facing: the people who are able to learn wiki codes, who are normally young and students, are not necessary the ones who know the language best. On the other hand in order for Wiktionary/Wikipedia to increase the quality of contents and build a reputation, we need those other people, who are either not tech-savvy or so busy with their daily job that they do not have the will to learn wiki codes.

Bearing in mind that these projects are to preserve endangered languages, we should make it possible, that Wiktionary/Wikipedia contributors can concentrate on the contents and are not distracted by the struggle with writing wiki codes.

Bearing in mind that these projects are to preserve endangered languages, we should make it possible, that Wiktionary/Wikipedia contributors can concentrate on the contents and are not distracted by the struggle with writing wiki codes.

This issue can be solved easily if the Wikimedia Foundation provides Wiktionary and Wikipedia apps that facilitate this. Exactly because those non-tech-savvy contributors are the one who need assistance, a Wiktionary app would be of a great assistance. They would only need to fill in a form in order to create a new entry or to edit an existing one and could do that without distraction.

I know there is VisualEditor, and it works perfectly on laptop/desktop computers. But those who would be the main contributors of endangered languages generally do not have computers. However, they own smartphones. Unfortunately VisualEditor is not much a help on mobile screen.

And how about the Wikipedia app? Unfortunately it doesn't allow creating new pages/new entries, although it can edit existing ones. However, there is no way to make test project (Wikimedia incubator's projects) accessible in Wikipedia app, exactly the projects that need the assistance most.

On the bonus side, a Wiktionary app would avoid the formatting mess and reduce the misspelling mistakes and make Wiktionary entries "machine-readable". The resulting consistency would make Wiktionary even perfect for Wikidata!

Therefore, I would recommend to Wikimedia to invest in Wiktionary and Wikipedia apps, that can be used for projects in the Wikimedia's incubator and use form to ease writing/editing Wiktionary entries (use dropdown menu for inserting templates and categories). It would be even perfect if the Wikipedia app can integrate Wiktionary.

On the bonus side, a Wiktionary app would avoid the formatting mess and reduce the misspelling mistakes and make Wiktionary entries "machine-readable". The resulting consistency would make Wiktionary even perfect for Wikidata!

Thanks for reading.