User:T Cells/

The problem we are trying to solve

Language is one of the core values of people and identity of any nation. It's been established by the United Nation that in “every two weeks, at least one indigenous language vanishes, leading to two language extinctions each month”. Essentially, this is a problem facing small languages with little or no documentation. There are several indigenous languages in Nigeria that are neither taught in schools or written down. These endangered languages lack any tangible preservation, documentation and may soon vanished as predicted by the United Nation.

English is the official language spoken in Nigeria; however, there are over 520 languages and dialects in different parts of the country. The country is divided into 6 Geo-political zones; South-West, South-South, South-East, North Central, North West and North East, for administration. Essentially, there are three major languages spoken, written and taught in schools in Nigeria, while speakers of these languages are dominants in their respective zones e.g. South-West; Yoruba, South-East; Igbo, North-Central; Yoruba and Hausa; North-West; Hausa, North-East; Hausa. This project intends to operate a scalable plan starting with languages and dialects from the South-West; Yoruba.

This project aims at preserving, documenting and digitization of oral history of Nigerian indigenous languages and make them available under an open license for improvement of existing and new articles on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The project was designed to provide solutions to the following key problems:

There are over 500 languages and dialects in Nigeria. Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo are the three most popular languages and supported by its education system, while the rest are spoken language and stand the risk of going into extinction. This create a knowledge and content gap for Wikipedia projects and language enthusiasts.
Less than 10% of these languages and dialects were covered on English Wikipedia articles, while less than 10% of these languages and dialects are available on the local Wikipedia where these languages are spoken and written; Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, creating a content gap.
The problem above is a sign of neglect or no communal engagements to promote Nigerian indigenous languages on Wikipedia and among language-based Wikimedia affiliates in the country and entire Africa.
There is no digital archive of indigenous languages in Nigeria available under an open license.

Our solution to this problem

There are over 500 languages and dialects in Nigeria. Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo are the three most popular languages and supported by its education system, while the rest are spoken language and stand the risk of going to extinction. Thereby create knowledge and content gap for Wikimedia projects and language enthusiasts.

We want to document the over 500 languages in Nigeria. Audiovisual of the contents would be recorded by a professional Cinematographer for documentation on Wikimedia Commons. We will work closely with native speakers of these languages, community that focus on these languages such as the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group and language experts in Nigeria. The contents would be preserved in a format that is acceptable on Wikimedia Commons and accessible by re-users for use on Wikimedia projects and outside of the Wikimedia projects.

less than 10% of these languages and dialects were covered on English Wikipedia articles, while less than 10% of these languages and dialects are available on the local Wikipedia where these languages are spoken and written; Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, creating a content gap.

One of the key focus of this project is to promote the re-use of the contents (or files) on relevant Wikipedia articles where they are lacking. The project will run for four months and every last Saturday of each month, we will organize an edit-a-thon that will primarily focus on the uploading of the materials produced on Wikimedia Commons and using them on Wikipedia articles by volunteer members of our community.

There is no digital archive of indigenous languages in Nigeria available under open license.

The project will produce digital archival of the collection of the focused indigenous language under a Creative Commons License that is compatible with Commons.

Project goals

Primary Goals

This project is designed to achieve four main goals:

To freely document the brief oral history of indigenous languages in Nigeria.
To Increase contents on Wikimedia Commons
Promote the use of indigenous languages audiovisuals on relevant Wikipedia articles
To bridge contents gap on Wikimedia projects

Secondary Goals

To recruit new editors and up-skill the existing Wikimedians.
Build capacity for new and existing volunteers
To bridge the gap between languages experts and and other language-based local Wikimedia community
Create awareness and promote contents around indigenous language on Wikipedia.

Project impact

How we will know if we have met your goals

Primary

To freely document the brief oral history of indigenous languages in Nigeria: We plan to engage a professional documentary filmmakers to create short audiovisuals on the oral historical information about all the languages spoken in South-West Nigeria. The contents would be preserved in a format that is acceptable on Wikimedia Commons and accessible by re-users for use on Wikimedia projects and outside of the Wikimedia projects for educational purposes and any other purposes. This goal would be considered achieved if at least 50 audiovisuals of these languages are documented and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons

Promote the use of indigenous languages audiovisuals on relevant Wikipedia articles: We plan to organize at least 3 edit-a-thon that would primarily focus on the use of the contents produced on relevant articles where they are lacking. Participants of the edit-a-thons would be a mix of new and existing editors. We will continue to engage the new editors to ensure that they are retained as active editors. This goal would be considered achieved if at least 40 audiovisuals of these languages are used on Wikipedia articles where they are required

To bridge contents gap on Wikimedia projects: Essentially, the lack of audiovisual in some language-related articles is a huge content gap as our readers would like to have a sense of how a language sounds when reading a language-related articles or text on Wikipedia. One of the ways to bridge this content gap is to ensure the use of either audio or videos (or both) on relevant articles and that is one of the primary goals of this project. This goal would be considered achieved if at least 40 audiovisuals of these languages are used on Wikipedia articles where they are required

Secondary

To recruit new editors and up-skill the existing Wikimedians: During the edit-a-thon for upload of the material and use of the materials on Wikipedia articles, participants (new and old editors) would be trained on how to work on audio and video files and how to use them on Wikipedia article. This is a new skill for most existing editors as they are only familiar with uploading and reusing images but not audio or video files and the relevant tools we use. We will follow up with new editors to retain them while we continue our efforts to engaging existing editors. This goal would be considered achieved if at least 20 people participate in the edit-a-thon and if at least 10 of the participants are new editors.

Build capacity for new and existing volunteers: Capacity building is a key to continued growth. participants would be trained on how to upload videos and audios to Wikimedia Commons and how to re-use them on Wikipedia articles. This goal would be considered achieved if at least 20 people are trained and if at least 10 of the trainees are new editors.

Create awareness and promote contents around indigenous language on Wikipedia We will promote some of the audiovisuals produced on social media to promote these languages. Facebook and Twitter ad would be used.

Goals around participation or content?

Two out of our four goals are tailored towards increasing participation within the Wikimedia movement or increasing /improving the content on Wikimedia projects. We will use the following metrics and numeric targets to measure whether we meet that component of our goals. The substantial amount of work on this project will focus on empowering the language-based local communities by working directly with language-based affiliates in the community:

Total Participation: At least 10 people would participate in the audiovisual production and at least 20 people will participate in the edit-a-thons and at least one relevant Wikimedia affiliates communality and at least one mission-aligned organization would participate.

Number of newly registered users: Since we will work directly with the language-based affiliates in the country to organize series of edit-a-thons to get contents produced on Wikimedia Commons and using them on Wikipedia articles, new and some existing editors would be trained and at least 10 new editors would register an account

Project plan

Activities

The project core team, our partner/advisor, language experts and the concerned affiliates are responsible for a wide range of activities around the Grassroots language documentation in Nigeria. In this section, we will describe the activities that will be funded by the proposed project below:

The project core team includes;

Project coordinator
Documentation officer
Producer/director
Post-production
Production/___location Manager
Logistics Manager
Volunteer members of Wikimedia User Group Nigeria

What each member of the team will spend their time doing

Project Management

Set up & coordinate members of the core project team and the concerned affiliates.
Write grant request
Maintain communication with relevant staff at Wikimedia Foundation;
Measure and collect data to be reported at the end of the program.
Report monthly and midterm on activities to WMF
Report on the use of budget at the end of the program;
Write grant report

Technical contributions This project will involve the services of the under-listed technical staff:

Documentation Officer

Organizing an archiving system
Labelling, sorting and categorizing documents for ease to use
Retrieving document upon request,
Outlining a long-term storage strategy.
Adhering to regulatory requirements
Ensuring documentation integrity
Controlling access to documents
Proofreading documents upon requests

Producer/director

Oversee the production
Oversee script development
Coordinate various aspect of the production
Approving ___location, production schedule
Directing or hiring the director,
Organise production crew Including the cinematographer, gaffer, editor, sound mixer, makeup artists etc
Work with the editor during post production

Post Production

Audiovisual editing
Sound mixing
Color correction
Subtitle

Production/___location manager

determine the number of locations
visit to proposed locations.
identify native speakers of dialects for interview.
arrange time of visit with the identified native speakers of dialects and communicate with the production team.
prepare visiting schedule to each ___location.
organize regular meetings with core team of the project.
ensure judicious use of project resources.

Logistics manager

determine the cheapest means of transportation of each visits to locations
ensure the number of trips determine in the budget align with the actual trips.
Ensure effective model for transporting project team on and off the locations.
Develop a simple transportation strategy for conveying project team to ___location.

How the project would be carrried out

The project is divided into three phases

Preliminary work
Project execution
Future plan

Preliminary work

Inform and hold series of meetings with the identified stakeholders of this project: language-based communities,advisor, language experts and affiliates in the country to intimate them about the benefits, goals, and project plans.
Recruitment of technical and non-technical staff and volunteers.
Collect feedback and suggestions from stakeholders
Pre-shooting visits
Collate list of all the indigenous languages and dialects in the country and share the list with all the project stakeholders and request for inputs.
Hold regular internal team meetings to review the suggested list of indigenous language and other relevant and incidental tasks listed in the project time-line.
Design of processes and procedures for data gathering and documentation of the indigenous languages and communicate the document available to the stakeholders of the project.

Project execution

For the purpose of project execution, we plan to divide this project along the Geo-political zones in the country.E.g Yoruba South-West and part of North Central, Hausa North East;North West, Igbo; South-South, South-East
So, we plan to start the project execution with 101 languages in South West of Nigeria, a predominant settlement of Yoruba speaking settlement of the country.
The project is designed to cover 16 weeks.
The project team is expected to undergo at least 3trips every week for content gathering and documentation.
At least four videos/audios and other relevant contents are expected to be produced weekly.
At most one Wikipedia event; training, edit-a-thon, uploads must be organized, monthly, using the gathered content from field for the proposed training.
Hold a biweekly meeting to review and monitor statistics in term of work done and proposed works.

Future work

If this project is successful, we plan to continue with documentation of languages in other geo-political zones in the country.

Work plan
Month(s)	Location(s)	Activities	Resulting deliverables	Remarks
May 2024	Lagos & Ibadan	Stakeholder engagement, Production meetings, script writing, shoot days scheduling preparation for fieldwork, equipment hiring (or purchasing), hiring of technical personnel, tickets, bookings, Scout and secure locations, finalize the budget	Every arrangement would have been finalized
June 2024	Location to be finalised	Audiovisual-record consent sessions, backup recordings, add metadata, define access, files editing; sound mixing, color correction and subtitle (for video), uploads to Commons, use of audiovisuals on Wikipedia articles, and activities reporting	30 media files produced (10mins per video files and 5 mins per audio files), one event organized, and at least 30 Wikipedia articles created or improved with the media files, and monthly report is submitted.
July 2024	Location to be finalised	Audiovisual-record consent sessions, backup recordings, add metadata, define access, files editing; sound mixing, color correction and subtitle (for video), uploads to Commons, use of audiovisuals on Wikipedia articles, and activities reporting	20 media files produced (10mins per video files and 5 mins per audio files), one event organized, and at least 20 Wikipedia articles created or improved with the media files, and monthly report is submitted.
August 2024	Location to be finalised	Audiovisual-record consent sessions, backup recordings, add metadata, define access, files editing; sound mixing, color correction and subtitle (for video), uploads to Commons, use of audiovisuals on Wikipedia articles, and activities reporting	27 media files produced (10mins per video files and 5 mins per audio files), one event organized, and at least 26 Wikipedia articles created or improved with the media files, and monthly report is submitted.
September 2024	Location to be finalised	Audiovisual-record consent sessions, backup recordings, add metadata, define access, files editing; sound mixing, color correction and subtitle (for video), uploads to Commons, use of audiovisuals on Wikipedia articles, and activities reporting	14 media files produced (10mins per video files and 5 mins per audio files), one event organized, and at least 14 Wikipedia articles created or improved with the media files, and monthly report is submitted.
October 2024	Location to be finalised	Audiovisual-record consent sessions, backup recordings, add metadata, define access, files editing; sound mixing, color correction and subtitle (for video), uploads to Commons, use of audiovisuals on Wikipedia articles, and activities reporting	9 media files produced (10mins per video files and 5 mins per audio files), one event organized, and at least 9 Wikipedia articles created or improved with the media files, and monthly report is submitted.

Deliverables
File type	No. of files	Format	Duration	Approximate size on GB or TB
Video	50	WebM or .ogg	500 minutes (8.33 hours)	5.74 GB
Audio	50	.ogg	250 minutes (4.16 hours)	2.87 GB

Community engagement

Wikimedia Nigeria official WhatsApp.
Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation's official mailing list
Wikimedia Nigeria official Facebook, Twitter and Instagram fan pages
Wikimedia User Group Nigeria's community portal.