Decolonizing knowledge through languages: why making Wikimedia more multilingual | #Wikimania2023
Channel: Wikimedia Foundation
Date: 28/11/2023

Full title: Decolonizing knowledge through languages: why making Wikimedia more multilingual and multimodal matters

In spite of efforts for countering systemic bias[1] and promoting knowledge equity[2] on Wikipedia, we are not able to get past the predominance and hegemony of some languages over others. Language is a proxy for knowledge and an essential part of who we are. If we continue to cultivate a primarily monolingual global encyclopedia, we risk losing the richness in multiple forms of knowledge of the +7000 languages of the world. As a knowledge movement, can we afford this?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiProjects_relevant_for_countering_systemic_bias
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund

As a global movement, Wikimedia is rooted in our collective love for languages. The movement and its communities and projects are multilingual spaces and ecosystems organized around languages. It is no coincidence that Wikipedia's user interface supports over 400 languages, and there are more than 300 Wikipedia language editions. Yet, we are not able to get past the predominance and hegemony of some languages over others. The number of articles in each language Wikipedia is dynamic, but clearly there's a bias towards English-language content, with the English Wikipedia being the largest by far.

Language is a proxy for knowledge and an essential part of our identities and histories. Every language is a way of knowing and inhabiting the world. If we cultivate a primarily monolingual global encyclopedia, we risk losing the richness and the multiple forms of knowledge of the over 7000 languages of the world. Most significantly, language has multiple forms (i.e. oral, gestural, visual, etc.). Only about 4000 languages[1] have written systems or scripts, many of which were developed through violent and extractive processes of colonization. When digital technologies offer us possibilities for representing the plurality of language forms, how are we re-thinking Wikipedia[2] as a global open knowledge repository to account for non-textual forms of languages?

But language justice runs deeper than representation. The forms of digital marginalization and exclusion of most of the world’s languages on the internet and on Wikipedia are the result of historical and ongoing structures of power and privilege. By analyzing the power dynamics of knowledge production on Wikipedia, using language as a proxy, we aim at understanding whose views, whose agenda, whose epistemic ways of knowing and doing build and sustain the ways in which we create knowledge on the global encyclopedia — in our many languages.

In this session, we aim to:
1) Detail some of our current research in (online) language justice issues
2) Analyze some of the critical ways they manifest in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects
3) Facilitate a discussion on actions to make Wikimedia projects more meaningfully multilingual and multimodal in concept, content and communication

[1] http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problem/149536
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy

Presenters:  Whose Knowledge? 
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