Submissions/Wikis for Under Resourced Languages

Please note that this submission is not yet complete because detailed proposal is missing.

Note to the proposal's author(s): A member of the Programme Committee marked your proposal as incomplete to encourage you to expand it. While you are not required to do so, and may leave your submission as is, you have until the submission deadline, 30 April 2013, to review the submission guidelines and complete your proposal if you wish. Once you are done, you may remove this tag.

After careful consideration, the programme committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2013 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no.: 1018
Subject no.: A1

Title of the submission: Wikis for Under Resourced Languages

Type of submission: Presentation

Author of the submission: Mohammad Nasiruddin

Country of origin: Bangladesh

Affiliation: Univ. Grenoble Alpes

E-mail address: Mohammad.Nasiruddin@imag.fr

Username: Mohammadnasiruddin

Personal homepage or blog: http://www.MohammadNasiruddin.eu

Abstract

The Word Wide Web (WWW) has been dominated by English language content in its nascent years, however, English is now closely tied with Chinese, followed by languages like Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese and so on (http://www.internetworldstats.com/). With the substantially decreasing costs of bandwidth in developing countries, the Internet user population, that used to be mostly from the North Americas and Europe, is now dominated by countries like China and India. Computerizing under resourced languages is one of the key solutions to preserving them and to building language resources for them. Recently, almost all under resourced languages (except endangered languages) have some degree of computerization, i.e. newspapers, blogs, forums, etc. Besides, currently, Wikipedia articles are written in approximately 285 languages (though the number of article varies from language to language) (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/).

There are several variants to be considered when dealing with under-resourced languages: less or low resourced, less commonly taught languages, minority languages. And are opposed to so-called Majority languages - where ‘majority’ can be interpreted as languages with large amounts of data, or funding, or political interests.

Only a few languages in the world enjoy sustained research interest, and continuous financial support for the development of language resources. Furthermore, due to lack of raw resources, most of the time, researchers lose their interest in those languages, as they may be unable to tackle fundamental problem, whereas a majority language will usually make their work much easier.

This presentation focuses on under resourced languages (mainly Indo-Aryan languages) and discusses several challenges and opportunities that they can bring to the the wiki ecosystem.

Detailed proposal

Track: Wikis in Asia

Length of presentation/talk: 25 Minutes

Language of presentation/talk: English

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: I am fully depending on a scholarship.

Slides or further information (optional): Will be added shortly.

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