Increasing access to free and open knowledge for speakers of underserved languages on Wikipedia

Date:

One of the biggest barriers for accessing knowledge on the Internet is language. We tend to provide information in one or at most a few languages, which makes it hard for speakers of all the other languages to access that same information. This is also an issue on Wikipedia, a project widely and internationally used by all kind of people. But there are many topics that are only covered in few languages on Wikipedia. People who don’t speak any of these don’t have access to all the information available potentially vital to them. This is a huge issue we need to address.

Today we have Wikidata, Wikimedia’s knowledge base, which collects localized open structured data in one central place and makes it available to everyone. In this talk I will show you how we can give more people more access to more knowledge by making use of Wikipedia’s reach and Wikidata’s multilingual data.

URL (including recording): https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/increasing_access_to_free_and_open_knowledge_for_speakers_of_underserved_languages_on_wikipedia/