Celtic Knot Conference 2017/Programme

Time	Details	Room
9:00am	Registration and coffee	University of Edinburgh Business School - Main Concourse
9:30am	Welcome - Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal for Online Learning, University of Edinburgh.	Auditorium
9:35am	Introduction from Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, and Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK Programme Manager.	Auditorium
9:50am	9.50am to 10.05am: Conference Opening - Robin Owain (Wales Manager for Wikimedia UK) 10.10am to 10:45am: Keynote presentation - Jason Evans (Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales) Welsh Wicipedia – Thinking big Jason Evans will discuss his strategy for working with the National Library of Wales, Wikimedia UK and the Welsh Government to develop the Welsh language Wicipedia using a combination of community engagement, data manipulation and the implementation of Open Access policies. Jason will discuss how this strategy was implemented as part of the recent Wicipop project, which saw the creation of nearly 800 new Welsh Wicipedia articles in 3 months. The talk will also explore the growing importance of open data in the development of the Welsh Wicipedia, and how this may hold the key to the sustainability of smaller and native language Wikipedias.	Auditorium
10:45am	Coffee break	Main concourse
11:00am	Parallel sessions Lecture Theatre 2 CK101: A "state of the question", sharing our model on how we do things to promote the Catalan language project and why we do it and how we engage with language activists and also which are our challenges - Àlex Hinojo, Executive Director, Amical Wikimedia. Did you know that Catalan Wikipedia was just the second version of this encyclopedia to have articles, right after the English-language version and weeks before versions began to appear in other languages that are much more widely spoken throughout the world? It is just one example of Catalans on the internet and of their civic activism in favor of their language. With more than 500,000 articles, it’s the 18th biggest Wikipedia in a ranking by number of articles. If you take into account the number of Catalan speakers—about 11.5 million—it should be in 80th or 90th place. Those who write in Catalan on the internet still have a decidedly activist character borne of the prevailing diglossia. Even still, the position of the Catalan language is not fully normalized, despite its advances. On the internet, net neutrality and the existence of open platforms that are easily adaptable to different languages have been key factors in the success of networked Catalan successes. The net favors activism and facilitates getting people with similar interests together: it is a tool that connects. In a society with a tradition of community involvement like Catalonia, the net has been ideal for making our language and culture visible. Without political borders or obstacles, we are able to grow more than we can in the real world, which is significant given the numerous roadblocks that we suffer there. Our only weapon to gain the world’s confidence has always been our work ethic. Even though it is horizontal and neutral, the internet tends to reproduce the models we have in the physical world. When local associations, chapters, or divisions are organized from whatever international group or project, it’s often by country. Since Catalans always want to be there with our own voice, we defend groups that are defined by interest instead of by political borders. Our particular situation as a nation without a state has often been the catalyst that has generated changes in a variety of international organizations. One example of this is the .cat domain, which was the very first top-level domain to be awarded to a linguistic and cultural community—and not to a state— and which opened the door to the creation of other types of domains. In the case of Wikipedia, the Amical Wikimedia group of friends of the Catalan Wikipedia lobbied the Wikimedia Foundation to create the Thematic Organizations concept, which were local chapters of Wikimedia based on common interests and not borders. CK124: Developing the Basque Wikipedia: From corpus expansion to outreach - Iñaki Lopez de Luzuriaga, Basque Wikimedians User Group. 2016 was a critical year for the Basque Wikipedia, a project surging in 2007 that reached an activity peak last year by establishing the Basque Wikimedians User Group, benefiting from its synergies with Donostia-San Sebastián Capital of Culture 2016. As a minority language community, the project has faced the insecurities and hurdles inherent to a small community with a lesser status and pending corpus related issues, but determined all the same to live up to the challenges posed by an ever mutating reality. Individual editing has given way to a concerted effort aiming to expand Basque Wikipedia beyond online contribution into GLAM and Education outreach, as well as interaction with local communities, so becoming a referential player in today’s Basque cultural scene. In 2017, the Basque User Group sets off towards new horizons related to upcoming Education outreach programs that challenge its own internal structure. CK114: The Scottish Gaelic Uicipeid project: a talk discussing the role of the Gaelic Wikipedian at the National Library of Scotland and the success/failures of encouraging Gaelic speakers to make the Uicipeid a hub for online Gaelic knowledge - Susan Ross, Gaelic Wikipedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland. Lecture Theatre 1A CK125: Adult Learners from the Ionian Islands of Corfu and Kefalonia Share Cultural Heritage on Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary - Mina Theofilatou, Computer Science Teacher (Argostoli Evening High School). User:Saintfevrier. CK106: Y BYWIADUR: the dictionary of life: A joint venture with Wicipedia Cymraeg and other partners. The Bywiadur is part of the Llên Natur (nature lore) website and comes under the auspices of Cymdeithas Edward Llwyd – a charity set up in 1978 to promote the appreciation of nature, cultural heritage and the environment.] The editorial language of this environmental, interactive recording project is strictly Welsh but it nevertheless welcomes testimony in whatever language is offered. Items in Gaelic, Breton and Cornish are currently included, as well as the more dominant languages. It seeks to make the environment a more mainstream aspect of Welsh culture and by the same token welcomes those with a limited knowledge of the language into the Welsh cultural fold. CK128: The Digital Library in Romansch (to be confirmed) In Switzerland we work a lot with alpine languages and mainly with Romansh (spoken in Grisons and South Tyrol). We are building the biggest digital library in this language and we are in contact with local administration to use this library at the school. In this session, we will outline our project of Digital Library in Romansh and also about the new initiatives to map the archeological sites connected with Celtic culture in the Alps - Ilario Valdelli from the staff of Wikimedia Switzerland.	Lecture Theatres 1A and 2.
12:00pm	Facilitated group discussion How to kickstart a dead Wikipedia? Wikimedia Norge is supporting Wikipedias in three languages: Norwegian Bokmål (460,000 articles), Norwegian Nynorsk (130,000 articles) and Northern Sami (7,000 articles). The two Norwegian varieties are Germanic languages, while Northern Sami is an indigenous language in the Uralic language family. Northern Sami is spoken in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and is by far the biggest of several living Sami languages. In Norway about 25,000 people speak Northern Sami, but far fewer are able to write in the language. The Northern Sami Wikipedia currently has no active contributors, and Wikimedia Norge is looking into building a project to revitalize the Northern Sami Wikipedia. This conference gives us all an unique opportunity to learn from the representatives from different Celtic & Indigenous language Wikipedias. Astrid Carlsen will host a 15 min presentation followed by a 45 min discussion space, pertinent to all attendees, where we ask the following questions: Where do we start with no active community? What kinds of institutional partners should we seek? What activities should we prioritize? How can we best support a language with limited resources? What have been the biggest challenges for similar projects supported by Wikimedia UK and other related entities? What are the pitfalls, things to avoid?	Lecture Theatre 1B
1:00pm	Lunch	Main concourse
2:00pm	Keynote presentation: Professor Antonella Sorace, University of Edinburgh and Bilingualism Matters. Bilingualism in minority languages: a resource and an opportunity Research on the bilingual mind shows that bilingualism in any languages, regardless of their status, prestige, and worldwide diffusion, can give children a range of mental benefits. Equally, child bilingualism is essential to the inter-generational transmission of these languages, and in some cases to their very prospect of survival. However, there are still many widespread old misconceptions – as well as some new ones - about what it means to grow up with two languages. For example, many people still think that early bilingualism makes children confused and puts them at a disadvantage at school. Research, in contrast, shows that when there are differences between monolingual and bilingual children, these are almost invariably in favour of bilinguals: bilingual children tend to have enhanced metalinguistic skills and language learning abilities, a better understanding of other people’s points of view, and more mental flexibility in dealing with complex situations. Some of these benefits have also been found in adult second language learners, both younger and much older. I will first illustrate the main facts and benefits of bilingualism over the lifespan, focusing in particular on current research on minority languages, including Gaelic. I will then present what can be done to disseminate correct information on bilingualism in different sectors of society and to enable informed decisions in minority language communities.	Auditorium
2:30pm	Parallel sessions Lecture Theatre 1A CK111: Using the UNESCO Atlas of World Languages in Danger and Wikidata - organising knowledge about world languages on Wikipedia including using open license text from external sources. John Cummings, UNESCO Wikimedian in Residence. CK110: Welsh/Celtic speech technology in Wikipedia: Text-to-speech and speech recognition are becoming increasingly important in our digital world. Major languages such as English are well catered for, but smaller languages such as Welsh and the other Celtic languages are often left behind. Wikipedia is both a huge resource for the creation of Celtic automatic speech capabilities and a platform for deploying the technology. A new project to make text-to-speech possible for Wikipedia has been announced for English and Swedish, (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikispeech) which may be extended in time to other languages. However, as far as we know, there are no plans yet to develop speech recognition in the Wikipedia environment, and speech recognition for the Celtic languages in general remains underdeveloped. In our Welsh National Language Technologies Portal we have published the work we have done so far in this field (see http://techiaith.cymru/speech/?lang=en) aiming at disseminating our resources on free and generous licences. We now wish to engage with our Celtic colleagues to explore how we can create speech recognition for our languages with Wikipedia, starting with training in named entities, and questioning and answering modules e.g. who was, where is, where/when was someone born etc. - Delyth Prys, Head of the Language Technologies Unit, Canolfan Bedwyr. Lecture Theatre 2 CK121: Welsh-language technology and digital media: This presentation will share with the conference what we’ve discovered about the importance of the number of Wikipedia pages in a language in getting better services for that language from big companies. I’ll show slides mapping the languages supported by Google, Twitter, Apple, etc. against both number of speakers and number of Wikipedia articles in languages to show how much importance major companies attach to creative activity on Wikipedia. I’ll explain how this information has led to Welsh Government helping to fund two Welsh-language Wikipedia initiatives called WiciPop and WiciMôn and how we wanted to strike a balance between the need to scale up article production with the need to encourage more people to hand-craft articles in workshops. I’ll compare this activity with that of the Papurau Bro – Welsh-language community magazines – which have brought people together to fold and staple editions in chapel vestries since the 1970s. And I’ll argue that including a link to a Wikipedia article started by a school pupil is an asset for their personal statement and CV. So this isn’t an academic paper I’m presenting; it’s a passionate account of a public intervention aimed at solving a lot of challenges at the same time - Gareth Morlais, Welsh Language Unit, Llywodraeth Cymru - Welsh Government. CK127: Project Miljon+ and Vikipeedia in Estonian language Strategies for Estonian Wikipedia for getting more articles in Estonian language include a new big project, Miljon+. The main goal for the project is to get 1,000,000 articles on Estonian Wikipedia. This project is part of a gift for the Estonian 100th anniversary (Estonians are making collective gifts to our homeland) so it will last til year 2020. Currently Estonian Wiki has ~157 000 articles and there are not so many users, because there is not enough data. This lightning talk will cover how we are engaging more and more people to write inside of the Miljon+ project. Käbi Suvi - Wikimedia Estonia.	Lecture Theatres 1A and 2
3:00pm	Parallel workshops Lecture Theatre 1A CK113: Using Wikidata to support small-language wiki content Practical workshop led by Jason Evans, Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales. Lecture Theatre 2 CK112: Lingua Libre an interface for massive open audio recording. During the launch of the Langues de France project, the ability of minority language speakers to participate to a great extent in the written aspects of Wikimedia projects encouraged us to come up with a new way of contributing. The purpose of Lingua Libre is to realize records all around the world with a documentation useful for quality linguistic re-use thanks to city-accurate geolocation. Lingua Libre is an open and open-license platform and webapp which boosts the recording of mass of words or sentences into clean, well cut, well documented audio files. It is perfect to create small to large datasets of audio files. The session will include a demo / training for LinguaLibre. LinguaLibre.fr is the professional cloud system used by Wikimedia to swiftly record series of words or sentences into super clean, high quality audios. LinguaLibre is excellent for OpenData creation, languages teaching, and language conservation. Over 120.000 audios have been uploaded with this tool. It also allows you to record the words and voice of your grandma for ever. We will give a presentation of this tool and its many functionalities. We also would like to propose a recording session with some volunteers as a good opportunity to meet speakers of Celtic languages, hear and record them.	Lecture Theatres 1A and 2
4:00pm	Coffee break	Main concourse.
4:15pm	Panel discussion & Closing plenary: The Politics of Language Online	Auditorium
5:00pm	End of conference	Auditorium