Talk:Small Wikipedia Community Sustainability/Wikidata

Draft presentation text

1

Greetings to everybody in attendance, here, watching online and maybe in the recording!

I would like to start by thanking the conference founders and organizers, as well as Presidium for the invitation to the plenary and a chance to present our work here. Just like the thesis we've supplied into the conference proceeds, the presentation and the visual materials used will be in Tatar. Before proceeding, I would like to make a short announcement in Russian:

«Dear participants! The event that has brought us together is one of the currently rare cases when an international team's work can be presented in Tatar at a Russia-wide Applied Science Conference. Thus I would use the language of my ancestors. But, if necessary, feel free to use the QR-code on slides or a short link under my surname (and in the footer of every following page) to open them on your gadgets and then switch to Russian or English by clicking the language code in [[]] to the left. The last page will have similar ones with the links to the research work itself and sources of data used.»

We are happy to be invited to the conference again. Our work last year has shown that "different linguistic worlds are not exclusively unique". This time, during Tatarstan's Year of ethnic cultures and traditions, we are demonstrating a method of assessing where and how much much investment is necessary to sustainably preserve the utility of each of the languages and related cultural knowledge.

The emblems below symbolize multilingual volunteering communities I am part of, whose collective knowledge made the work possible and whose approval, support, comments and proposals have gone into the outcome. Let me note that my colleagues from around Russia, CIS countries and the wider world have welcomed the decision of Tatarstan on enlarging the mandate of Tatar Language Preservation and Development Commission to include assuring sustainability of all languages used by the people of Tatarstan.

All materials presented are non-copyrighted, thus feel free to use them as you deem necessary.

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Here we are demonstrating our history of taking part in various events, ready to respond when invited to share available international practices, knowledge and experiences of the wiki-world. In my case, this public embassadorship role in Tatarstan materialized in 2018. Then, on the initiative of Mintimer Shaymiev, I've spend some two hours responding to questions of Roman Shaykhutdinov at the Ministry for Digital Development and IT, then about the same first with the State Councillor himself, followed by Alexander Terentyev of the Presidential Administration's Internal Policy Department. All of them said: "The utility for Tatarstan and mother tongues of Tatars and other ethnic groups in the Republic is clear. Please, continue advancing this!"

3

This one demonstrates the importance of the topic. International team of mathematical linguists has forecasted the sad fate of communities and languages that won't be able to adapt to the changing informational ecosystem. Which is why our own efforts, and those of colleagues from Moscow and St.Petersburg with the support of Presidential Grants Foundation: two registered methodologic guidelines for universities of Russia were published in 2020 and 2022, an online course created in 2021, presentations in cities around the country (in Kazan - at the Federal University, Chemical Technology and Power Engineering Universities, at Selet Foundation), some achievements mentioned in the document signed by the President of Russia, Letters of Appreciation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Upper Chamber of the Federal Assembly, Representatives of the President in Federal Districts and regional leadership, awards from Federal Agency on Ethnic Affairs. Regionally, our neighbors have awarded a colleague with an Order of Merit for volunteer contribution into Bashkir Wikipedia. BUT! Both the nature of the "threat" to language sustainability, and the scale of the solutions that can be effective today is very different.

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Ecosystems have changed radically. Thus conditions for survival therein.

Hypertext links and hashtags used on websites, social networks and various messangers are a result of 1989 discovery (Tim Burners-Lee, inventor of the Internet). The same scientist back in 1999 has forecast the need to transition to Semantic Web. That's where everything written-said-shown can be understood by our gadgets, which will process and then present this knowledge to humans in the format and language desired. We are living this digital transformation for more than a decade already. It's bringing us to the interdependency world described in the Qur'an, whilst pyramidal-hierarchic management models humanity has grown used to are to become part of the past. The survival of the states, commercial and scientific organizations, various ethno-cultural and religious worlds and phenomena depends on their adaptability. I've been told that similarly tasked Tatarstan Digital Transformation Center representatives are taking part in the work of the conference. We are now living the evolution into the society of 9 billion equally Mighty Khalifs. Unsurprizingly, there are those afraid of this and trying to fight the change.

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What does this mean for the languages and their sustainability? The ones not fulfilling the promise of assuring material wellbeing and safety have no practical utility, thus will only survive in museums, books and isolated virtual cultural spaces. An illustration to the left is an example of Wikidata knowledge base element, localized by Tatar volunteers.

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We started by building an analytical framework model that helped us describe the changing language sustainability conditions. These are some scientific definitions from ornithology/primatology, organizational behaviour and cybernetics we relied on.

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The quantitative indicators for progress monitoring were selected from the following Semantic Web volunteering multilingual initiatives under free license:

• First one used by supercomputers that have beaten humans in debates in 2010s, and later in 2022 to build a multilingual concept map for GPT3 model by Russian developers from SBER.
• Second one is similar to what's being used by chatGPT-like neural networks to build beautifully-phrased texts.
• Third one is a project for developing automatic compilers for translating natural language into machine-readable and vice-versa, like your post in some chat, a paper you wrote or a book.

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Russian-speaking volunteers deserve our applause! The level they have achieved today is quasi-enough to fully Russify interface and processes in Public Service systems all over the world.

Important to note here, that around 2030s we might start seeing state/official language concepts becoming dated. Progress figures we see today give us confidence that colleagues by then will take the language they work on to a stable humanity-stationary orbit.

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When speaking of the official and other local languages of the country, we should bow to our neighbors. The contribution of volunteers from Finland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Kazakstan is a guarantee we won't ever go to the desert of mono- or a bilingual Russian-English linguistic landscape. A truly heroic example by the Veps and Hill Mari (immediately following the Sakha language in the table) inspires us and is showing the need to make a leap forward in what others have achieved per speaker-count.

The meaning of the figures in the table can be explained as follows: "Out of total number of phenomena in the Universe that wiki-volunteers from around the world deemed important for inclusion, English gives access to see/understand 85%, Russian - 8.62%, Tatar - 0.96%. Now imagine we are talking about oncology and think in terms of knowledge and experience levels that help those involved to suspect a tumor/s, discover it/them, identify types, stage and other factors, as well as perform a minimally-invasive surgery.

We now have a better understanding of what and how must be developed to keep language-support infrastructure up-to-date.

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Thank you for your attention.--Frhdkazan (talk) 14:03, 16 February 2023 (UTC)