[UPDATE 24/3/20]: The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference will take place fully remotely in July 2020!
ORIGINAL PIECE:
With 20 billion page views every single month, Wikipedia is undoubtedly one of the best resources for information out there. It has long been the first stop site to click into when people search for information from anything like celebrities and historical facts to niche information and indeed, minority languages. But have you heard about the Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference?
Wikipedia has largely been seen as a cornerstone of the digital age but often the information within it is sadly not represented evenly across languages.
Cue, this fantastic event! The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference aims to tackle this issue and will this year be hosted in The Hunt Museum in Limerick on the 9th – 10th of July 2020.
The focus will be on the Irish language and its developing Wikimedia community while also addressing how one can share and support other languages in the Celtic Knot and beyond.
Wikimedia is a non-profit organisation that hosts Wikipedia. Its core goal is ‘to create a world where every human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge’.
According to the organisers, the Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference ‘aims to bring people together to share their experiences of working on sharing information in minority languages. We hope to help people learn how to encourage the flow of information across language barriers and support associated communities. As in previous years, we will have a strong focus on Wikidata and its potential to support languages’.
The conference is currently open for paper and proposals for the conference which will be open through March and selected in April.
‘Speakers are encouraged to share their success stories and the challenges they have faced whilst helping to develop a small or minority language Wikipedia. Organizations, editors, any group of people are welcome to submit proposals for the program.’
Wikimedia UK has been the organiser with local partners for the 2017 conference in Edinburgh (focusing on Scottish Gaelic), the 2018 conference in Aberystwyth (focusing on Welsh) and the 2019 conference in Falmouth (focusing on Cornish).
Featured Image of The Hunt Museum via Wikimedia Commons / Chemical Engineer. Discover more interesting stories here.