Language onboarding/incubator process in one word

what are the challenges of Language onboarding/incubator process? why do these challenges still exist

what recommendations do you propose to improve the Language onboarding/incubator process?

Discussion notes

• Incubator is a very lengthy process however, one of things that worked well for us is Setting the rules for ourselves in terms of alphabets etc, we have the freedom to set the rules for ourselves
• When onboarding a new language there is a need for translation, you have to go to translatewiki, to translate the most important messages, User; Amire80 has been useful in listing the most important messages and post them on the talk pages,..it is however challenging to translate some of these terms since they may not be available in some languages, so communities are forced to create their own terms
• Those working/maintaining the incubator have tried to support people of small language communities, but there has not been any documentation/resources for people to refer to,for example how to start test wiki, how to translate on translatewiki and any other useful information needed to get their language on incubator that would be helpful
• The interface is a bit different from Wikipedia. There should be an easy way to add citation on an article when on incubator. Citation template should be changed. Most people create their content on incubator but when they are finally approved they loose the content because it does not meet the standard of an encyclopedic article; for example people add capital letters to their titles which is unacceptable, also consider interlinks, and proper referencing because at the importation phase when it does not meet the requirements and you lose all the articles.
• Perhaps if the language has it’s own official link, it can encourage more people to write rather than being on incubator
• Machine translation can also encourage creation of small wikipedias. However there is a challenge of community members publishing articles through copying and pasting without counter checking what is translated hence they end up loosing content since they don’t meet the encyclopedic standards, for newbies if you don’t know the languages, please use a language expert .

Follow ups

• user Rwebogora needs help with transferring Swahili Wikiquote from beta incubator to the mainspace
• username; Martin Hipangwa needs basic training on the incubator, how to edit and contribute.

Key takeaways

• Generally, main points highlights revolved around;
• awareness of existence of the incubator and its role in creating new wikipedias
• technical knowhow on how to navigate the incubator
• technical improvements to make incubator more user friendly
• technical capacity building through the availability of resources and documentation
• Awareness of where to go to ask for support
• Mobilizing communities of active language speakers for minority languages.

Overall Key takeaways from the conference

• Engaging volunteers and affiliates from the start of product development; had a lengthy conversation specifically with Wikimedia Uganda, on their willingness to engage with Product and Technology teams right from the start of product conceptualization. Most of the times they are engaged only from Product implementation.
• Technical contributions and innovations through Hackathons; The OTA Hackathon (automated, over-the-air updating of offline (Kiwix) libraries such as Wikipedia, using a simulated TV signal ) is a practise to be carried forward in the upcoming Wikindaba’s. Moving forward we should collaborate with African Technical contributors to engage on the high volume of Technical tasks. For example our Language Technical support backlog column has some first good tasks.
• Clarity on where to seek Technical support; A couple of volunteers reached out to ask for support on the incubator, it was unclear on where they should go to ask for support. User Rwebogora needs help with transferring Swahili Wikiquote from beta incubator to the mainspace and username; Martin Hipangwa needs basic training on the incubator, how to edit and contribute.