Turkic Wikimedia Conference 2012, Almaty – intro

The first Turkic Wikimedia Conference in Almaty, the largest city of Kazakhstan was held last weekend.

Turkic Wikimedia Conference 2012 logo by Batyr Hamzauly. The design of the "TWC" letters is based on Old Turkic runes. licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Turkic?

“Turkic” refers to Turkic languages. The most prominent Turkic language, in terms of number of speakers and international awareness of its existence is Turkish, the main language of Turkey. There are, however, many more such languages; Most of them are spoken in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, and a few are spoken in China, Afghanistan and other countries.

There first sign of this conference was given in Jimmy Wales’ closing speech of Wikimania 2011 in Haifa. By coincidence, in the same speech Jimmy’s pointer broke down, so I came up on the stage to push the button that moves the slides for him. At some point he asked me not to go too fast, and then he praised Rauan Kenzhekhanuly – the head of WikiBilim, a Kazakh association of people who contribute to Wikipedia, which expanded the Kazakh Wikipedia by many thousands of articles. He was so impressed by their activities that he promised his support for holding a regional Wikimedia conference, and now it happened.

Even though Russian is not a Turkic language, it is the most common language for the majority of the conference participants. As I am one of the few Wikimedia Foundation who speaks it, I was invited there.

Why and how to write Wikipedia in your language

At the conference I delivered several talks. The first was one of the opening keynote speeches – “Why you should write Wikipedia in your language”. In the talk I repeated my usual thesis – writing content and developing software in your native language rather than in a major language is important not just because of nationalism, politics or ideology, but simply because many people don’t know major international languages and thus they cannot access information if it’s written only in a language they don’t know. Before this talk I was told that even in Kazakhstan, where most people know Russian, native Kazakh language speakers often find it easier and more natural to read in Kazakh, especially when it comes to textbooks in schools and universities, and this went along perfectly with what I tried to present.

In that talk I also mentioned practical things that can help people to write in their languages and to join the global Wikimedia community – our mailing lists and our language support tools.

To make it more entertaining and memorable, I said a few words in Hebrew to give the audience the feeling of bewilderment when encountering a foreign language, and told people to stand up and sit down if they know this or that language. Beyond having fun, this little game also had a practical purpose: I delivered most of this talk in Russian and I wanted to make sure that everybody understands me. People from Turkey and other non-Russian-speaking countries were present in the audience and even though there was simultaneous translation into English, I wasn’t completely sure that they understand me. People laughed and applauded, so I guess that it worked.

My answer to the question “will Wikipedia ever carry advertising” was “NO”. This also received thunderous applause.

To be continued…