A Need Finding Study with Low-Resource Language Content Creators

Online knowledge repositories like Wikipedia offer a way for communities to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living. However, there is a huge gap in the volume and quality of content available for communities that speak high-resourced languages versus communities that speak low-resourced languages—including a majority of African communities.Usually, such online repositories are situated in Western ways of knowledge preservation and sharing, requiring low-resourced language communities to adapt to new forms of interaction and preservation.To understand the challenges faced by low-resourced language content creators on the popular knowledge repository Wikipedia, we collected Wikipedia forum discussions in low-resourced languages and conducted a thematic analysis. For the purpose of this work, we focused on three Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, and Afan Oromo. In this short paper, we report findings from ongoing research aimed at understanding the challenges faced by such content creators.Our analysis reveals several recurrent themes, including (1) how typing in non-Latin scripts on Latin keyboards is challenging and slow, and (2) how content creators' time is consumed by cleaning duplicate and low-quality articles.We hope our study will help inform designers' choices in making such platforms accessible to low-resourced language speakers.