Low-Resourced Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need-Finding Study.

Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way\nto share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living.\nHowever, for communities with low-resourced languages -- including most African\ncommunities -- the quality and volume of content available are often\ninadequate. One reason for this lack of adequate content could be that many\nOKRs embody Western ways of knowledge preservation and sharing, requiring many\nlow-resourced language communities to adapt to new interactions. To understand\nthe challenges faced by low-resourced language contributors on the popular OKR\nWikipedia, we conducted (1) a thematic analysis of Wikipedia forum discussions\nand (2) a contextual inquiry study with 14 novice contributors. We focused on\nthree Ethiopian languages: Afan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Our analysis\nrevealed several recurring themes; for example, contributors struggle to find\nresources to corroborate their articles in low-resourced languages, and\nlanguage technology support, like translation systems and spellcheck, result in\nseveral errors that waste contributors' time. We hope our study will support\ndesigners in making online knowledge repositories accessible to low-resourced\nlanguage speakers.\n