Wikidata IOLab is a Wikidata Lab activity that will occurr in the International Linguistics Olympiad 2024. In the activity, the students will get to know what is Wikidata, how the Wikimedia ecosystem works, what is free knowledge, free data and free licenses, and edit language phonemes on Wikidata! It will occurr as a partnership between the IOL's Local Organizing Committe, which organizes the international olympiad, and Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB), which is in charge of Wikidata Labs.
The international linguistics olympiad (IOL) is one of many international olympiads for high school students. It is generally the last round of the linguistics olympiads each nation has. Each country can participate with one or two teams, each composed by 4 students and 1 team leader. The team leader is an adult that takes care of the trip and the security of the students.[1]
The IOL was created in 2003 and, since then, it has happened in a lot of countries. In 2024, it will happen in Brazil, for the first time in the southern hemisphere. In 2023, 205 students participated from 38 countries/regions, obtaining in total 68 medals.[2]
In 2024, Brazil will host the IOL and welcome students from at least 40 countries/regions.[3] It will happen as a 7 day event, with an opening ceremony, the traditional individual and team contests, and a lot of fun and enjoying activities!
The students will use their own mobile phones to edit Wikidata. There will be an available wi-fi to be used. Since Wikidata doesn't have a dedicated mobile app and editing on a mobile browser is not possible, there will be a simple mobile-friendly web app, being developed here to allow Wikidata edits for this specific event, developed by the activity's committee.
The opening talk will be done in part by the local commitee and in part by WMB. The students will get to know what is Wikidata, why it is important, how the wikimedia ecosystem works, what are free licenses and why they matter, what is free knowledge and free data, and more. They will also see an example of wiki activity in a national olympiad: the experience with Obelepédia in the Brazilian Linguistics Olympiad.
In Wikidata, each language can have associated phonemes through the has phoneme property. Many languages don't have its associated phonemes on Wikidata. The students will, in small groups, add phonemes for a lot of languages. This data will allow some interesting phoneme analysis in the future. Also, it will help to produce language articles on Wikipedia, by already listing the phonemes of a language.
The mobile-friendly web app will use OAuth to edit in behalf of the users. Therefore, the students need to register their accounts before the event to ensure their account creation will not be blocked.
The web app will be developed by the local organizing committee, with the help of Wiki Movimento Brasil. It will be hosted on Toolforge and its being developed in this repository.
At the end, the students will be gathered again to see what they've accomplished. It will be shown how many phonemes they've added to Wikidata and how many languages they edited. This impact will be quantified by calculating the total amount of phonemes added to languages before and after the event, with a wikidata query.
This event is supported by Wiki Movimento Brasil and, therefore, it adheres to the friendly space policy, described here.