WikademyFAQ

What is the Soillse Wikademy?

 * 1) The “Soillse Wikademy” is an **academic research project** currently being undertaken by the University of Glasgow, investigating the implications of new technology and social media for corpus planning tasks in geopolitically-challenged languages like Gaelic. The main research question is: Can the formulation of linguistic standards be “crowdsourced”, i.e. devolved to an online community of language professionals, activists, learners and enthusiasts?
 * 2) The Soillse Wikademy is a **collaborative website** (i.e. a “wiki”) dedicated to Gaelic linguistics and corpus planning, where users can add their own content directly and read and edit the contributions of others.
 * 3) The Soillse Wikademy is a **community** of people who have a stake or interest in the Gaelic language and in the formulation of a standardised formal register, for use in the media, publishing and education. The aim of the community is to collaborate on topics related to Gaelic linguistics and corpus planning.
 * 4) The Soillse Wikademy is a **library** of group-authored documents relating to the Gaelic language (e.g. a descriptive/prescriptive grammar, a set of guidelines for the creation of new vocabulary), all of which are freely available under a creative commons license.

Who came up with the idea for the Soillse Wikademy?

 * The idea behind the Wikademy was developed by [|Dr Mark McConville], Research Fellow in Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow (and previously of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh), in collaboration with [|Professor Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh], Professor of Gaelic at the University of Glasgow.
 * The origins of the project lie in a report commissioned by [|Bòrd na Gàidhlig] - Michael Bauer, Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh and Rob Wherrett: [|Survey of Gaelic Corpus Technology] (2009). This report recommends, among other things, the creation of an official [|Gaelic Language Academy], independent of any one sector of the Gaelic world and staffed by expert linguists, in line with international best practice. The report highlights the need for the Academy structure to contain a "user acceptance panel", including publishers, educationalists, translators, developers and learners, to ensure community "buy-in".

What does the Soillse Wikademy have to do with Soillse?

 * [|Soillse] is a national research network for Gaelic language research, bringing together academics at the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Sabhal Mór Ostaig. The aim of Soillse is to rapidly increase the quantity and quality of research into Gaelic sociolinguistics and language planning. The main funders of Soillse are the universities themselves (47% of the £5.29 million five-year budget) and the Scottish Funding Council (35%), with contributions also coming from Bòrd na Gàidhlig (10%) and Highlands and Islands Enterprise (8%).
 * Both of the Wikademy project instigators are core members of the Soillse network, and are employed by the University of Glasgow. In order to benefit from the publicity given to the Soillse network in the Gaelic world, a decision was taken at an early stage to market the Wikademy project under the Soillse brand. The Wikademy project contributes to the aims of Soillse by developing and evaluating an innovative approach to corpus planning, as well as by building links between academia and other organisations that have a stake in Gaelic.

Is it really going to be called the Soillse Wikademy?

 * No. We are actively looking for a more appropriate name - an authentic but unusual Gaelic noun whose meaning encapsulates the collaborative, democratic ethos behind the Wikademy, much as the name “An Seotal” does for Stòrlann’s terminology panel. All suggestions welcome!

What does this have to do with Bòrd na Gàidhlig’s proposed Gaelic Language Academy?

 * From the start of the consultation period for the project, we have been in touch with a number of people at Bòrd na Gàidhlig, with a view to establishing cooperation between the Wikademy and the proposed [|Gaelic Language Academy] (GLA). We have been keen to make it clear that, although the Wikademy is a distinct enterprise, we are committed to being supportive of any independent, collaborative, Bòrd-sponsored GLA model which is not dominated by any one set of interests. In particular, one of the short-term aims of the Wikademy is to provide much-needed empirical evidence that will feed back into the consultation process for the GLA.
 * The aim of the Wikademy is explicitly not to compete with the GLA, or to duplicate its work, but rather to assist it in the huge task that lies ahead. Any recommendations made by the Wikademy will be precisely that, i.e. recommendations. The GLA may subsequently choose to accept them or reject them as official standards for formal Gaelic.

Who is in charge of the Soillse Wikademy?

 * In principle, no-one and everyone. The ethos underlying wikis in general is that responsibility is devolved to the lowest possible level, with the understanding that all participants are committed to the ultimate aims of the community. In particular, conflict is resolved by bottom-up consensus building rather than top-down diktat. Experience from other wiki projects has shown that attempts to impose an explicit hierarchy on the community is counterproductive, and leads to fragmentation.
 * In practice, however, all successful wiki projects involve an implicit, “light-touch” model of “shallow” hierarchy. Thus, the Wikademy will be steered by a small group of “moderators” who are responsible for things running smoothly and in a focused manner. Ideally, these moderators should come from different sectors of the Gaelic world.

Who can join the Soillse Wikademy?

 * Anyone who has a stake or interest in Gaelic linguistics or corpus planning.
 * In particular, we are actively recruiting Gaelic language professionals - broadcasters, journalists, schoolteachers, Ulpan tutors, translators - because: (a) we think that they have the most to contribute to the work of the Wikademy; and (b) they stand to benefit the most from participation.
 * We are also actively recruiting non-Gaelic-speaking, independent academic linguists to provide a much-needed outside perspective on Gaelic corpus planning - one of the benefits for them would be to demonstrate that their academic research has some kind of direct “impact” on society beyond academia (as is required under the new Research Excellence Framework for British universities).

What is the timescale for the Soillse Wikademy?

 * We are launching the Wikademy in July 2011, to conduct an initial pilot six-month experiment into the feasibility of this approach to corpus planning. We will be actively recruiting participants over the summer. We will conduct an initial evaluation of the project in December 2011.
 * The long-term aim of the Wikademy, if successful, is to be a sustainable community of people working on Gaelic corpus planning and standardisation, in collaboration with the official, independent GLA.

How much taxpayers’ money will the Wikademy cost to run?

 * **None**.
 * Once the Wikademy has been established, the direct running costs will be negligible. We estimate that server-space for the website will be of the order of £200 per year, which we hope to cover either by private sector sponsorship or by “crowdfunding” (soliciting small donations through PayPal, as Wikipedia does).
 * Participants and moderators will not be paid to participate, either taking part in their own free time or in time their employer has given them “off work” for personal and professional development - for example, each schoolteacher in Scotland is entitled to devote 45 hours per year to professional development, and we aim to tap into this resource.
 * We are actively developing links with the relevant professional bodies to get Wikademy participation recognised as a useful CPD opportunity for Gaelic language professionals.

What organisations have been identified as potential stakeholders in the Wikademy?

 * Since the start of the project we have been in discussions with the following stakeholder organisations about getting their voices heard and interests represented within the Wikademy: Bòrd na Gàidhlig, BBC Scotland, MG Alba, SQA, LTS, The Scotsman, GTC Scotland, Deiseal Ltd, Clì Gàidhlig, Stòrlann, HMIe, CLAS.
 * We have been particularly keen to work in partnership with [|An Seotal], the Stòrlann panel which is responsible for developing new vocabulary for use both in GME and in SQA examination papers. We are very interested in working with Stòrlann on a wiki-based terminology pilot experiment, and have been in negotiations with them for the last four months with that in mind. Although terminology development is not going to be the primary focus of the Wikademy, we are nonetheless interested in investigating the potential for innovative, wiki-based approaches to this task, as a way of contributing to international best practice for minority languages. In any case, assuming that An Seotal is fully integrated into the Gaelic Language Academy structure, as recommended in the Bòrd na Gàidhlig "Corpus Technology" report mentioned above, we see no potential for either real or perceived duplication of effort.

What is crowdsourcing?

 * Crowdsourcing is a new paradigm for getting big tasks done that has developed over the last ten years or so. The basic idea is that, rather than create a hierarchical organisation to get the job done, you delegate it to a decentralised online community of suitably accredited volunteers.
 * The key ingredients for successful crowdsourcing are: (a) cheap, user-friendly collaborative software (e.g. wikis); (b) a sufficiently large “crowd” of enthusiastic, computer-literate people willing to donate some of their free time to the common good (i.e. of Gaelic); and (c) a good shared understanding of what the task actually involves.

Does crowdsourcing work?

 * Ask the shareholders of Encyclopaedia Britannica! The Wikipedia online encyclopaedia is a clear demonstration that crowdsourcing **can** work. There are many other similar success stories form the last ten years - the [|eBird] online research collaboration between academic and amateur ornithologists, the TripAdvisor hotel recommendation site, the review and recommendation systems underlying the Amazon online bookstore and Apple’s iTunes music store, and so on.
 * Much less is known about **why** crowdsourcing works - although there is a growing body of experimental evidence from economics and organisational theory suggesting that humans are natural crowdsourcers, and that when it comes to solving big, novel problems, a large diverse group is more effective than a small committee of experts (the “Diversity Trumps Ability” Theorem).
 * Research has also shown that crowdsourcing competes favourably with the traditional “committee of professional experts” approach with regard to quality control - for example, a recent comparison of Wikipedia entries with their counterparts in Encyclopaedia Britannica showed no discernable difference in accuracy.

The following books are good primers to the theory and practice of crowdsourcing:


 * James Surowiecki (2004): //The Wisdom of Crowds - Why the many are smarter than the few//, Abacus.
 * Clay Shirky (2008): //Here Comes Everybody - How change happens when people come together//, Penguin.
 * Jeff Howe (2009): //Crowdsourcing - How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business//, Random House.
 * Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (2010): //Macrowikinomics - Rebooting Business and the World//, Atlantic Books.

What are the implications of the Soillse Wikademy for Gaelic?

 * We hope that the Wikademy approach to corpus planning will be of huge benefit to Gaelic language revitalisation over the next generation or so, especially in light of the current economic conditions.
 * The Wikademy mass collaboration approach hold out the potential of getting more work done, faster, and for much less public investment.
 * In addition, the standardisation process will be completely transparent and democratic (since any computer-literate person with an internet connection and a bit of free time can take part), and the resulting recommendations on usage are more likely to gain acceptance if they have been scrutinised and debated in such a public forum.

What are the international implications of the Soillse Wikademy?

 * From an international perspective, the Wikademy represents a completely novel approach to corpus planning, reflecting the Soillse network’s commitment to producing world-class research in language planning for minority languages.
 * We believe the wiki-based, crowdsourcing approach to corpus planning offers significant advantages over existing established practices, in terms of time, money, accountability and acceptance.
 * If successful, we hope that the Scottish Gaelic Wikademy model will become the new international best practice for corpus planning in minority languages, thus placing Gaelic at the forefront of minority language planning.