Wikipedia:VideoWiki/Signpost 2019

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In the last census of India, 25% of the country still had low literacy. That's 300 million people, in a single country, who can't read the written word. And, of those, 300 million, 200 million of those were women.

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Low literacy isn't an issue isolated to India,

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it's actually a major problem in many developing countries.

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For instance, south sudan, has a 74% illiteracy rate.

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In Afganistan, it's 68%.

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And in Haiti, illiteracy runs at 51%.

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Globally, 15% of the world, or over a billion people, can't share, in the sum of all human knowledge

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This can have a devastating impact in fragile environments, because the same people who are disengaged from Wikipedia by illiteracy, are also disproportionately affected by diseases that can be prevented through education.

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Simple information, like rehydrating a child when they have diarrhea

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having someone be with a mother during childbirth

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and keeping a baby warm in the first hours of its life, is unknown to many in the developing world.

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Which, in turn, is critical to wikipedia because at more than two-hundred and twenty-thousand articles, in 281 languages, and 4.2 billion page views per year, our medical information (alone) likely makes us the, most used, medical resource on the planet.

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So, even though video can seem like a cosmetic change to a user who lives in the developed world, for many, in developing nations, Wikipedias vital information is inaccessible, without it.



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Videowiki proposes an all-on-Wikipedia solution, that allows editing of a script, the use of references, and consensus building through talk pages

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but, most importantly, it allows merciless editing, in the same way that traditional articles are created.

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The Videowiki engine uses, text-to-speech engines, to read a script page, and matching it to multimedia content.

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The script is organized by sections, with text and visuals. Each section of the script, represents a segment of the video

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The scripts can then be translated, and either read by the text-to-speech engine, or overdubbed if a language is not supported.

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Once created, the entire product can be uploaded to Commons as a web m file, and used by article editors, if they choose.

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At this years Wikimania, the theme is "Wikimedia, and advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals",

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Let's focus our efforts on reaching the worlds most vulnerable populations, by bringing Wikipedia's content into the last mile.