Wikimedia Deutschland wants to make a step towards creating a collaboration with a movement partner for a common software development infrastructure for Wikidata. With this we want to breathe life into the movement recommendations of increasing the sustainability of our movement, invest in skill and leadership development and empower local communities.

Since language and its use is a highly localized concept we believe that capacity
building both for the communities and the partner and growing the contributor base to our software products is best placed with partners in those local contexts. For us this means that the lexicographical part of Wikidata that has been introduced in 2018 and that we see as an important means to digital language equality for underrepresented languages is a good place to start finding new pathways of software collaboration.

Questions we want to discuss with the Wikidata community:
* What do we have to consider when building sustainable software development partnerships/ software hubs for lexicographical data from your perspective? What criteria do you think should drive such a decision?
* Mapping suitable groups or affiliates for the partnership: How to find and reach out to groups interested in partnering in this project? What does it need to be a partner in a shared software development environment?

"European Language Equality" (ELE) is an European Commission project consisting of 52 partner organizations that envisions a future where all European languages can achieve full digital language equality by 2030. In order to get there the partners are working to create a convincing roadmap to hand in to the European Commission that will make sure that under-resourced and minority languages in Europe have the technological support to exist and prosper in the digital age.

The Wikimedia movement - and more specifically Wikidata editors, Wiktionary editors, editors of Lexemes, Lingua Libre volunteers, edit-a-thon organizers, editors of small language Wikipedias, editors of European language Wikipedias - have been part of the consultation process for this project. We wanted to make sure the pains, challenges, wishes and needs of the volunteers and communities keeping the multi-language environment of Europe alive everyday are heard on a EU policy level.

In this session, we will present the results of the project so far as well as take the opportunity to discuss the pains of under-resourced language communities that are active in the Wikidata community.

Questions we want to discuss with the Wikidata community:
What are our challenges, needs and expectations for the future of Language Technology for under-resourced languages?
What do we need from policymakers in order to preserve European languages with the Wikimedia projects?

Discussion of the languages sessions