THE IRISH-LANGUAGE VERSION of Wikipedia, Vicipéid, was mostly written by two people who do not have fluent Irish.

Amy Uí Ríordáin, the Gaeilge officer for Wikipedia Community Ireland, and Kevin Scannell, a mathematics professor in the United States, told Irish-language news website Tuarisic this week that the biggest challenge to the site was correcting articles.

The pair and a group of volunteers have spent the guts of a year holding ‘edit-a-thons’ to update and correct articles to the best of their ability, they told the publication, and have asked that more people join in to help them in this task.

Speaking to The Journal, Uí Ríordáin – who is full-time employee at Wikipedia Community Ireland  – said that Vicipéid has helped to boost the confidence of students and other non-native speakers in their ability to use Irish.

“I’m seeing that people have the muinín (confidence) to go ahead and use their cúpla focal sa caint – but scríobh na Gaeilge (written comprehension) is kind of going by the wayside,” she said.

“In terms of Vicipéid, I think it’s a really great way to do a bit of cleachtadh.”

Editing teams have found that some of the articles that appear on the website have seemingly been written by translation machines, and many were not edited or looked over once they were published, Scannell told Tuairisc.

Because of this, he feels the website has gotten a bad rep among fluent and native speakers.

Scannell told the publication that he thinks it is unfortunate that Wikipedia does not require contributors to be fluent in the language they write articles and disagrees with the open-door policy.

However, Uí Ríordáin said, despite having a Bachelor’s degree in Irish, she initially felt out of practice with writing and reading Gaeilge and that it held her back from applying to Irish-language jobs.

She said that she would be wary of her cruinneas in front of native speakers.

Shared pride among minority-language speakers

Since starting in her role at Wikimedia, Uí Ríordáin said she feels more confident in her ability to use Irish. She said that a lot of inspiration came from opportunities she has had to meet other minority-language speakers.  

Many of her working days include her reaching out to universities, galleries, libraries and other public institutions seeking that they provide better open-access information online and through Irish. 

Last year, she helped to organise events in Co Waterford alongside people from the Basque region in Spain and other minority-language speakers from Northern Africa and Asia.

Uí Ríordáin found that Irish and other minority-language speakers shared a pride in their identity and their desire to keep their native-tongue alive.

“It’s very part-in-parcel with identity and cultural identity of their regions,” she said. “I think that’s why it’s really good to have Irish.

“While you do have the minority of people saying ‘Sure, it’s a dead language why don’t we leave it’ – which I hate – you also have people who are fíor-Gael and are really into it.”

She said that Wikipedia Community Ireland intend to increase their engagement with other Celtic languages this year, such as Scots Gaelic.