Yorùbá Tones, Wikimedians partner to expand quality Yorùbá content online

Yorùbá Tones, a language technology organisation, has partnered with the Yorùbá Wikimedians User Group (YWUG) to improve the quality, accessibility and use of Yorùbá-language content online.

The collaboration will combine Yorùbá Tones’ language technology with the Wikimedia community’s work in developing freely accessible Yorùbá knowledge, including content on Yorùbá Wikipedia.

A key focus of the partnership is the wider use of tone marks, which are an important part of standard Yorùbá orthography but are frequently omitted from digital and printed content.

The omission can make Yorùbá text more difficult to interpret because tone marks can distinguish words with different meanings. The challenge is particularly significant for language learners, researchers and readers seeking standardised Yorùbá content.

Yorùbá Tones is developing tools that can automatically restore missing tone marks, correct tone-marking errors and predict appropriately marked Yorùbá text.

Under the partnership, the technology company will make its publicly available tone-marking tools available to Yorùbá Wikimedia contributors, enabling editors to add and correct tone marks more efficiently when creating or updating articles.

The organisations will also conduct joint training sessions aimed at improving contributors’ digital literacy and their ability to produce fully tone-marked Yorùbá content using digital tools.

“This partnership is an important step towards building a stronger digital presence for the Yorùbá language,” said Mikaeel Sodiq, president of YWUG.

“By combining the Wikimedia community’s commitment to creating open knowledge with Yorùbá Tones’ technology, we can make it easier for contributors to produce high-quality, correctly written Yorùbá content and make that knowledge accessible to people around the world.”

Olajide Ishola of Yorùbá Tones said working with the Wikimedia community was a natural extension of the organisation’s mission.

“Our goal has always been simple: Yorùbá, written right, everywhere. There is no better place to start than with the people building open Yorùbá knowledge. Joining forces was the most natural decision we have made,” Ishola said.

The partnership comes as digital platforms become increasingly important to the preservation, teaching and development of indigenous languages.

Yorùbá is spoken by millions of people in Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, as well as by communities in the diaspora. However, the growing shift of education, research and cultural exchange to digital platforms has increased the need for reliable and accessible indigenous-language content.

For the partners, improving the quality of digital Yorùbá is therefore not only a language-preservation effort but also a way to expand access to knowledge for readers, students, educators and researchers.

The collaboration is expected to support the development of a broader community of Yorùbá writers, editors, educators, researchers and language enthusiasts contributing to online knowledge.

Yorùbá Tones’ technology includes automatic tone restoration, tone-mark correction and text prediction, with the organisation focused on making it easier for people to write Yorùbá with complete tone marks.

YWUG, meanwhile, promotes Yorùbá-language knowledge across Wikimedia projects, including Yorùbá Wikipedia, through workshops, edit-a-thons and outreach programmes designed to encourage more people to contribute knowledge in the language.

The group was officially recognised as an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation behind Wikipedia, in August 2019.

The partnership seeks to bridge the gap between language technology and community-led knowledge creation, with the long-term goal of making correctly written Yorùbá easier to produce, access and use online.

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