Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way
to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living.
However, for communities with low-resourced languages -- including most African
communities -- the quality and volume of content available are often
inadequate. One reason for this lack of adequate content could be that many
OKRs embody Western ways of knowledge preservation and sharing, requiring many
low-resourced language communities to adapt to new interactions. To understand
the challenges faced by low-resourced language contributors on the popular OKR
Wikipedia, we conducted (1) a thematic analysis of Wikipedia forum discussions
and (2) a contextual inquiry study with 14 novice contributors. We focused on
three Ethiopian languages: Afan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Our analysis
revealed several recurring themes; for example, contributors struggle to find
resources to corroborate their articles in low-resourced languages, and
language technology support, like translation systems and spellcheck, result in
several errors that waste contributors' time. We hope our study will support
designers in making online knowledge repositories accessible to low-resourced
language speakers.

研究通过对维基百科论坛讨论和对 14 个新手贡献者进行的环境调查，发现在低资源语言贡献者中存在一些问题，如在低资源语言中验证文章的资源匮乏以及语言技术支持（如翻译系统和拼写检查）导致多个错误从而浪费贡献者的时间。希望该研究能够支持设计师使在线知识库对低资源语言使用者更加可访问。