{"id":6847,"date":"2026-09-18T17:20:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T15:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weblearning.co.za\/blog\/?p=6847"},"modified":"2026-09-20T18:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T16:06:08","slug":"heritage-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weblearning.co.za\/blog\/heritage-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Heritage Month"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today was a heritage day at my local high school. Kids could dress in their local heritage gear, or wear blue. Mine chose the latter. The other outfits…well they were lovely. I\u2019d like to highlight another Wikipedia group who is standing out for me at the moment. They are from the Basque region and their \u201ctaal\u201d is a language isolate<\/a>. Located close to the Pyrenee Mountains (42.6681804, 1.0011899) between Spain and France, there are less than a million people who are speakers of Euskara<\/em>, the ancient language of Euskal Herria<\/em>. I don\u2019t know too much about this group, the region or their heritage<\/a>. I have however noticed their online efforts. They have put together a children\u2019s encyclopedia called Txikipedia<\/a>. Here is the backstory (there are some similarities to SWiP).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wikipedians from  Euskal Herria (the Basque Country ) started conversations with the Basque Government about “auzolan” a tradition of <\/em>community collaboration. The government bought their pitch…as they soon realized that “Wikipedia is a must for a language to survive.” The Basque Education Program encouraged university students to improve existing Basque articles as part of their classroom assignment. The result was “that at least 2.200 students worked on improving 1.740 articles with students adding more than 2 million words.” Their contribution makes up 5% of Basque Wikipedia words. Then part of the vision was to create Txikipedia, the first children’s Encyclopedia inside Wikipedia. See Basque Education program presentation<\/a>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve frequently covered grown up knowledge resources. But frankly, children’s reference resources are more important. Much like Childcraft<\/a>, Txipedia is a children’s encyclopaedia<\/a> that Basque Wikimedians<\/a> have incorporated into Wikipedia. “Txiki” is Basque for “small” and this resource stands as an example of how language communities can amplify their vernacular language with Wikipedian. Here are my few thoughts on making a local vernacular equivalent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
My annotation of the Txikipedia header. We will be deconstructing the code<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n