This manual/curriculum is developed by multiple trainers and collaborators to help with documenting and archiving various Adivasi, Tribal/Indigenous, mother tongues and local languages.
Last updated 26 April 2026 (v.1.0.0-beta).
We conducted a workshop series between May and September 2026, both online and offline. We also conducted additional workshops at various conferences. This manual was created by the trainers and collaborators of those workshops. It is written in simple English and published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA) 4.0 Licence. You can also find translations in various languages on the left side. If you see any mistakes in any language version, please click on “Edit this page” at the bottom right and correct them.
Session plan
1. Planning
- How to choose the language or language community.
- How to decide what kind of material to record.
- How to set a realistic goal for the day or project.
- How to get money to pay people for labour.
2. Consent and ethics
- How to explain the project to the community in simple language.
- How to get consent from speakers and contributors.
- How to discuss credit, shared ownership, and payment for labour.
- How to decide what can be shared openly and what should stay private.
3. Recording
- How to choose the right device.
- How to test audio before recording.
- How to keep notes on speaker name, date, place, and topic. (metadata)
- How to record in a quiet place.
4. Managing Files & Processing Audio/Video
- How to use, name and save files and folders.
- How to make backups and keep a simple log/history of all files.
- How to edit audio and video.
- How to export in stable formats.
- How to create transcripts or subtitles when possible. (see module_9])
5. Publication
- How to prepare short project and file descriptions.
- How to add language name, speaker name, date, and place.
- How to choose the correct license.
- How to upload to Wikimedia Commons.
- How to add participant and project details to Wikidata.
- How to use files in Wikipedia articles.
6. Sharing and deposit
- How to contact archives and libraries and deposit media for archiving.
- How to share copies with the community.
- How to plan follow-up support after the workshop.
- Hands-on outputs
- One documentation plan
- One consent and rights note
- One file-folder structure
- One cleaned media sample
- One Commons-ready metadata draft
Collaborators
Organised by: OpenSpeaks
Collaborators: FOSS United, Whose Knowledge?, Adivasi Lives Matter, People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), Endangered Languages Project
Supported by: Wikimedia Foundation