User:Derek J Moore

Abstract

Unintentionally and unwittingly, I responded to Escobar’s invitation to embrace a pluriversal narrative. On Wikipedia, I have found an academic heritage that remains rooted within a traditional and dominant knowledge system, combined with small communities of practice that have sponsored a multipolar version of scholarship.

The "truth" of a readily available source that confirms “the facts” to the average Google searcher ties in neatly with modernity. Through interviews with South African Wikipedians, I aim to investigate combined efforts to achieve language equity in South Africa through “Vernacular Wikipedia”. My paper will contain narratives of a few South African Wikipedians who are surfacing the diversity of knowledge systems, enabling the emancipatory promise of the postdigital and uncovering the pluriverse.

I suspect that if I can move beyond the “languages of modernity” (Mingnolo, 1998) and work in alternate but familiar platforms where these facts are constructed, it might be possible to uncover alternate knowledge systems, and their different realities will be surfaced and revealed. The Wikimedia Foundation, with its 346 language versions, offers an entrance into a pluriverse. South Africa has 11 languages on this multilingual platform. They permit the unaware (i.e. the author) to explore complex and diverse spatial realities, using auto-translation, stubs, categories and an onboarding tool as a guide. Those who enter and participate in this multilingual markdown space, are offered a "holding space" to safeguard their customs, heritage, and cultural knowledge in open, educative, and participatory ways.

South Africa’s constitutional intentions are to build up an indigenous knowledge commons and a vernacular systems of thought. This has opened many hidden worlds and their multiple realities to me (a pluriverse?). In the paper, I will be exploring how SADiLaR, Wikipedia and PanSALB have combined their efforts with SWiP to initiate a participatory digital humanities, and have begun to use a platforms' complex ecology to support the construction of a linguistic pluriverse in my home country.