article · Sustainable Social Development
This research assesses Wikipedia as a tool for digital inclusion and language preservation, focusing on Setswana speakers in South Africa and the Hà Nhì community in Vietnam. Using interviews with editors, activists, and educators alongside platform metrics such as article counts and editor numbers, the investigation identifies emergent yet restricted digital engagement in both groups. The communities face shared barriers, including infrastructural deficits, editorial gatekeeping, complex procedural governance, and the systemic marginalisation of non-hegemonic knowledge. The findings demonstrate that Wikipedia's standard platform architecture reproduces broader knowledge hierarchies, offering structural advantages to better-resourced languages. To describe this phenomenon, the research defines platform-induced hermeneutical injustice as an additional dimension of digital exclusion, providing guidance for platform operators, governments, educators, and language advocates.
Efforts to preserve minority languages online often rely on open platforms. However, when digital architectures inadvertently favour dominant languages, minority communities face exclusion from global knowledge sharing. Understanding how governance and infrastructure hinder contribution helps policymakers, educators, and platform custodians build equitable environments for endangered languages.
The abstract does not indicate a commercialisation pathway, focusing instead on policy, platform governance, and community preservation strategies.
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This article investigates the role of Wikipedia as a mechanism for digital inclusion and sustainable language preservation among two minority language communities, Setswana speakers in South Africa and the Hà Nhì ethnic minority in Vietnam. A quanti-qualitative mixed-methods design combined semi-structured interviews with Wikipedia editors, language activists, digital literacy educators, and community practitioners with quantitative Wikipedia platform metrics, including article counts, active editor figures, and content growth trajectories, was employed to investigate this issue. The results show that both communities demonstrate emergent but constrained digital participation. Their barriers are structurally distinct but epistemically convergent, i.e., infrastructural inequity, editorial gatekeeping, procedural governance, and the systemic undervaluation of non-hegemonic knowledge all recur across cases. Cross-case comparison shows that Wikipedia’s ostensibly neutral platform architecture reproduces existing knowledge hierarchies by privileging well-resourced language communities. The study introduces “platform-induced hermeneutical injustice” as a fifth dimension of digital exclusion, supplementing existing models of digital inclusion. It grounds Fricker’s epistemic injustice framework in digital platform governance and offers evidence-based implications for the Wikimedia Foundation, national governments, educators, and language preservation practitioners across the Global South.
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DOI: 10.23812/ssd8716
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