User:Yug

Currently looking for work 🧑🏻💼 (📧 mail me)
About me
Bonjour Wikimédia !
I joined Wikipedia projects in 2004. I specialize in breaking down digital and linguistic barriers, ensuring marginalized languages and underrepresented communities have the technology and platforms they need to thrive on Wikimedia. I previously worked with INALCO, Université de Paris, Université de Toulouse, and Wikimedia chapters to scale digital education and multilingual access.
My driving motivation is personal: rurally raised, my ancestors were Occitan, a formerly 15-million-strong community whose culture has nearly vanished due to systemic erasure. Fluent in French, English, and Chinese, I dedicate my career to open education by building digital tools to serve the public, cultural diversity and minority language revitalization.
My work
I design systems that turn the larger Western communities' energy into targeted, high-impact technical solutions for content gaps and digital equity.
- Solving visual and data gaps: Between 2005 and 2015, I focused on making Wikimedia visually appealing. I established the first Graphic Labs and standard Wikipedia cartographic guidelines[1] to make information universally digestible. To bridge East-West cultural knowledge gaps, I initiated the Commons CJK Stroke Order and Ancient Chinese Characters projects, we we gathered 30,000 more illustrations.
- Helping languages learning & preservation: During my PhD, I recognized the lack of digital audio infrastructure for languages educations and revitalization. I integrated Shtooka into WMFR and evolved it into « LinguaLibre.org »—a rapid-recording solution designed to document voices, accents, and [endangered] languages.
- Scaling the solution: This ecosystem has secured over 1,500,000 recordings across 330+ languages. The project is feeding and enriching Wiktionaries|, Wikidata, SignIt, WikiTutur, WikiKata, and Rapid Dictionaries. Today, I sustain this impact by maintaining the core codebases for Lingua Libre, SignIt, Dragons Bot, and other Wikimedia's language tools, ensuring marginalized communities possess the open-source infrastructure needed to survive in the digital age.
Contact me
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Tools
Over two decades I built dozens of innovative toolkits, projects and full fledged tools.
- Wikipedia:Graphic Lab — Wiki forum for graphists and cartographers to learn by doing. Creation, internationalization, advocacy for 10 years, 30,000 illustrations.
- Commons:CJK stroke order project — documentation of CJK writing order in China, Taiwan, Japan. Creation, facilitation. 10,000+ illustrations.
- Commons:Ancient Chinese characters project — documentation of CJK characters. Creation, facilitation. 10,000+ illustrations.
- Lingua Libre App — recording tools. Creation, advocacy, workshops, fundraising, community facilitation, coding developments since 2013.
- Lingualibre.org — branding website introducing the Lingua Libre project
- SignIt — Sign Languages web extension. Lead, code, internationalization, advocacy, fundraising, workshops since 2020.
- User:Dragons Bot — bot to supports Chinese calligraphy and linguistic projects on Commons and meta.
- LanguagesGallery — LinguaLibre statistics and datasets download page. Creation, coding.
- Lingua Libre inventory tool — tool inventoring thousands of wikipages from Lingualibre.org, filtering the relevant ones to be migrated to Wikimedia Commons
- Commons:Rapid dictionary — simplest possible process to rapidly create online e-dictionary. Creation, advocacy, fundraising, community facilitation, coding developments since 2025.
- WikiNaturalist — create a wikimedia-boosted gallery of your local biodiversity, shareable with others. (Also works with other items)
- RenameOrReplace.js (RoR) — mass editing userscript to fix content or rename pages. Aimed to ease the maintenance of Lingua Libre's 1.5M records.
- List Augmenter — userscrip assistant to create bilingual dictionaries from the 2,300 parallel Swadesh lists
Events

- Wikimania '07,'13,'14,'17,'18,'19,'21,'22,'23,'24,'25.
- Wikimedia Hackathon '13,'14,'17,'18,'19,'23,'25.
- Hackathons, a dozen more.
- WMF's Google Summer of Code: '24 (mentor x2).
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Legend: WP: Wikipedia • LL: LinguaLibre • CM: Commons • CO: Coordination • PC: Project Creation • FR: Fund request. ![]()
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- ↑ The Signpost — “The Cartographers of WikiProject Maps” (2012 interview with Yug)
