Related/Off Topic: Is there a documented way to improve the accuracy of a particular language model? Say we can put in the effort to collect 1000's of verified/transcribed samples of a language that is currently scored poorly (WER). What steps do I have to take to get those improvements into the system?
Yes, you need to fine-tune the model with your data. This might be easy or hard, depending on your experience level and complexity of the model and available tooling.
For this model specifically (https://github.com/openai/whisper) it would be a significant challenge for a newcomer. Luckily Huggingface has a blog post that will get you started: https://huggingface.co/blog/fine-tune-whisper