Wikimedia Conference 2017/ESEA Meeting

2017-03-31

East and South East Asia + Australia meetup

2017-03-31, Wikimedia Conference in Berlin

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wmcon17esea

Participants

Erick Guan
Addis Wang
Yusuke
Ks aka 98
Liang-chih Shang Kuan
Aaron Huang
Dody Ismoyo
Venus Lui
Robert Myers
Taweetham Limpanuparb
Athikhun Suwannakhan
Biyanto Rebin
Kartika Sari Rebin

(The names of a couple more people present there might be missing here...)

Introduction on regional status of each community

China user group

User group since 2014
- This structure gets less government restriction than a legal entity
Chinese Wikipedia is the main target, involving mainland Chinese

Wikimedia Taiwan (WMTW) chapter

speaker: Aaron
Chapter since 2007, hosted one of the two Wikimanias in Asia, then exhausted; revived in 2011
Focused to zh-TW Wikipedia
Translation project of medical contents, recently a talk by James Heilman; getting attention from government bureau

Discussion

Dody Ismoyo writes a lot about Taiwan in English Wikipedia. But he found out the translation of the Chinese geographical names is confusing.
- Liang reply it's rather a complicated question, maybe in the future we can use the conversion system between zh-TW and zh-CN to English Wikipedia?

PhWiKi community

Officilal user group since June 2015, local community since 2012
Focused to BCL.wikipedia.org and Incubator projects of some languages in Philippines (BTO)
Editathon, Wiki Takes City, TV station, collaborating with other communities. Textbook uses Wikipedia contents.
Challenges: new editor recruitment and following up events; most of the above has time gaps, one year in between.

Japanese Community

Tokyo Community (Tokyo User Group)
Large online community and small offline community (One of top 10 wikipedia in terms of number of users). None of the Wikipedia Japan usergroups is being recorgnised by the WMF.
Tokyo user group has 5-6 members
Wikipedia Town is one of the most prominent (editathon series) --> Go around the town, taking pictures, and go back to library to edit.
Main concern : sustainability of the projects because it heavily depends on the library.
2009 and 2013 : Country-wide Wikimedia conference
WMAU has many GLAM collaborations and one of the way is by making librarian as a Wikipedian.

S. Korean community

Eun-Ae Gu - director of the South Korea Wikimedia user group
Local community started in 2008 after Jimmy Wales gave talk in S Korea
Focused to Korean Wikipedia (English and other languages are not widely spoken in S. Korea)
Recent attention to AI lead to interest to Wikidata and Wikipedia. (because of AlphaGo)
- Local companies get interested in the use of Wikidata and Wikipedia for AI
- Software development in AI in S. Korea is acitve
Challenge - Competing online commercial encyclopedia (Daum) is more popular than Wikipedia
- Awareness to the Wikimedia projects and Creative Commons is an issue
(Plans to ?)collaborate with with government, but fears censorship

Community in Malaysia

Dody Ismoyo - personally created 1600+ articles
An early stage community - no organization existing (user group or chpapter)
- Probably the first meeting was in 2015 on Skype, first in-person one was in May 2016.
Main focus is en.wikipedia and ms.wikipedia
- ms.wikipedia has little quality standards yet; trying to establish policies
- No other patrollers from the region who monitor project

Discussion

Q - how many readers does ms.wikipedia have? You might need to select and allocate limite resources to where most cost-effective. A - Seeking to make it a more reliable project and then readers will follow. Cautious against simply following readers interest. (e.g. only paying attention to breaking news and celebrities)

Wikimedia Indonesia (WMID) chapter

establishedin 2007-2008
2 languages
many ongoing digitization projects involving museums; libraries and magazines
challenges: overwhelmed by too many projects; funding and staff spread thinly
monthly wiki training; Google training

Discussion Q - when translating articles between languages, Indonesian naming of certain places can be confusing - transliteration doesn't seem to be standardized. (e.g. Kalimantan) A. diversity

Wikimedia Australia (WMAU) chapter

established in 2007-2008
Wiki Loves Monuments
Supporting 300+ indigenous languages in the country
Katherine Maher is coming for Knowledge Week to Melbourne
Challenges: similar to Japan; branching to user groups in different parts of Australia under one chapter8
- This may be a better transition than splitting into multiple chapters though.

Discussion

Q Government partnerships? - They are quiet but all right. Trying to work with them
Q Wikimedian organization in New Zealand? - Long time not heard. Due to Government regulation, WMAU cannot be involved.

Wikimedians in Thailand Usergroup (WMTH)

Wiki Loves monuments, Wiki loves Earth, and (possibly) science photo competition
Taweetham - organizing lectures with Wikipedia assignments
Government intervention is an issue - asked to revise articles in 2006
Wiki Loves Monuments
Education program for survivors
Athikhun - started involved after Taweetham's class in 2015, now working as campus voluteer for the education program, monotoring student's contribution
Working on so called "academic success" of Wikipedia, research projects, e.g., students' outcomes from the education program, suitability of Wikipedia articles for medical education
Seeking collaborations with experts/specialists to evaluate and improve the content of Wikipedia articles
Seeking new partnerships with local organizations
Challenges - relationships with government; needs to keep distance and good relationships at the same time. Contacted by Ministry of Digital Economy and Society

General comments and feedback on the intro

Asia does a lot of things but is quiet about it; should talk about it like Europe does
Immigrants between countries in the region; they can be a catalyst for international collaboration in the region
Should seek an ASEAN-wide collaboration similar to Europe and Ibercoop
Maybe Asia's regional usergroup? Doesn't have to have recognition from AffCom

ESEA regional meeting (2018)

Why? To break barriers of cultures and languages, and then to learn from each other
Mostly invitational

WMID is preparing to be the host; plan is to hold it in Feb 2018
We need to form a core committee
Planning to form (sub)committees - logistics, registration, scholarships, program design
Topics of the program- learning, capacity building, collaboration (e.g. WIkipedia Asian Month, membership swaps)

Discussion

Is it going to be like Wikimania or WMCON? Invitation only?
- Focused to capacity building and learning about each other's organization; building a new community leader

2017-04-02

participants:

WMID: Biyanto
WMTW: Liang & Aaron
WMAU
PHWiki irvin & ramon
China User Group
Japanese community
(Thailand)
(Malaysia)
(WMF)

Agenda:

Wikipedia Asian Month
Introduction of Google Non-profit - free GMail/Google Drive accounts for nonprofits - (G Suite, formerly called Google Apps)
1. techsoup.asia : used by Korea, Indonesia
Communication
1. Difference between newsletter from social media
2. Ask help from Ed Erhart
Conference

Newsletter, communication

Why newsletter? What's the popular communication channel?
- Keeping writing a Newsletter (long-form content) was heavy load to volunteers
- Social media updates are already done in many communities
  - Taiwan: https://www.facebook.com/WSOTK
  - Malaysia: https://enwp.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Malaysia https://www.facebook.com/groups/ms.wiki/
  - Japan: active Twitter and Facebook communities exist with different audience
Icon!!
- - Liang and Biyanto will make the Social Media first (FB and Twitter)
  - Rotation: The admin will be from each country and there is an admin who will be responsible to ask the community and to post every month
  - Level 1: Wikipedia facebook A photo with 3 sentences (WAM & regional meeting)
  - Level 2: (learning pattern) lesson learned, reflection (endorsement)
    - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns
  - Level 3: Event report on Wikimedia blog - Translation to all asian-pacific languages

AU: 2009 they have newsletter, but no human resource to continue. GLAM newsletter / Education Newsletter

Another blog post for call for participation to the event?

JA: for the call for participation, it might be better to use mailing lists and maybe CentralNotice. leave the Wikimedia blog for the post-event report

Conference

Comittee commnication channel -
- committee mailing list - 2 weeks later we set up
- telegram & facebook, irc channel -
- for work flow - phabricator.wikimedia.org
  - example to follow - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2286/

Round 3 2017 schedule https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference (Open call: 5 September – 1 October, see the link for more)