Wikimedia Conference 2017/ESEA Meeting

2017-03-31

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East and South East Asia + Australia meetup

2017-03-31, Wikimedia Conference in Berlin

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

Participants

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  • 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

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China user group

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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)

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  • 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

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  • 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)

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  • 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

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  • 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

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participants:

  1. WMID: Biyanto
  2. WMTW: Liang & Aaron
  3. WMAU
  4. PHWiki irvin & ramon
  5. China User Group
  6. Japanese community
  7. (Thailand)
  8. (Malaysia)
  9. (WMF)

Agenda:

  1. Wikipedia Asian Month
  2. 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
  3. Communication
    1. Difference between newsletter from social media
    2. Ask help from Ed Erhart
  4. Conference

Newsletter, communication

  • Why newsletter? What's the popular communication channel?
  • 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)
      • 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

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