Wikipedia Asian Month 2022/Media

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Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM) is an annual Wikipedia contest focused on the promotion of Asian content on various language-specific Wikipedias and other Wikimedia communities (Wikimedia movement). Each participating community runs a month-long online edit-a-thon every November on their language's Wikipedia to create new content or improve existing articles about Asian topics apart from their own country.

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Background

Wikipedia started in 2001(15 January) as an online encyclopedia and has grown to support more than 200 languages. There are millions of subjects you can read about on Wikipedia. Although when people referring Wikipedia, what they usually mean is English Wikipedia, most of Wikipedia contents were actually distributed across all different language editions. In the smaller editions of Wikipedia, there are only a handful of editors creating content for their Wikipedia edition. Despite being the largest and most populous continent (More than half of the world's population lives in Asia), Asian topics are largely underrepresented on the internet as well as on Wikipedia. Without being presented on the internet, Asia's rich culture and history are hard to be learned and known by the rest of the world. Wikipedia Asian Month can be seen as a cultural exchange across Wikipedia editions, exposing the editors to multiple perspectives across different nations and cultures.

Meanwhile, Most Asian languages Wikipedia projects and communities are relatively smaller compared to its large population base. There are 9 Wikipedia projects that have more than 5,000 active users, yet only 2 of them are Asian languages. Among 39 Wikimedia Chapters, only 7 of them are from Asia. Wikipedia Asian Month wishes to narrow these gaps. Supporting is essential for these communities to take more approaches to grow. To address this issue, Wikipedia Asian Month devotes itself to this supporter position for demands of community development, and promotes its participants to create content about Asian topics. For many Wikipedia projects, Wikipedia Asian Month is their only online event. By participating in the Asian Month, you are empowering the WAM team and make all these supporters possible and available to these communities.

Unlike some other Wikipedia events, Wikipedia Asian Month isn't paying most of its attention to outreach to new users, or highlight extraordinary active editor. Instead, we give most of our effort to praise the core forces of the Wikipedian communities, who has constantly contributed to Wikipedia for a long period of time by writing serval new articles every year, or by making a couple hundred edits once a while. By giving out an appreciation to them, it makes them feel connected and appreciated in the Wikimedia movement. This, in turn, may lead to the editors creating more content to Wikipedia and staying longer to edit Wikipedia of their language.

Asian Topics

Wikipedia Asian Month promotes its participants to create and improve Wikipedia content about Asian topics, which are underrepresented on most Wikipedia project. Since 2015, each participating local community runs an online Edit-a-thon every November, which promotes the creation or improvement of the Wikipedia content about Asia except their own country. The participating community is not limited to Asia.

6 Years of Wikipedia Asian Month

Wikipedia Asian Month is an annual Wikipedia contest. Over the last 5 years, Wikipedia Asian Month has achieved the following:

More than 63 Wikipedia language editions participated.
More than 2,900 Wikipedia editors took part.
More than 37,500 new, high-quality articles were created.
More than 13 Wikimedia affiliations took part in planning, execution, and post-event.
Postcards were sent to 44 countries/regions. (We will be sending Barnstars for the 2022 campaign)

How the Contest is Organised

The project is a one-month contest which happens between November 1st, UTC 00:00 to December 31, UTC 23:59, 2022. In the previous years, the contest lasted 1 month. The project will run across different language Wikipedia. However, there are partners that have volunteered to host specific actions (subcontest, upload events, communications, etc.) on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

Wikipedia Asian Month was created and developed, and is managed by the principals at Wikipedia Asian Month User Group, it is the official user group. Actions in each country are supported by the Wikimedia community in the form of Chapters, User groups and volunteers.

Wikipedia Asian Month is a contest. As part of the friendship and cultural exchange of the Wikipedia Asian Community, participants who create at least four articles will receive a special Wikipedia Asian Month Barnstars from the WAM Usergroup, other participating community can still send postcards after the contest closes. Where there are local partners, they can decide to organise (or not) judging and local prizes for their communities at their discretion. Please review the events page to see what is happening where.