Grants:APG/Proposals/2019-2020 round 2/Wikimedia Indonesia/Progress report form
Introduction
Wikimedia Indonesia (WMID) is the biggest chapter in the ESEAP region. We develop and support the local communities to ensure that they feel happy to be part of our nationwide community. WMID always try to find new opportunities from encouraging GLAM institution to join free knowledge movements to collaborating with educational institution to increase their student digital literacy. Our partners are coming from various background, government institution, private entity, even small community. We value them and always regard them as an equal partners as we understand we cannot work together without them. We are also good at any competition event, we have been managed different kinds and types of competition, ranging from photo competition to writing competition, small or big event, and collaborative or internally funded activities.
Indonesian Community: Beyond words and distances
The pandemic has forced our communities to shift from fun and cheerful offline activities into boring online activities. This reason make us, Wikimedia Indonesia, to extend our help to our precious community members beyond words and distances. We understand that we must support each other during this difficult time. However, we realized that we cannot fix the situation only by expressing our sympathy to each other through words. For that reason, we attempt to give our support through some real actions, by mailing wellness kits to our community members. The kits contained several important items such as vitamins, sanitized wet wipes, hand sanitizers, and facial masks.
We are aware that our community members’ well-beings are important. When we received some bad news that our community members got infected by COVID-19, we extended our gratitude and support to them by mailing them the wellness kits. We did not only mail the kits to the members who got infected by COVID-19, but we also mailed them to those who had been actively joining, helping, and contributing to our activities in spite of all the limitations.
Regardless of the background differences (regions, languages, ages, professions, etc.) our communities have become one big family united by the collaborations on Wikimedia projects. Supporting as well as showing gratitude to each other is what a family does.
Metrics and results overview
editThis section provides metrics that will be used to measure each program's achievements conducted by Wikimedia Indonesia under this grant
- Participants: The number of people who attend your events, programs or activities, either in person or virtually. This definition does not include people organizing activities, social media followers, donors, or others not participating directly.
- Newly registered: The number of participants that create new accounts on a Wikimedia project. These include users who register up to two weeks before the start of the event.
- Content pages: A content page is an article on Wikipedia, an item on Wikidata, a content page on Wikisource, an entry on Wiktionary, and a media file on Commons, etc. This metric captures the total number of content pages created or improved across all Wikimedia projects.
- Active collaborations: the number of organisation or partners which actively collaborate at least 2 events during the grant period.
- Active community member: the number of active community member who spend their time to attend, organize or participate in the events, program, or activities, either in person or virtually with minimum 3 participation. This definition does not include social media followers, donors, or others not participating directly.
Metrics | Goals | Achieved outcome | Status | Explanation | ||||
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1. number of total participants | 4,891 | 2,153 |
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On track | ||||
2. number of newly registered users | 2,685 | 204 |
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Newly registered users usually come from offline activities, this is the reason why the metrics is very low | ||||
3. number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects | 26,586 | 35,714 |
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Higher than target because we maximised our online community activities | ||||
4. Active collaborations | 15 | 13 |
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On track | ||||
5. Active community members | 70 | 76 |
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Higher than target. We managed to attract more active contributors to join our activities |
Telling your program stories – all programs
editCommunity Development and Support
editWhile the pandemic does not show any sign of slowing, its impact on Wikimedia communities in Indonesia shows a slight change in attitude towards contributing to Wikimedia projects. The new normal for the Indonesian communities means their activities are limited to online activities. The actual meetups that were normal and cheerful to the communities have to adapt to the situation, thus shifting to online meetups. However, that unavoided need for adaptation was felt by many of our volunteers to slowly disconnect them from the Wikimedia movement. More and more online meetups finally lead to a general perception that Wikimedia activities have become less interesting.
Wikimedia Indonesia can do nothing but adapt to the new normal. Some community programs possible to be turned online are carried out, e.g. Grants, while others deemed too difficult to turn online are shut down, e.g. WikiNusantara, a national conference. The past six months were also the time Wikimedia Indonesia explored social media as a way to connect with its followers. Some of them are known volunteers, and more are people interested in its regular posts. Language communities also manage their own social media. Wikimedia Indonesia keeps in touch with them to keep best practices on managing social media and hopefully could keep people connected to Wikimedia projects.
Grants
editWikimedia Indonesia has commenced grants for online activities since APG19. The APG20 continues the program that consists of an Internet package grants and a book grants. The former opens monthly while the latter opens bimonthly. Interest on these grants is quite high, possibly because of their simple procedure (register, get an announcement, and do the task if receiving the grants) and an achievable goal (create a 30.000-byte edit on chosen Wikimedia projects). About 20 people receive the Internet package grants each month and less than 5 people receive the book grants every two months. The lower number of people receiving book grants is in line with the number of people registering for the grants. The book grants may not be interesting to many since it requires grantees to read the book first and then edit articles related to the book and put the book as their reference, obviously requiring more skills and time than editing 30.000 bytes without digesting a book first.
Despite some people feeling disconnected, others get more connected. Originated from social media invitation posts facilitated by Wikimedia Indonesia, three language communities emerge i.e. Madurese, Nias, and Toba. Beside being assisted by Wikimedia Indonesia, these communities have proven active and solid on Wikimedia Incubator, even though the members have never met in person since May 2020. Their aim was to get Wikimedia projects in their language released as soon as possible. By the end of 2020, Madurese Wikipedia, Nias Wikipedia, Nias Wiktionary were approved by the Language Committee, while Toba Wikipedia is getting closer to approval. In the time of writing this, Madurese Wikipedia, Nias Wikipedia, and Nias Wiktionary have already been released and can be accessed using their own domains. These new Wikimedia projects joined our family of Wikimedia projects in Indonesian languages.
The above initiatives let the contributors unfold the linguistic situation that their languages face. In the case of Nias where an ongoing shift to the Indonesian language occurs to its speaker, a contributor, Slaia considers that the existence of the two Wikimedia projects may help develop and preserve the language. He aligns the Nias Wikipedia and Wiktionary to be part of his five-year vision to the development of the Nias language in this Digital Age.
Secara kebetulan saya melihat potensi menggunakan Wikipedia dan Wiktionary untuk mengembangkan dan melestarikan bahasa Nias, mendokumentasikan bukan hanya kosa kata melainkan budaya dan sejarahnya. Wikipedia Nias telah dibentuk sejak 2012 tetapi masih minim konten, saya lalu memulai proyek Wiktionary Nias, yang merupakan langkah pertama mensuplai kosa kata yang akan dipakai dalam penulisan artikel di Wikipedia. |
By chance, I saw a potential in making use of Wikipedia and Wiktionary to develop and preserve the Nias language, by documenting not only words but also its culture and history. The Nias Wikipedia has been developed since 2012, but the amount of contents were low, so I started the Nias Wiktionary as a first step to supply words for writing articles in the Nias Wikipedia. |
—Slaia, a Nias contributor |
Meanwhile, a different experience came from a Madurese contributor, Boesenbergia. In his knowledge, Madurese may be far from endangerment, but most of its native speakers are not familiar with the language being written. The language has encountered several orthographic reforms, yet the current orthography is deemed an outlier.
Semoga menjadi ikhtiar untuk mengakrabkan bahasa dan budaya Madura dengan bahasa tulisan. Jangan sampai orang Madura berpengetahuan tapi pelit untuk membagi pengetahuan lewat Wikipedia. |
I hope the Madurese Wikipedia becomes an initiative to get the Madurese people familiar with their language and culture being written. Any knowledgeable Madurese must not be parsimonious in sharing knowledge through Wikipedia. |
—Boesenbergia, a Madurese contributor |
Community Meeting
editWikimedia Indonesia still facilitates, encourages, and supports local communities to hold monthly meetings. However, it is limited to only online meetings. Five communities regularly hold online meetings with attendance less than 10 people for each community. The five communities that regularly hold a monthly meeting are city-based communities such as Bandung, Denpasar, Jakarta, Padang, and Yogyakarta. Language-based communities may have carried out their own online meetings, but are not under Wikimedia Indonesia’s facilitation. Some of language communities are new, i.e. Madurese, Mandailing, Nias, and Toba communities, while the rest are Acehnese, Banjarese, Buginese, and Gorontalo communities.
Social media can be a platform to keep people connected. Wikimedia Indonesia and some language communities fully use of social media to connect with people and to increase awareness about Wikimedia projects. In our perception, social media is a platform to distribute knowledge and at the same time to invite people to take part in Wikimedia projects. Our best practices are creating open-licensed infographics and linking them to Wikimedia projects. Some visually appealing infographics are proven to reach numerous people on social media. Apart from helping people aware of Wikimedia projects, the infographics can be reused by uploading them to Wikimedia Commons.
There are three social media where Wikimedia Indonesia posts the infographics: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Language communities manage varying numbers of social media, but most of them also manage the three above.
Lesson learned
editThere three lessons that could be learned for future implementations. First, keeping the grants simple. The current Internet package grants and book grants are deemed simple. Especially the book grants, it is reasonable that it shows less interest since it requires people to have more skills. Second, considering social media as an extension to spread knowledge in the form of open infographics and to invite people to volunteer, considering that the online population in Indonesia is quite high. According to the World Bank, 48% of Indonesian population was using the Internet in 2019. Third, mapping the needs of communities during the new normal. Some volunteers that were familiar with actual meetups may feel disconnected in the time of physical distancing, while volunteers that emerge online during this pandemic may feel connected instead.
Moreover, redefining community is also necessary since at the moment there are city-based and language-based communities. Detailing what Wikimedia Indonesia can do maybe a prerequisite before handing over support to the communities. Meanwhile, ensuring the communities as partners, not subordinates, is a good starting point in the time of growing numbers of local communities.
Education
editThe pandemic situation has forced the Education Team of Wikimedia Indonesia to shift from offline activities to online activities. It has been a challenging responsibility for the Education Team. However, we realized that the shift from the offline to online activities must take place because we still have growing communities to be supported, as well as the duty to spread free knowledge, even during the unfortunate circumstances. We see this as the opportunity for us to grow and to learn in developing and organizing online activities which we believe will be beneficial in the long run.
Online Meet-up
editTo facilitate the contributors to greet and have a discussion with one another in the middle of this pandemic, we still organized the meet-up for the contributors of the Wikimedia projects. The online meetup consisted of a series of meet-up activities that were held once in a month, in the second week of every month. The participants that registered and came to join the meet-ups usually did not exceed 20 people.
In some meet-up sessions that we had, we did not only edit on Wikipedia but we also introduced Indonesian Wikibooks to the participants and urged them to write on Wikibooks. The participants were enthusiastic with this idea, because it was a different new experience for them.
The first time we organized the online meet-up, the sessions were held every week in a month and lasted for 3 hours per meeting. However, as the time passed we felt that the interval between each meeting was too short while also the duration of the meetings were too long. Consequently, the participants tend to feel bored due to the frequent and long meet-up sessions. To overcome this, we decided to shorten the duration of the meet up sessions, and we only held the meet-ups once every month.
The online meet-up is actually a great activity to do. The usual (offline) meet-ups that we had were usually only centered around particular communities who held the meet-ups, but with the online meet-ups, many more contributors who live in different parts of Indonesia could join the editing activities as well as greeting other contributors who joined the meet-up sessions. So we did get to see many new faces joining the online meet-ups which was very refreshing.
We also tried experimenting with the format of the meet-up sessions. From having all the participants in one big group during the session, until dividing the participants into groups in which they can be more engaged in the discussion. However, two of these formats have not yet been proven successful as a way to provide comfortable, enjoyable, yet effective sessions. Either the participants were too busy chatting with each other and forgot that they had to do some editing activities, or they did not even talk to each other, so the sessions became awkward and boring until the sessions ended. Until the middle of the term, we still have not been able to find a better way to organize this online meet-up so that they can be more enjoyable for the participants. We figured that this had been a very challenging issue for us to overcome.
Because the situation makes it impossible to create offline activities, we formulated several new formats for Wikilatih. Usage of these new formats is dependent on the targets and participants.
Online course
editOur most comprehensive training format. It’s also the most challenging for the participants because we offer certificates of completion if they manage to finish the course and meet the requirements. The duration of the online course is two weeks at first, and then we extended it to three weeks. In this format, we use Google Classroom for organizing WikiLatih where all the materials, for example, videos and supplementary documents, are available to participants that they can watch and read. This course consists of three units.
- Unit I. This unit mainly introduces the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects, Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia. Participants also learned how to sign up and create their user pages. At the end of this unit, participants are given the assignment to analyze the basic structure of an article in Wikipedia, e.g., references that are used in the article, images and its license, category, and writing styles.
- Unit II. This unit focuses on describing rules in Wikipedia, i.e., notability, reliable sources, encyclopedic tone, plagiarism and paraphrasing, and neutral point of view. At each point, there is an assignment to evaluate the understanding of participants. At the end of this section, there is a final task to analyze articles based on these rules.
- Unit III. This unit is a tutorial on how to write an article. Participants were introduced to the visual editor interface and shown about adding a reference, insert a link and category, etc. At the end of this course, participants must create a start class and a C-class article each.
There are four online class sessions between these units, explaining things that are not covered in the units, e.g., Creative Commons, user talk page, and Wikimedia community. Participants might pass the course if they got a score of 80% and above, join two of four online class sessions, and have 30 edits from articles other than their Unit III articles.
From three batches of the online course, the number of participants that passed the course varied. In the first batch, only 2 of 15 participants passed. We realized that we did not interact much with participants in the first batch. We tried to have more interaction in the second batch. The result was better than we expected, with 18 of 20 participants passing the course. In the third batch, however, just 9 of 18 participants passed.
There are several suggestions from participants. Participants felt if two weeks' duration is not enough to finish all of the tasks, and we extended the period for an extra week. We are also concerned with participants who have difficulties in writing an article. In the fourth online course, we changed the duration to three weeks. Participants also have difficulties finishing 30 edits from other articles. We decided to decrease the minimum edit from 30 edits to 20 edits in the fourth course. There are also some advice for the course material. We implemented some changes in the fourth course. For example, supplementary documents are merged into one file because it’s easier to download and read. Assignments in the class also changed to make question instructions clearer and have standardized assessments. There is a list of article examples to be created on Indonesian Wikipedia as an inspiration for participants.
After several changes implemented in the fourth batch, however, only 8 of 20 participants passed. Again, many of the participants' progress stalled in writing an article assignment.
The retention of participants after the course is still far from satisfactory. Only a few participants from these courses actively participated in the other program, e.g., online meet-ups or competitions. In the next semester, we will try a different approach to retaining our former participants. (Read: WikiSedaya)
Live (Incubator version)
editThis format is very similar to offline WikiLatih. We explained the basic rules in Wikipedia and additional information about Wikimedia Incubator to participants. There are differences between offline WIkiLatih and WikiLatih Live, for example, the medium we used and the duration of training. We’re using Zoom to deliver our training. We break the activity into two sessions, two hours each. In the first session, the tutor explained Wikipedia and Wikimedia Incubator. The tutor also showed a tutorial for creating an article. At the end of the first session, the participants must write an article in Incubator as their homework that is evaluated in the second session. The second session is an evaluation of the article and Q&A with the participants. At the end of the training session, there is a quiz. The winners of the quiz and the most active participants were rewarded with a voucher.
We organized the WikiLatih Live for several Incubator volunteers from Batak Toba, Nias, Mandailing, and Madurese. For the former three, we observed low retention of participants. The bad timing of training causes that. Initially, the training started at 15:30 and ended at 18.00 Western Indonesia Time (UTC+07:00), when most of the participants were still working and may not have joined the next session. In the Madurese Wikilatih Live, we changed the timing, began at 19:00, and finished at 21:00 Western Indonesia Time. As a result, most of the participants can join two sessions.
We evaluated several indicators of the tutors’ performance in each WikiLatih, for example, proficiency in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Incubator, skills in reading the participants’ mood, and timekeeping. Our main findings are that some of the tutors, mostly the first-timer, have not reached their best performance yet. The first-timer has difficulties in knowing the participant's mood. Thus the participants feel that they’re ignored. The tutors also struggled to keep the speech tempo consistent. We will address this problem in our next program, Mini WikiPelatih.
In the future, we will expand this format to smaller communities that have their own Wikipedia, e.g., Buginese, Banjar, Gorontalo communities.
Advanced
editAdvanced WikiLatih is targeted to contributors who finished previous WikiLatih or used to write an article in Wikipedia using Visual Editor but still not familiar with the advanced skills, e.g., source editing, templates, and image galleries. This WikiLatih lasted for 2 hours and was emphasized in practice. The participants would be guided to insert templates and editing in wikitext.
When we organized Advanced WikiLatih three times, we realized that not all of our volunteers have online presentation skills as good as offline presentations. Some of the tutors don’t know how to engage participants to be more active in online activities. As a result, the participants feel if the training was mundane and not all of the training materials can be delivered. However, when the tutors know how to give online presentations and courses, the participants can be more active in discussions and practices.
Mini WikiPelatih (Training of Trainers)
editMini WikiPelatih is our simplified version of the training of trainers. We scaled down the training covering presentation skills and administrative procedures within Wikimedia Indonesia, which are often encountered by first-time facilitators and other projects in Wikimedia Indonesia. The duration of this ToT is 4 hours and divided into two sessions. Mini WikiPelatih is an invitation-only event. We invite participants from small Wikimedia communities and beginner tutors, i.e., Buginese, Gorontalo, Banjar, Batak Toba, Nias, Mandailing, and Madurese communities.
Overall, the participants were satisfied with the training activity. The participants are given a chance to demonstrate their presentation skills, and we gave them feedback about their results. The participants also have a better understanding of administrative procedures. Two of the main issues in Mini WikiPelatih are an unstable internet connection and timekeeping of activity, so Mini WikiPelatih ended thirty minutes late than we scheduled.
Wiki Masuk Sekolah (WMS/Wiki Goes to the School)
editWe have not been able to conduct the WMS program this semester because WMS depends on offline teaching-learning activities, while every teaching-learning activity in Indonesia must be held online due to the pandemic. Apart from that, we do not have the permission to organize offline activities yet.
In this situation, a volunteer of ours arose an idea to seize the opportunity to try out our online program by collaborating with the universities for the WMS. However, after we had internally discussed the matter, we decided not to go further with the idea because we realized that we did not yet have a stable online program that we could offer to the universities.
From our observation during the first few months into the pandemic until now, many educational institutions still struggle very hard with the online teaching-learning activities that they must do. In that case, we think it will be difficult to collaborate with them for the WMS program if we ourselves do not have a solid and steady program that can be applied in the universities’ online teaching-learning activities.
We still are not able to project the possibility of implementing this program online while we still have not been able to do offline activities.
WikiGuidebook
editAfter releasing two versions (General version and Educator version) of WikiGuidebook in the last year’s program, and creating a short video version of the Guidebook, we have translated the Guidebook into 4 local languages. At first we planned to translate it to 3 local languages which were Sundanese, Javanese, and Minangkabau but in the process, one language was added which was Balinese and we now have 4 language variants of the Guidebook available.
The version that was translated to the 4 local languages was only the Educator version. We involved two community members from each language to translate the Guidebook. One person did the translation and another one did the proofreading process to ensure the quality of the translation.
Some people in Wikimedia Education also encouraged us to translate the Guidebook into English so that they would be more easily accessible by a broader audience and people in Wikimedia Education as a part of their learning materials. We excitedly accepted this idea and even if it is not our current main priority we will work on the translation slowly but sure.
Online Talk Show
editSince we started doing online activities during the pandemic situation, we have noticed that there was a slight drop in the volunteers’ enthusiasm to join our activities. Hence, we wanted to provide them with a breath of fresh air, by organizing an online talk show that they can enjoy from their smartphones, tablets, or laptops while lying down. Not only that they get to enjoy the show while relaxing, but at the same time, they also get to acquire new information regarding the particular topics that are discussed in the talk show.
The online talk show is called “Wikipedia:Warung Kopi” or loosely translated into "coffe shop" which was taken from “Wikipedia:Village Pump” namespace in Indonesian Wikipedia. This means that the online talk show will be the place where the invited contributors can share their ideas, their insights, or their contribution stories in Wikimedia projects, while the audiences are able to drop some questions that the contributors will answer at the end of the show. In determining the person that we would invite to the show, we distribute a form to be featured or to take part in the show which can be filled up by our volunteers, contributors, and community members.
The talk show is broadcasted online on YouTube every Friday once a month at 07.00-08.00 p.m UTC+7. We hope that by broadcasting the show on YouTube, this will reach broader audiences, not only those of our contributors but also other people out there who are interested in learning about Wikimedia projects. The recordings were then archived in Wikimedia Indonesia’s Youtube Channel.
The only difficulty that we had with arranging the talk show is finding the contributors who were willing to be on camera, and sharing their stories because there were not many people filled up the form that we shared. In that case, we needed to do a more personal approach by personally inviting several people to join the show.
We hope that in the next term more people will be willing to step up and take part in the online talk show.
Lesson learned & Next Steps
editThere are a lot of things that we have in mind for the next steps we take for the rest of the term. Many of these include things that need to be prepared in case that we have to go online for the rest of the term because of the pandemic.
Survey for contributors regarding Education programs
editDue to the drop of volunteers’ enthusiasm in joining our program, we decided to make a survey that we would distribute to our active volunteers to find out what had troubled them in joining our activities and what they expected our activities to be in the near future while we were still unable to hold any offline activities.
Even though we had distributed the survey to as volunteers as possible, there were not many of them who filled out the survey. There were less than 100 people who participated in the survey, therefore, we could not really get the expected results that we needed.
Some of the things that we obtained from the survey were the biggest impediment that hinders the volunteers from participating in our online programs, and what kind of online activities that they would expect to be held, the frequency, as well as the duration of the activities.
Most of the participants of the survey answered with “dealing with personal matters”, “having unstable internet connection”, and "lacking direct interaction and the sense of togetherness”. These three points are really important and do have a massive impact on our online activities that involve our volunteers. Other responses that were given by the volunteers were the interval between each activity or the frequency of the activities. Most of them answered this question with “twice a month”, which means only two activities in a month with the duration of 120 minutes or 2 hours at most per activity.
WikiSedaya (Mentoring for Wikipedia’s beginner users)
editIn next semester’s program, we will focus on retaining our relations with former participants of previous programs while actively seeking new volunteers. However, as we projected that our activities are still going online next year, it would be challenging to improve interaction and togetherness in our online activities.
To address this challenge, we have planned to introduce a new program, WikiSedaya. This program will combine editing Wikipedia activities and support groups where volunteers can share their problems outside of Wikipedia matters. In this program, five participants will be assembled into a group, where there will be a mentor that is also a veteran volunteer from the Wikimedia community. The participants will be given some tasks from simple editing (e.g., cleanup or adding links) to writing an article. This program will use the Welcoming Newcomer feature from The Growth Team of Wikimedia Foundation. The tasks are entirely optional. However, If participants manage to finish some of the tasks, they will be rewarded with our memorable souvenirs.
The mentee and mentor will communicate with each other via WhatsApp Group (or Telegram). In that group, they can ask questions related to Wikipedia or share their stories even if it's not related to Wikipedia. This group aims to substitute the feel of togetherness that is missing from the other online activities.
Once we are in a safer situation and are allowed to hold offline activities, we expect the mentees will join and be active in Wikimedia Community events. We also hope that some of the mentees will be our new mentors ready to teach Wikipedia editing to others. After all, we dream that community regeneration will run smoothly and Wikimedia Indonesia will have an enormous impact on Indonesia.
GLAM & Partnership
edit2020 is a challenging year for everyone. For us, we are required to adapt to a new habit, which we have never done before. For us, 2020 has changed all aspects of our activities, from offline to online. Nevertheless, we tried our best to deal with it, which in the end, we managed to invite a number of new GLAM institutions into the open ecosystem of Wikimedia projects.
In the second semester of 2020, a joint project called the Retas Budaya (Hack Your Culture Festival) succeeded in bringing us to meet new GLAM institutions in Indonesia. They were Bank Indonesia Museum, Pasifika Museum, Islamic Art Museum of Indonesia, Indonesian Heritage Museum, History of Java Museum, and Indonesian Visual Art Archive. They partially opened the access to their collections to Wikimedia Commons resulting the public can see and peek at what collection the institution has.
Moreover, the collaboration with Wikimedia Nederland continued to grow. In 2020, the WikiSejarah (WikiHistory) online campaign was announced, followed by a number of activities impacting Wikimedia projects, namely opening the access to photos from KITLV and Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen collections, releasing videos from the Open Images Project, structured data marathon, article writing challenge on the topic of Indonesian history, and #WikiSejarah WPWP Campaign.
To facilitate access to all collections of GLAM institutions in Indonesia that have collaborated with Wikimedia Indonesia on Wikimedia Commons, we created a website for users and visitors to visit these collections directly. The website not only serves as a portal, but also provides instructions on how to collaborate in gaining access to collections to Wikimedia Commons. Also, we update the contents in it with stories and best practices to provide more insight to the public, especially for GLAM institutions.
In the second semester of 2020, GLAM Indonesia has conducted a number of online activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic impact. Starting from July 2020, we continued to approach and re-approach new and existing GLAM institutions that have become Wikimedia Indonesia partners to invite them to participate in the Retas Budaya (Hack Your Culture) Festival, and collaborated with Wikimedia Nederland to organize an online campaign under the name “WikiSejarah” (WikiHistory).
Hack Your Culture Festival is an online event initiated by the Goethe-Institut Indonesien, in collaboration with a number of institutions in Indonesia, including Wikimedia Indonesia. The Hack Your Culture Festival invites GLAM institutions in Indonesia which have opened their collection access on the internet to participate in the event to see the creativity of participants of the event in remixing and making new creative works from collections opened by the GLAM institutions. In this event, eleven GLAM institutions participated. Five of them are existing Wikimedia Indonesia partners who have opened access to their collections, and six others are new participating GLAM institutions.
The Festival aimed to open up insights that the collections of museums and similar institutions can contribute in increasing public awareness of visiting museums. In Indonesia, particularly, only a few people are interested in visiting museums. Others are reluctant to do so because of the lack of attractions or exhibitions, and even the museum displays are considered old-fashioned, therefore visitors do not want to stay longer while visiting it. Thus, museums need to pay attention to these public perceptions in order to increase public interest in visiting museums, for example by "utilizing audio-visual media in the form of historical relics, archives or in the form of audio-visual displays of historical events such as historical documentaries". The Festival supports this effort by inviting the public to “decorate” the museum collection into a new, interesting work that can be used by the GLAM institution to invite more visitors.
The Festival lasted for three days, 6–8 November 2020, and there were dozens of online seminars and events for everyone to participate in. Most of the programs provided education material on steps that can be taken by the institutions to increase their visibility to the public, either offline or on the internet. With the participation of several speakers from Europe, the participants of the Festival can gain broader insights about the institutions there and the best practices that can be applied here in Indonesia.
Retas Budaya is an important project in helping GLAM institutions stay relevant in the digital transformation we face today. As one of our partners in this project, Wikimedia Indonesia has been doing excellent work in reaching out to GLAM institutions and guiding them step by step in order to ensure their cultural collections are available online. — Ivonne Kristiani, Project Coordinator of Goethe-Institut Indonesien
Apart from the Hack Your Culture Festival, we organized an online campaign under the name WikiSejarah (WikiHistory) in collaboration with Wikimedia Nederland (WMNL). Cooperation with WMNL has been going on since 2017, at which time we carried out the Indonesian History Month and transcriptions of Ki Hadjar Dewantara's letters. This year, we introduced a new model of collaboration that still benefits the Wikimedia project. Our activities include donating photos from KITLV and Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, releasing videos from the Open Images Project, structured data marathon, article writing challenge about Indonesian history, and the #WikiSejarah WPWP campaign.
WikiSejarah started from August to the end of November 2020. A total of 25 participants participated in the series of activities, 27 new articles on the Indonesian Wikipedia were written, and 195 pages of articles were edited in the #WikiSejarah WPWP Campaign.
From these two activities, we saw a greater potential to hold similar activities in the future for content enrichment that still fall within the scope of GLAM activities. In the first semester of 2021, we will focus on Wikisource by conducting workshops and online meetings with established communities in Indonesia. In addition, #1lib1ref will also be implemented for the first time this year by inviting librarians in Indonesia to participate, not in the aspect of digitization, but in opening access to the bibliographies of the institutions they work for. This allows GLAM Indonesia to expand itself in more activities.
Lesson learned
editThe COVID-19 pandemic has changed our policy for implementing our activities to be completely online. This is a difficult thing for us to do since we have to reconstruct the activities that have been planned in the initial activity proposal and needs to communicate with partner institutions that digitization activities must be postponed until further information is available.
We have undertaken a number of online activities and considered them successful, but we have found a number of things that we can take as lessons. First, GLAM Indonesia's offline activities cannot be completely carried out online. The digitization process that takes place at the GLAM institution, for example, cannot be replaced by online activities. The presence of volunteers who assist in scanning the text obliges them to visit the museum and carry out their activities there. Until now, all digitization activities have been postponed for nearly 10 months and resulted in the decreasing achievement of Indonesia's GLAM metrics. Although there were supporting activities, only a few contributions were made.
Second, in conducting the Wikisource proofread-a-thon in September 2020, we received some feedback from the participants. Some participants said that there were incomplete book pages which resulted in incomplete text of the book shown in the Index page. Also, there were participants who did not understand the reading-test process which prevented them from participating in activities and the lack of documentation on using Wikisource templates, including and positioning images on the page. The latter gave us the initiative to create a video documentation about editing on Wikisource and upload it to Wikimedia Commons so that potential participants in similar activities can watch it in the future.
Similar to the proofread-a-thon, we also received feedback from participants in the Indonesian History Month 2.0 regarding the availability of articles on Wikipedia. Some of the participants found that the articles that the committee had determined already existed, thus opening the possibility of duplicate articles. This is a lesson for us as the organizer to keep in mind and prepare everything carefully for the success of similar events in the future.
Content Enrichment
editDuring the pandemic, Indonesian government instruct all of the schools and university activity becoming online. The online learning ecosystem is not really good. The students, usually get their knowledge via teaching-method, suddenly they need to keep up their lessons with additional materials. Sadly, the good materials in the internet are hard to access either by paywall or language barier. This is the main reason why Wikimedia Indonesia push forward the new initiative to increase quality and quantity of primary and secondary school topics in Indonesian Wikipedia.
Writing competition
editCovid-19 pandemic brought up a new inspiration for us in designing a writing competition this year. It’s been a long time since we realized that most of Indonesian Wikipedia readers are students. The fact that these students were not able to attend school due to the pandemic restrictions for the last 9 months had encouraged us to help them get free-learning resources through Wikipedia.
With the name Wiki Jelajah 2.0, we designed a competition that includes various topics each month. The topics were derived from the subjects that were taught in primary and secondary schools in Indonesia. Fourteen subjects became our target in this competition. They are Mathematics, History, Anthropology, Chemistry, Physics, Economy, Accounting, Sociology, Biology, Indonesian Language and Literature, Geography, Civics, Arts, and Physical Education.
We also changed the scoring system. Unlike the previous writing competition that used missions which were then leveled-up by creating new articles, Wiki Jelajah 2.0 used a points system in which the participants could choose to improve existing articles instead. Hence, considering there are many important articles without references in Indonesian Wikipedia, the new scoring system can be said to be revolutionary. Until the end of November 2020, 29 participants have participated in the competition, improving more than 950 articles in Indonesian Wikipedia.
Saya berpartisipasi untuk mengisi waktu luang sekaligus mendayagunakan koleksi buku elektronik sebagai bahan kompetisi. Selain itu, saya juga memperbanyak pengalaman dalam hal tulis-menulis dan menambah wawasan keilmuan di berbagai bidang ilmu pengetahuan. |
I participated in this event to spend my leisure time, at the same time I used extensively my e-book collections to support me during the competition. Moreover, I also got writing experience and improved my scientific knowledge in various fields. |
—JumadilM, a competition participant who managed to get the most point, he edited, contributed, and improved 145 articles of Indonesian schools subjects. |
Lesson learned and next step
editProcess of searching good-quality references and put them into articles are the main problem for most of the participants. Many participants used references from online websites which are generally worse written than books or journals. Moreover, science topics materials with deeper and comprehensive information are mostly available in English only, which resulted in some important and difficult articles not being chosen by the participants.
For this competiton, we still gave the same points to all kinds of references as long as they are reliable, but in the next competition, we plan to give different points based on the references quality.
Wiki Jelajah 2.0 will be completed at the end of January 2021, but that does not mean our competition activities will end. Starting from January, we will have a new monthly photo competition, named WikiKaleidoskop. The competition will take place throughout 2021 with a different theme each month.
The competition format of WikiKaleidoskop is also a relatively new thing for us, because for the first time we create a photo competition that will run continuously for a year.
Continuing our mission with a limitation that we can no longer hold offline events has been challenging for us particularly with offline events being where we previously have been gaining our number of participants the most. In place of that, we focused on online events which consisted of workshops, a webinar, and datathons. The latter were new for us and we were able to gain more contributions compared to the other type of online events despite still not being able to be on par with ourselves in the previous year in terms of numbers. However, in all events we managed to get new participants and contributors and get the current contributors in the Indonesian Wikimedia community to be familiar with Wikidata.
We also realized that parts of our current active volunteers and contributors who have been very active on other programs actually have very limited knowledge on Wikidata and at the same time they show limited interest. Despite that, in several of our online events, the support of other community members has been very welcoming and enthusiastic and we perceive that the Wikidata community in Indonesia is budding. As we believe that our communities are at the core of our movement, garnering their interest is vital. This therefore will be fundamental to our future plans.
Activities
editIn total we held five workshops, two datathons (one of which extended into the first week of 2021), and one webinar. Of the five workshops, two were for new contributors, one was for current contributors, one was with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Indonesia (HOI), and one was for the WikiCite WikiLontar grantees from Bali. All of the workshops were held online and with a duration of around 3 hours, shorter than our usual offline workshops of minimum 4 hours. Training for new and current contributors was announced via social media. A lot of people registered quickly and we were exceeding our participant limit less than a day since we opened. However, not all of the registrants replied to our confirmation email and when the event day arrived, not all of the people showed up and some people also quitted halfway into the training. Not all of the participants who were present did their tasked training material. This is also a disadvantage of holding an online-only training. We could not give support directly to each individual participant like we always did on offline training where we could monitor and give direct assistance on what the participants were working on. This, however, was different for our last two workshops with HOI and WikiCite grantees where the participants were following the material and tasks that were given to them. This might be because the participants in those two workshops held some knowledge or interest on Wikidata or open data beforehand compared with the participants on some of the workshops before. Despite these shortcomings, the online workshops have enabled us to reach farther in terms of our contributors’ geography. We had our participants from outside the regional community, we received our first Wikidata participant from the easternmost province of Papua, and some other participants were coming from the recent Banjar user community in South Kalimantan that we were meant to train but was cancelled by the pandemic in the last semester.
We also held a new event format, the datathons, which was once in October and once in the week of the new year. We considered holding these as we have limited experience on the type of events we could have online but we knew datathons had ever been held elsewhere before. The first datathon was our part in celebrating Wikidata’s 8th birthday. This was also the first online meet-up with our volunteers and contributors to specifically discuss Wikidata and each participant expressed their hopes for the Wikidata community. The first datathon was primarily to add external identifiers on Wikidata on items about Indonesia. Despite gathering the most contribution compared to the workshops, some were eventually dismissed because several participants were recipients of our Internet data plan grant and therefore we did not count their edits toward the Wikidata program. We held another round of datathon on the week of the new year (three last days of December and three days January) and we gathered even more contributions from the community by the time it finished.
Our one webinar was held in August leading up to the “Retas Budaya” culture hack event in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Indonesien during which we presented a webinar about general introduction to Wikidata, cultural data in Wikidata, how it can be connected to other cultural databases and its examples, and the imports of cultural information from Wikipedia to Wikidata. Parts of the participants were coming from GLAM institutions who were also partnering with us and Goethe-Institut for the event.
The Wikimedia community in Indonesia has vibrant diversity and activities that were cut short by the global events in 2020. When we move events that were usually held offline into online, we had an aspiration that parts of the community who had been active in other projects would also have interest in Wikidata. We have been underprepared that the communities actually needed more of our assistance and despite their enthusiasm in some events, not all of the community members participated. Most of our recurrent participants were from the community in West Sumatra, South Kalimantan, and Bali and only a few were from other regions. In regards to this, we spoke with some contributors and we received inputs regarding our material, how we conducted the training, and from the beginning we announced our events.
Lesson learned
editWith the beginning of the new year, we planned to engage and enlarge our community more with online activities, competitions, and workshops. We task ourselves for more training materials on Wikidata which are easy for the community to follow. The disadvantage of online training may be mitigated with a special session on the meeting platforms where trainers can check each participants’ works and opening the enrollment period longer than before. Online events enable us to gather participants from new communities and also contributors outside of the community. Meanwhile, the datathon format perhaps has become the most engaging and we plan to hold several in the future. We also have set up a social media account for the Indonesian Wikidata community in order to hopefully further our reach and our campaign.
Continuing from the previous year's project, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in annotation activities for schools in Yogyakarta this year that have not yet been implemented. Therefore, this semester, we are focusing on online work such as collecting training data for annotations, improving annotation software, developing transliteration, and integrating the Javanese OCR API with Wikisource.
Activities
edit- Training data collection for annotations
- Due to the change in the segmentation method from the previous year (Connected Components) to the Projection Profile, we did a re-scan of the training data to be used in the OCR machine. The scan was carried out of 62 pages of the Javanese script, which resulted in 3192 new script segments. This new segment has been integrated with annotation software.
- Annotation software improvements
- Bugs that previously appeared in annotation software, mainly bugs when saving corrections and bugs for details of annotation results, have been fixed so that the software can be used.
- Transliteration development
- This year, the transliteration development process is at the stage of refining the syllabification program, so that later word predictions can run well. This refinement of the syllabification is carried out for the suffix 'ipun' and 'aken', the suffix 'an', and the suffix 'wan'. The syllable decapitation in this transliteration project is based on the Javanese script writing system. The output of this syllabification program is used as the basis for statistical calculations of all syllables in the corpus document.
- OCR API integration with Wikisource
- Problems with OCR API integration that need to be addressed this year were (1) receiving Binary Large Object (BLOB) data from Wikisource which must be converted into an image in the API, (2) the return format which is still in JSON must be converted to Unicode. Currently, these two things have been completed. Wikisource users can install this script on their user page so that OCR devices can be used on Wikisource.
- Webinar
- In December 2020, we conducted a live talk show about Javanese scripts OCR project on Wikimedia Indonesia YouTube channel. Unexpectedly, the public's enthusiasm in welcoming this project was quite high, which we observed based on the number of views, comments, and questions during the event. Participants were very interested in the segmentation process carried out on the OCR machine.
Lesson learned
edit- Annotation process
- Due to the pandemic, the annotation process that was supposed to be held this semester will finally be carried out in the next semester. For annotations, we decided to change the method, from crowdsourcing into recruiting team members consisting of expert Javanese speakers, so that the annotation results can be directly used as machine training data.
- Image quality and interpolation at Commons
- We held discussions with the GLAM division regarding the quality of the Javanese script scans quality on Wikimedia Commons, and we realized that the quality of the scans was mostly not ideal enough for machine detection. Fortunately, we realized that the ImageMagick used in Commons allows interpolation and enlargement of the scan dimensions simply by changing the URL of the image. For the next steps, we will integrate this URL manipulation process into our API.
- User manual
- Through discussions at Phabricator, we realized that we need to make a guide so that other people can use the OCR tools. Therefore, we will create a project page that explains about the Trawaca project, how to install the OCR API scripts to Wikisource user, and additional layers that will inform the user that only the BLOB from Wikisource will be sent to the Trawaca machine hosted on trawaca.id.
Financial report
editRevenues received during this six-month period
editFor this round, WMID requests the grants amount in USD, it's different than previous year to avoid the volatile currency exchange.
On 23 June 2020, WMF approved WMID grants amount of USD 328,397
Note
edit- S1 is per 31 December 2020
- S2 is per 30 June 2021
Another format
editRevenue Source | Currency | Anticipated | S1 | S2 | Cummulative | Explanation of variances from plan |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
FDC APG Grant | IDR | 328,397 | 191,550 | 191,550 | Initially, our proposal budget was USD 355,162, but because of the pandemic and after consulted to WMF Grants Team, we decreased our budget and assumed that on 1st October 2020 the situation would be normal. |
Spending during this six-month period
editExpense | Currency | Budgeted | S1 | S2 | Cummulative | Percentage spent to date | Explanation of variances from plan |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Office and admin support | USD | 40,743 | 12,985 | 27,758 | 31.87% | ||
Salary | USD | 137,698 | 58,931 | 78,767 | 42.80% | ||
Community Development | USD | 17,003 | 647 | 16,356 | 3.81% | Pandemic effect, so we cannot do travel, since travel expense is our biggest expense for most of programs | |
Community Support | USD | 33,848 | 1,945 | 31,903 | 5.75% | Pandemic effect, so we cannot do travel, since travel expense is our biggest expense for most of programs | |
Education | USD | 38,419 | 6,663 | 31,756 | 17.34% | Pandemic effect, so we cannot do travel, since travel expense is our biggest expense for most of programs | |
GLAM | USD | 23,401 | 1,224 | 22,177 | 5.23% | Pandemic effect, so we cannot do travel, since travel expense is our biggest expense for most of programs | |
Wikidata | USD | 7,273 | 41 | 7,232 | 0.56% | Pandemic effect, so we cannot do travel, since travel expense is our biggest expense for most of programs | |
Javanese OCR | USD | 4,518 | 19 | 4,499 | 0.43% | Pandemic effect, so we cannot do travel, since travel expense is our biggest expense for most of programs | |
Competition | USD | 9,394 | 1,342 | 8,052 | 14.28% | Pandemic effect, so we cannot do travel, since travel expense is our biggest expense for most of programs | |
Program Support | USD | 16,100 | 2,598 | 13,502 | 16.14% | ||
Total | USD | 328,397 | 86,396 | 242,001 | 26.31% | We project that we will spend maximum 80% of requested budget until end of the grant term. |
Compliance
editIs your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?
editAs required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- Yes
Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- Yes
Signature
edit- Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.
- Biyanto Rebin (WMID) (talk) 07:52, 31 January 2021 (UTC)