WikiAdvocates/Programs

Wikipedia Birthday Meet-Up

Last January 15, we celebrated the 24th birthday of one of the world’s largest and most popular online encyclopedias. Since its creation in 2001, it has revolutionized the way users across the globe can access and share knowledge. Even before we became editors of Wikipedia, we had been active users of it during our student days. Our small gathering has also served as a space to remember the small beginnings of Wikipedia until this present time, where we are already involved in providing free access to the sum of all knowledge.

Over the years, Wikipedia was able to create 60 million articles in different languages, including our very own Central Bikol and Tagalog languages. We are also proud to be part of the more than 200,000 active editors who collaborate in improving and safeguarding information online.

As volunteers, we also celebrated our effort in making Wikipedia a tool for our education initiatives, providing free access to information through our local community learning hub, adding information during natural disasters during our WikiForHumanRights campaign participation, and giving voice to marginalized voices through our SheSaid and Art+Feminism campaigns.

In commemorating this milestone, our group will continue to invite people from diverse backgrounds and expertise to come together and help in building a shared resource that benefits not only our local community but also the entire Wikimedia community.

Bikol Wiktionary Birthday Meet-Up

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On January 12, 2025, volunteers of Wiki Advocates Philippines celebrated Bikol Wiksyunaryo's 4th anniversary out of incubator. Bikol Wiksyunaryo is the Central Bikol Wiktionary project developed through the Hatch-A-Wiki project in 2021. The goal of this meet-up is to reach the 8000th word in Bikol Wiksyunaryo. Other volunteers joined the editathon via remote participation. Bikol Wiksyunaryo has 8,016 entries made through actual human contributions.

During our development of this incubator project in 2019, we foresaw the advantage of having an accessible online dictionary for Central Bikol speakers and also for other language enthusiasts who will take an interest in our local language. There are numerous printed local dictionaries, but a digital version of it will provide easy access, and the possibility of collaborative work is higher.

During previous edit-a-thons, we have realized that language is indeed dynamic and other words may be at risk of being lost or unused in conversations, and one way to preserve it is through developing the Central Bikol Wiktionary project. Every year, we opted to add more vocabularies, provide interlinks to each entry, and add audio pronunciations as guides.

As we moved forward, we also planned to take language preservation initiatives to other Bikol languages, such as the Rinconada language, and conduct research on the Inagta Partido language with the help of Language Revitalization Toolkit of Wikitongues.

For the next phase of our program, we are currently cleaning up word entries and the interface as we are set to create the online Central Bikol Wiktionary application powered through Kiwix.