Wikimedia Indonesia and the Indonesian community: Knowledge Equity Calendar

December 5

For us working on the Indonesian Wikimedia projects, Knowledge Equity means you can share your knowledge in your mother language without being afraid of any restrictions. It also is about getting the same opportunities to access and being able to share knowledge like the privileged world languages (e.g. English or Mandarin) in your own native language. 

We, at Wikimedia Indonesia, are working to open the access and to increase the opportunities and participation possibilities for local language speakers to contribute to Wikimedia projects. We encouraged people to write and share their knowledge in their local languages. In Indonesia, we have more than 700 languages, yet only 12 of them have their own Wikipedia. Last year, we launched Gorontalo Wikipedia, this year Balinese Wikipedia, and Minangkabau Wiktionary. We are also working with a lot of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) partners to open their resources and make them benefit from the Wikimedian community as well as a broader public audience. By uploading the digital version of their collections and archives to Wikimedia databases like WikiCommons, we support the cultural heritage by making it accessible for a large public. With the aid of the community, we are providing the technical and structural framework for artworks or other treasures that might otherwise stay hidden.

Our main challenge was that we didn’t have a lot of resources in our languages, especially from local languages speakers’ perspective. Most of the Indonesian people will learn about their own culture in another language and cultural perspective because most of the resources are only available in Indonesian, Dutch (because of colonization from before 1950), or even English. We are trying to invite more GLAM partners, including universities, to open their local language collections, so native speakers can learn about themselves and their heritage in their own language.

We combine the bottom-up approach from the Community and we support and foster the local communities. Now we have 5 very active offline communities in Padang, Yogyakarta, Bandung, Denpasar, and Jakarta, compared to 3 years ago, when we had zero. By strengthening the local community, we ensure that the broader Wikimedia community can get the maximum benefit out of this effort. Until 2030, we plan to encourage and invite more local communities to write articles in their own languages, to make sure the Knowledge Equity can be achieved by providing and sharing knowledge not only in big “world” languages but also for smaller language communities.