Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship edit-a-thon 5-11 February 2024

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An online editing week titled “Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship edit-a-thon I” was held from 5 to 11 February 2024. In this campaign, Wikimedians edited articles related to Japan and Turkey on Japanese Wikipedia and Turkish Wikipedia. This is one of the products of the Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship project.

Kurmanbek, CC BY-SA 4.0

Before the edit-a-thon

At Wikimania 2023 in Singapore, I became a friend with Caner (User:Kurmanbek) from Turkey. After the Wikimania, we established the Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship project and made our student Wikimedia clubs (Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda University Tokyo and Istanbul Bilgi University Wikipedia Student Club) sister organizations.

For our friendship project, we have held two edit-a-thons separately; Turkey-themed edit-a-thon in Japan (13 October 2023) and Japan-themed edit-a-thon in Turkey (30 November 2023), because 6 hours time lag between the two countries prevented simultaneous event. Both of them were fruitful, but of course we wanted to implement something more “collaborative.”

At an online meeting held on 20 January 2024, we tried to find a good way to collaborate and decided to hold an editing week like the Wikimedia Japan-Malaysia Friendship Editathon 15-21 October 2023.

Tools we used

I created MetaWiki [[Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship/Editathon 5-11 February 2024]] as a project page for the edit-a-thon, but Caner recommended to use MetaWiki [[Event:Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship edit-a-thon I]], which ties to outreach dashboard service, so we decided to use the latter. In addition, we constructed a scoring system.

Take photo and upload to Wikimedia Commons
about Japan and/or Türkiye
1 point
Add category1 point
Improve article2 point
Creating new article: 3 point (Linking each created article
to related articles +1 point)
3 point

Editing!

After the creation of the project page, we invited various Wikimedians to participate in the event on Wikimedia projects and SNS. Then, 20+ Wikimedians started editing Wikipedia articles about Japan or Turkey. I’m very pleased that one of the participants told me that this edt-a-thon broadened her eyes.

A Turkish poet Nigâr Hanım. User:Wadakuramon created an article of the poet on Japanese Wikipedia. (Public Domain)

After the edit-a-thon

After the edit-a-thon, I and Caner collected the results using outreach dashboard. Actually, it takes some time because we have to omit the articles which participants edited from 5 to 11 February not for the editing campaign. The dashboard traces all the edits of the participants and recognizes all the articles as the results of the event. So we have to pick up the articles related to Turkey or Japan.

Though outreach dashboard is a good tool to analyze and archive the editing events, I personally think it is not sure whether it suits larger and longer-term edit-a-thons.

Results

The articles edited for the event are listed up on MetaWiki [[Event:Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship edit-a-thon I]]. It varies a lot and all of the articles are interesting. Also, the scores of the participants are summarized on that page.

After the wrap up, we sent barnstars and certificates of participation to Wikimedians.

Barnstar for participants (Kurmanbek, CC BY-SA 4.0)

What’s next?

I and Caner plan to implement longer-term editathon week in April 2024. If you are interested in this collaboration, why don’t you join?

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