Preserving the Dead: My Experience with Documenting Gravestones for Wikipedia

Gravestones have been one of humanity’s best attempt at preserving the information of a deceased person. A pillar of stone, carved with the date and place of death, and sometimes their date of birth, honorific titles, and personal information, gives a glimpse about the long (or short) life of the person below. For Wikipedia biographies, gravestones are a valuable resource for biography article, as key information about a person could be taken from their gravestones.

The key role of gravestone becomes more important in countries such as Indonesia, where there is a lack of information about a notable person that has long gone from the public view. The lack of memorial websites available in the country complicates efforts to make a complete biography of a person. Due to this lack of information, some biographies had to be left uncompleted.

As a biography author in Wikipedia, my first contact with graves was when I accidentally stumbled upon a long-dead website owned by the Ministry of Social Affairs around 2022. The website contains the database of national heroes buried in various hero cemeteries in Indonesia, with the most complete being the database for figures buried in the Kalibata Heroes Cemetery. The website was preserved intact by the Internet Archive, allowing me to traverse the website for the titles and death dates of prominent Indonesian figures. I managed to complete some of the biographies I’ve written before that lacked important information. I later informed the existence of this website to several other colleagues of mine who were also editing biographies in Wikipedia. These websites proved itself to be useful for biographies, and within the next few months incomplete biographies had been completed with the aid of the archived database.

The next major step in my involvement with graves was WikiPatriot, which was inspired by the archived database. At a Wikimedia Jakarta community regular meeting in August 2023, I proposed a project to document the graves of the Kalibata Heroes Cemetery to commemorate the Heroes’ Day on 10 November. To assist the documentation process, the archived database would act as a starting point. The project also involved fixing biography articles of the figures buried in the cemetery. The project was approved, although I wasn’t too involved in the initial proposal, as my academic responsibilities got in the way. With full approval from Wikimedia Indonesia and permission from the social ministry, WikiPatriot was in full throttle. Prior to obtaining permission from the ministry, the preparation team arranged a list of names from the database to be documented and improved.

The documentation process was done in two days. I, along with several other members of the Wikimedia Jakarta community, went to the cemetery to document the graves. We were escorted around the cemetery with a buggy driven by a cemetery’s staff. During the process, I often stopped by for a while on the gravestone, reading the details before documenting it. I also documented several unlisted graves, as I believe some of the graves which were unlisted were noteworthy enough to be made as an article. We finished the documentation at around three in the afternoon on the first day. The team held a second round of documentations on the next day, which I wasn’t able to join due to other responsibilities. During these two days, we documented around 200 gravestones, with a total of 1,236 photo files.

The next step after documentation was to upload and catalogize the files. Upon the successful completion of the task, we began editing the figure’s Wikipedia articles and its structured data on Wikidata. We did several rounds of editathon during November, before completing the entire project on 24 November 2023.

I’d later figure out during the all-Indonesia WikiNusantara conference, which was held on May 2024, that the Jakarta community wasn’t the only community that proposed a grave documentation project. The Banjarese community also did a grave documentation project under the name WikiBarakat.

My experience with graves for the past two years has taught me a valuable lesson not to downplay the value of any historical object. The inscriptions carved on this seemingly simple stone is an important key to rediscover the past and understand the actors that shaped events and incidents that formed our understanding and perception of history.