Starting slow, finishing strong – now how to sustain the energy?

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SKAP Wiki Loves Living Heritage La Union
La Union Living Heritage Project

SKAP’s Year in Review

Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific or SKAP as we call it, commenced its first year or organized operations in 2024. After being individual volunteers for over a decade, we decided to incorporate to have a legal personality so we can leverage working with partners.

On our first year, we focused on living heritage as our signature and  project. We also continued a project that worked well, digitization of municipal laws. We envisioned a Philippine repository of local or municipal laws available on Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, a not so ordinary project but impacting not only community members of the cities or provinces covered but also other stakeholders especially visitors, law enforcement, judiciary, academe, local citizens residing abroad and the media. From the start of the project, we already digitized more than 1,000 municipal ordinances covering 4 provinces in the Philippines and still continue to do so in other areas.

Documenting Living Heritage is like capturing a fleeting moment. Each act, each skill, each moment is different from the next. The artifacts may still be the same, but the place, the presentation and the timing may never be the same again. For this year, SKAP has captured more than 3,000 living heritage images and uploaded them in Wikimedia Commons, excluding more than 500 PDF files  for the digitization project.

This is also our introduction to the world of Wikidata. We were able to gather more than 10 years of Philippine economic data  namely assets, liabilities, revenue and expenditures and gift it to Wikidata on its 12th anniversary. We were thrilled to contribute 6.81 million words added from 272,000 total edits.  

We at SKAP also tried to work with various demographics for our Wikimedia projects. Working with senior citizens and pairing them with young people in language revitalization proved to be successful. A small step towards preserving the Ilocano and Pangasinan Wiktionary yielded more than 2,000 words from both languages, not to mention the fun, laughter and the enthusiasm we have witnessed from the elderly women who truly wanted to help preserve the spoken language so gladly participated and showed us their local culture.

The participants of Ilocano Language Revitalization Project on Wiktionary

As a result of these projects, SKAP received several requests for the establishment of WikiClubs across the country.  One particular request came from the province of Cebu, the place of the largest language-edition Wikipedia is written not entirely by humans, but by a bot.

Since there is no community there to grow the Wikipedia, SKAP is fortunate to establish the WikiClub Cebu, probably the first in the Visayas region. Teaching them how to edit, do a photowalk and capacitate them on how to run the WikiClub is an honor. Now one of the largest language-edition Wikipedia having more than 6 million articles has a community to nurture and grow it.  

We started slow, there were learning curves. We were far from perfect, we learned our lessons well, stood up and just kept moving forward. Happy that we finished strong, hitting our targets and kept growing.

In 2025, we will continue the projects we found success with, no matter how hard it might be. We will also dip our hands in public policy advocacy, help establish a policy network in ESEAP and yield in to requests for the establishment of more WikiClubs in Visayas and Mindanao, the underrepresented regions in PH.

We also plan to have cross border collaboration with established affiliates, especially those who have more resources, learn best practices, and work with communities to be able contribute more to the open knowledge.

2024 is an interesting year. In 2025, we endure. Now how to sustain the energy?

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