“Good evening, kak1, we are currently planning on an outreaching program to Lombok to develop Wikipedia basa Sasak project. Are you interested in joining the program?”
I got a message from Education Team in Wikimedia Indonesia, in early May 2025. Previously, they contacted me about their interest in developing local community in central and eastern side of Indonesia, including in Lombok. Without hesitation, I accepted the offer as I always wanted to have some kind of local Wikimedia community in my hometown, developing Wikimedia project in my local language.
The program is a collaboration between Wikimedia Indonesia and Komunitas Wikimedia Denpasar, a local Wikimedia community in Denpasar, Bali. It is an outreach program that happen to be exactly inline with my dream: Wiki training and a chance to build lokal Wikimedia community in my hometown.
We then prepare for the program. We decided that the program will be in three days: a day to do final preparation, a day for WikiLatih (a wiki training program), a day for Kopi Darat (gathering program, usually used to edit specific Wikimedia project). We also decided that we are partnering bachelor students from Universitas Mataram, specifically students of Indonesian Language and Literature Education Study Program.
WikiLatih
On 30 May 2025, the first event that we did was WikiLatih Wikipedia, a Wikipedia training to students and lecturers of Indonesian Language and Literature Education Study Program (Bastrindo). We were helped by one of the volunteer of Wikipedia that happen to stay in Lombok at the time. From the first time I met the participants of the event, I instantly feels their enthusiasm. We started with a basic: to build their user page, edit a page, then to create one article in Wikipedia Indonesia. Both the students and the lecturers enthusiastically follow all the training event. We did short, light quiz and question and answer session. And at the end we took a picture together.
The warm I felt, the spirit, and the excitement as the trainer really feels strengthening to me. I wish I can stay and edit longer with them. Oh, I actually did! The next day, some of the participants join the Kopi Darat event to introduce and to edit Incubator Wikipedia Sasak.
Kopi Darat
Kopi Darat is an event for us local Wikimedia to gather and to edit a Wikimedia project together. In this day, instead of exclusive for Bastrindo lecturers and students, the participants also include general interested parties, including language enthusiast, volunteers, and a journalist. We introduce Incubator Wikipedia Sasak to the participants and encourage them to try and to improve the project. Besides, we also talked about the opportunity to build local Wikimedia community in Mataram to build and to improve Wikimedia project in Sasak, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and also recently Wikibooks. It was a fun experience to finally talk about Wikimedia project and mission to my people, to the people that speak my language.
What’s Next?
As of now, we are progressing in preparing the necessary things for the community, such as the logo, social media account, the administrative stuff, and figuring the standard that we wanted to use for our project. We also talked to several established local Wikimedia community for advice in developing our community, including Wikimedia Indonesia, Komunitas Wikimedia Denpasar, Komunitas Wikimedia Jakarta, and Komunitas Wiktionary Indonesia. We would also like to request for supports from everyone, including the global Wikimedia community for our small community. I personally hope this small community can develop, grow, and continue preserving Sasak language and culture. Tampi asih!2
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