Reflecting Back: Training Students for Wikipedia in Lampung

Last year, on 26 September 2024, I received a message from Dian from Wikimedia Indonesia. I initially expected her message to be a regular meeting invitation or something similar, but what I received was a bit far from my expectation.

Hi Jeromi! The Bandar Lampung community wanted to held a WikiLatih (WikiTraining) for the Indonesian Wikipedia on 12 October. Can I ask for your help to depart to Lampung on the 11th and return on the 13th? Most likely you’ll be going there by your own 🙂

After several minutes of hesitation, and a few inquiries on the detail, I accepted the request. What followed was several coordination and technical meeting to acquiant me with members of the Bandar Lampung community. I had to do the entire preparations for the training in the midst of my mid semester exam, and I had to tediously schedule my time to ensure my grades remained, at the very least, intact.

The day came, and I departed from the Sukarno Hatta airport for the Radin Inten Airport. When I arrived, I was astounded to see all buildings in the province decorated with a distinct kind of geometry, which I later figured out was known as the siger (Turns out, it has been mandatory for buildings in the province to display the siger in their architecture since 2006). I rested in my hotel room for a while and prepared the materials for the training the entire night, not wanting to go out due to the ingrained stereotype of the province (which, in reality, couldn’t be further from the truth).

The training program was held in a cafe and involves students from different universities in Lampung, but mostly from the Lampung language major in the Lampung. As with other training programs, I tried to adjust my presentation and explanation by supplementing the usual, normative, explanation of the inner workings of Wikipedia, its relations with Wikimedia, and other projects, with some good-and-uglies on the presence of Lampung in Wikipedia, such as the existence of a Wikipedia for the Lampung language, and on the presence about a long-term abuser that was known as the “Lampung long-term abuser” since the vandal was known to focus on Lampung-related articles and changing unrelated stuff in other articles to Lampung. The training session was closed with an editathon on Lampung related biographies and places in the Indonesian Wikipedia. (A more technical explanation on what I did during the training is available on my LinkedIn feed.)

I was worried about my presentation the whole time and I even made a story on my personal social media account after the training, criticizing myself by saying “Should’ve worn better clothes…” However, I was amazed to see a generally positive response from the students in the feedback session. At least I didn’t do it that bad 🙂

Overall, it was a wrap. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Mbak Ayu, who have invited me to the first-in-a-lifetime experience of an inter-island Wikipedia training. I’m also really grateful for the Bandar Lampung community, especially to the lead members, Deo Bernedy Putra and Taufiq Hilmi, as well as the other organizers, Agil Mulyani, and Gaizka Sendy Nathania. It turned out that a majority of the Bandar Lampung community members were from the same major as me, and I had a great time acquainting with them during the break session.