Justice through Open Knowledge: Training Human Rights Advocate to Document Human Rights Incident with Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

Disclaimer: I can’t disclose anything more detail than what I’ve written here due to the confidential nature of this training.

Like my previous Diff article on Wikipedia training, this one also starts with an invitation from Mbak Dian sometime in May 🙂 After some initial hesitancy and a few questions later, I accepted the challenge.

The training was an advanced Wikipedia training, held as part of a three-day program by Kontras (Commission for Disappeared and Victims of Violence) to educate human rights watchers on its three human rights education center in Ternate (Moluccas), Merauke (South Papua), and Balikpapan (East Borneo). There had been some basic preliminary training held in these three areas for the locals by other, much more senior volunteers. Delegates from these three areas were then sent to attend the training in Jakarta.

This training, however, sets a precedent for myself due to its nature that is very different than the previous training, which focused more on the introduction on Wiki and only a bit of editing. Since this was supposed to be an advanced training, packaged to accomodate the participant’s human rights documenting activities, there were requests from Wikimedia Indonesia’s education team to tailor the training materials to suit the participants needs. I was requested to add a material on safe editing policies in Wikipedia. I felt unfamiliar with the topic, and several coordination meetings later confirmed my unfamiliarity even further, hence pushing me to learn on the topic from policy pages.

The day came, and, unlike when I was writing this article, I had only a little clue on the wider context of the training (I didn’t read the invitation letter thoroughly). Hence, I was surprised to see the participants to come from different areas. From what I garnered during the introduction session, all of these are old hands in the human rights sector and have been through a lot in their efforts on documenting human rights related incidents in their area. Some of the participants even told the story of their plight in detail, thus making me understand more of what they’ve been through.

I tried to be as cheerful and vigorous as possible throughout the training session in order to prevent the attendees from leaving the premises, lose focus, or falling asleep. I occasionally throw jokes and respond as best as I could to banters from the participants (even though I’m not really that humourous). I try to adjust my presentation to suit their context and their works. For example, I tried to make references to an organization which, upon observation during the editing session, was joined by roughly half of the participants of the training.

The editing part of this training was a bit strenuous, due to a significant difference on the knowledge between the participants. Despite the prior training given to them in their original place, some of them have difficulty in doing even the most basic Wiki action. At the same time, a few participants managed to do what I’m presenting immediately without any instruction. I tried to work around my way on this problem by modifying the original material to make it easier for them to follow. Even though the materials mostly consisted of source editing, it was easier for the participants to follow by using the visual WYSIWG editor.

Another perennial problem that occured during the training was account access. Participants sometimes can’t use their accounts because they forgot their passwords or their IP addresses are blocked globally because of their work using VPN. These problems were resolved quickly with sysops powers that were vested into me in the Indonesian Wikipedia 🙂

One of the memorable parts of the training is the ice breaking part, during which I could see the true nature of the participants. A lot of banters were thrown during the “this or that” session, which made me laugh like a drain due to some of the responses. The funniest part? The most humourous participant during the session, which I later gave an award to, wasn’t even present during like half of it!

At the end of the event, one of the participants approached me, stating that he wanted to establish (in his own words, declare) a Wikimedia community in his place.

Overall, the entire training was a novel experience from me, and I felt that learned a lot more from them than the reverse through their stories. My key takeaway from the entire training is that when training people from a diverse area and level of academic comprehension, it is necessary to make the training material as easy as possible. The second interesting takeaway is that the participants exhibited a lot more interest during the Wikimedia Commons training session compared to the Wikipedia editing training session, which I would atrribute to the more visually loaded nature of Commons.

I would like to extend my thanks to both Wikimedia Indonesia and Kontras for inviting me as a trainer to this session, as well as the participants who have been enthusiastically involved throughout the entire training. I would also like to express my gratitude for my friend, Alia Fatika Santosa, who have helped me with technical matters during the training session.