Covering protests on Wikipedia: a personal experience

During the 2025 Wikimania in Nairobi, I had the honor of presenting my research regarding the coverage of protests in Indonesia from 2024 to 2025. In the presentation, one of my highlights was the lack of diversity regarding the contribution to the articles, despite the importance of these kind of articles as a portal of information for outsiders. I also showed the audience the failure of my lone campaign to aggregate photos and videos of the protests through social media, which, despite garnering hundreds of likes and reposts, did not result in a significant increase of contribution to images of the protests on Commons. Three recommendations arise from my brief research on this matter: community and user group-led campaigns on graphic contributions, collaborating with news agencies to provide materials ready to use for Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and using tools to allow newcomers upload images more easily. (I argued that images are more important than text contribution, as text contribution could be done post-hoc instead of image contribution which needs the user uploading it to be present at the time of the event).

After the presentation, I received input from attendees on how to optimize the campaigns to gather better contributions. Most of the attendees also had similar problems on garnering contributions for recent events happening in their countries. Some users recommended me ways to handle the problems.

The recommendations that I obtain through my mini research and from other users was thought to be shelved for a while. Out of the blue, the August 2025 protests happened in my country—just days after the Wikimania commenced, and I immediately put the advices and recommendations to the test. Instead of bystanding the articles, I initiated the article for the protest. Within days (or even hours) the article grew exponentially, evolving from a three thousand bytes stub article to a whopping 350 thousand bytes article (that made my computer lag whenever I tried to edit the article!)

The next major step for a recent event article was to raise the general awareness on the article by displaying it at the In The News section of the English Wikipedia’s mainpage. With a daily view of approximately five million, the article’s placement at the page would garner further attention from a wider, more diverse audience. There were initially some reservations from the community when I nominate the article for the In The News, with a majority of opponents arguing that protests from Indonesia has been posted before, the lack of possible change and participation, and a lack of coverage from the mainstream media. However, as the protests went on longer and spread wider all across Indonesia, these concerns were automatically addressed, and public opinion shifted towards supporting the event to be posted.

Due to personal reasons, I can’t attend the protests even though my university was the main catalyst for the protests. I had to think outside of the box and contacted my friends who attended the protests, convincing them that the photos they donate would be immortalized in Wikipedia. My friends provided their photos to me, and I uploaded it to Commons with their names attributed. However, one important step was still needed to ensure the security of the photos in Commons: a VRT confirmation via email. The VRT was quite complicated, as it involved listing the files uploaded, inserting it into a pre-made legal email format, and sending it to the VRT team, who then check the email in their inbox and confirming the license in the uploaded image one-by-one. The last time I did this, it took about a month for all of the images I uploaded received the VRT confirmation.

The nomination would have gone stalemate if it wasn’t for the help of an admin who lend a hand with his “mop” to push the nomination into the mainpage. He also has access to the Volunteer Response Team system, allowing him to cut the chase and confirm the license of my images in just matter of hours. In a span of a few hours, my friends managed to sent the VRT confirmation, and the protest article was displayed at the mainpage with a photo taken by them. I’m really grateful for all of those who helped in this stage.

As the protests grew wider, the available images that were displayed were insufficient, and I had to find ways to gather images from outside of Jakarta, the capital and where I reside. I remembered an advice from a user regarding Wikimedia Common’s campaign tool that could be utilized to allow newcomers and less experienced users to upload media without too much hassle. With the help of a Commons contributor who had the user rights to create Commons campaign page, I asked him to help me write the campaign page. After some delays, the Commons page was completed at 12 AM in my local time.

Around the same time after the contributor had completed the campaign page for my protest, a very prominent Twitter celebrity with the username Budi Bukan Intel (Budi, not an intel) reposted my campaign for the previous protests (which I presented in the previous Wikimania as a failure). Within hours after being reposted, the campaign went viral and received hundreds, even thousands of likes and repost. I immediately linked the new Commons campaign page to the viral tweet and asked users to upload there instead of the old one. The campaign page and the protest category on Commons were flooded with images from all over Indonesia, taken by the users uploading it (I had already put up a notice in the Commons campaign page asking for people to only upload images they took themselves). The campaign was a success, with diverse newcomers from all over the country uploading their images, resulting in a more variety of photos, as opposed to the previous protests.

With all of the assistance given to me throughout the process, I decided to pay it forward by helping other users cover protests in their own country. After the campaign, I received a Upload Wizard campaign editor rights that allows me to create my own campaign without having to ask assistance from other users. I advised a user on organizing campaigns to push people to upload images from the protests and helped him make the campaign landing page in Commons.

Overall, the entire circumstances taught me on the importance of persistence, especially in mending things that we failed to do prior. Seek help from others and analyze what we did wrong to improve the outcome of similar events.