In November 2025, the Wikipedia Asian Month User Group organized the annual Wikipedia Asian Month online campaign. This campaign has been held traditionally for the past ten years and focuses on creating articles and uploading media related to Asia across Wikimedia projects.
As part of this year’s campaign, we organized an offline meetup on 15 November in Tashkent, hosted at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers. Together with PanPanchik, I co-organized this event with the aim of introducing young volunteers to Wikipedia and encouraging them to edit and create articles related to Asia. Prior to the meetup, we announced a workshop on Wikipedia editing through social media and invited everyone interested in contributing to Wikimedia projects to join us. What made this event particularly special for us was the fact that it was the first independently organized offline meetup by young Uzbek Wikimedians. All participants were young people, students from different universities across Tashkent, which created a very dynamic and inspiring atmosphere.
During the workshop, PanPanchik and I spoke about Wikipedia as a free and open online encyclopedia, shared our personal experiences, and highlighted the achievements that active contributors can reach through Wikimedia projects. This sparked genuine interest among the participants. For many of them, the ideas of contributing knowledge, gaining new skills, and becoming part of a global community were completely new and exciting.
Around 50 people registered for the event, and 30 participants attended in person. At first, this number felt slightly disappointing to me, especially since it was my first experience organizing an offline event. However, looking back, I believe we successfully managed the meetup together, and the outcome was meaningful. Approximately 20 participants had never created a Wikipedia account before, while the remaining attendees already had some experience. Due to limited time, we could not cover all aspects of Wikipedia editing in detail. However, we guided participants through the process of creating an account, explained the basic principles of Wikipedia, and encouraged them to continue learning independently through video tutorials and practice. Many expressed their motivation to start writing articles on their own after the workshop.
After the workshop, we marked the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia Asian Month with a small celebratory cake, which nicely concluded the official part of the meetup. Yet the meeting did not truly end there. Despite having met only a few hours earlier, participants quickly bonded with one another. We went together to one of Tashkent’s large parks, played interactive games, and spent time simply talking and getting to know each other better.For the participants, this became an unforgettable experience. From our perspective as organizers, gaining around 20 new users and seeing approximately 10 experienced contributors create new Asia-related articles is a solid and encouraging result for an offline meetup. Most importantly, we succeeded in sparking interest in Wikipedia and, even in a small way, contributed to bringing free knowledge into the lives of new people.
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