Open Chiayi – Civic Tech Community Gathering

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2025/12/07, Chiayi, Taiwan

Wikidata Taiwan, together with the g0v, co-hosted a small community gathering in Chiayi, one of the buzzing cities in southern Taiwan. Chiayi is a city rich in culture and history, yet it seldom finds itself in the spotlight. This time, we teamed up with our partners at the g0v community with the hope of expanding our influence in the area, exploring new resources, and uncovering new possibilities that reside in this part of the island.

Although this event was relatively small in scale compared to our other events this year, we were encouraged by the amount of feedback it generated and the number of new potential partners we connected with. After the main session of the event—an overview of what we have been doing over the past few years—participants have a general understanding of what Wikidata is and what it aims to achieve, and during the Q&A session, we had a delightful discussion on the potential applications of Wikidata and the technologies behind it. Ideas ranged from fundamental questions such as what linked data actually is, to more complex challenges, including what is most difficult to translate or model within it’s constraint.

One of the most interesting topics revolved around the possibility of integrating the technologies represented by Wikidata with large language models (LLMs). We recognize that this area is still under active exploration and not yet a fully developed sector, but the overall consensus was clear: there is a promising and positive relationship between the two technologies, and worth our further investigation. Another noteworthy moment came after the event. Among our participants, one of them was a representative from the TaiwanLib, a group focused on providing free access to books centered on Taiwan, its history, memories, and cultures.

With TaiwanLib, we have a longer and deeper conversation about our works, our goals, and our visions, as well as the possibility of working together to expand our horizons. Given their strong focus on local culture and collective memory, they expressed clear interest in our cooperation with smaller language communities, particularly in the Taiwanese language area. One key takeaway from this discussion was an advancement on articulation of our theoretical foundation: our work to expand literature and data for smaller languages is necessary not for its immediate impact, but for the long-term accumulation of quality resources for future generations.

Our work is not about “fixing” or “revive” a language, but about curating a system, an environment, even a market, in which a language can grow, spread, and thrive. The goal is to establish an ecosystem in which a language can eventually reach a point of self-sustainability and self-replication; only then can we truly begin to taste the fruits of our labor. As a non-profit organization operating within a capitalist society, our role is not simply to generate new values, but to counterbalance the system’s negative effects and bring about a net positive by encouraging the emergence of new possibilities from the most unassuming places.

This event represents a venture into the next chapter of our journey, our accumulated efforts now beginning to bud into new ideas, new concepts, and new forms of possibility. Like flowers budding into fruit, and carries the seed of the future.