The theory-to-practice pipeline: lessons learned from Wikimedia Futures Lab and Wiki Cendekia

Between the last days of January and the first days of February of this year, I had the opportunity to attend two major Wikimedia movement related event, the Wikimedia Futures Lab and the Wiki Cendekia. These two conferences, which was held consecutively, was unlike any other conferences I’ve ever attended for two main reasons. First, the conference was organized by two specific local chapters: the Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia Indonesia, and second, the concept of these events was directed to the specific need of the organizers instead of adjusted for the attendees.

The Wikimedia Futures Lab’s Unique Way of Reflecting Challenges Ahead

Wikimedia Futures Lab was a derivative of a conference held earlier by the same Deutschland chapter to discuss the future of the German Wikimedia and brought together a limited amount of contributors to discuss various pressing matters related to the future of the movement, projects, and its main objective: freeing knowledge. I have to emphasize the word “limited” here, as it was the first time I was the sole carrier of Indonesia’s flag in a conference. The other participant from Indonesia was a representative of the ESEAP chapter, and there was a total of 5 people from the countries of the ESEAP chapter attending the conference. Personally, the Futures Lab concept was pretty novel, as there were only one line of program, with the breakout room and discussion topics being predetermined by the organizers prior. The freedom to chose only existed during the free programming session at the end of the day. The Futures Lab line of programs followed a specific pattern for three days: a sequence of presentations, followed by a panel discussion, and then a breakout session with a pre-determined group.

One of the phrases that’s still stuck to my mind today from the opening session is a statement by Malka Older that the future is the present. All of the developments regarding AI, geopolitics, as well as other technological advancements, now occured within the scale of months, or even weeks or days. Today is a whole new reality compared to yesterday, and discussions about the future are just discussions about the reality in the present. The predictions that we made in the conferences might’ve just passed before our eyes moments ago, and we’re discussing the consequences of its as its happening in front of our eyes.

I met with a lot of amazing people during the entire conference, ranging from your average friendly Wikipedia editor who has a lot of connections to important agencies and people, to unassuming acquaintances who, after a bit of discussion, happens to be the chief of innovation at one of the worlds largest social media company! Its truly a humbling moment to be able to stand in the shoulder of giants, to be able to sit, discuss, share and hear great ideas, one that would shake many worlds with the right willpower and implementations. Years of experiences and toiling from around the corners of the globe is directed for the sole purpose of Wikipedia’s quo vadis.

The conferences overalls could be divided into three major topics based on the days. During the first day, we’re dished out presentations regarding the reality of Wikipedia as it is now: a decrease in viewership, and a perceived need to drastically amend the website’s appearance’s, as some might suggest to do so given Wikipedia’s mostly unchanged appearance for the past quarter of a century. However, I am rest assurred that Wikipedia has went down on the right path. As one of the speakers, once said, there is no necessity to make different appearances to cater for different audiences, but instead stick to one appearance and create different abstracts to appeal for the different demographics. On the second day, instead of just discussing an abstraction of data and presentations, we began to formulate possible outcomes to the (near) future of Wikimedia, as well as responses from the contributors and support given by the Foundation. One of the interesting stuff during this day is the presence of a data lab, where we can ask Foundation staff about data related to contributor and admin retention, viewership, as well as other Wiki-stuff.

On the last day of the Futures Lab, the format was slightly different from the previous days. Instead of being assigned to a specific breakout group, after the presentation and panel discussion sessions, we were encouraged to formulate an experiment to tackle a specific set of problem that we perceived is happening either within the movement or the projects. All in all, the attendees proposed at least, from my prediction, more than fifty different experiment that tackled different angles of challenges that the Wikimedia movement. After the experiments were laid out in sticky notes in what I remember was a very wide glass, we were encourage to discuss, merge, or refocus our experiment with fellow attendees I joined forces with Daniel Sigge and Ruby D-Brown in formulating the concept for a tool that allows us to identify popular and stale articles that are urgently in need of improvement. We completed the pilot concept in time, and I had the honor to present it in front of the audience.

Although I was really happy in meeting fresh new faces and ideas, there were some corrections that I personally feel the need to make, as anything’s not without a drawback. I was much concerned with the lack of attention given by the organizers to the topic of the future from countries outside of the Global North. I felt that the Futures Lab gave too much emphasis on AI issues, even though its not the most pressing matter for the rest of the world. Personally, as an Indonesian, the biggest threat on the existence of the Wikimedia movement here is the political matters, which is more apparent from where I am in Indonesia with the pnging restriction on Wiki’s SUL by the government. These kind of discussion, alongside with other issues such as the problem of unwritten indigenuous knowledge, technological limitations, and discrimination were largely untouched during the conference due to a lack of platform for these topics to be voiced out. Some more planning and research on the kind of future discussed needs to be done for the next Futures Lab in order to ensure its relatability and relevance with all walks of attendees.

Wiki Cendekia Prepping Up Admins for Challenges Ahead

One of the problems that came up during the the Futures Lab was the lack of support provided for administrators in developing their necessary skills in maintaining their home wikis and fending off vandals. To ensure this, one of the solutions proposed was to held a capacity building program for administrators of a specific wiki. I’m so glad that I was able to attend one immediately after the Futures Lab ended! As the title of this article suggests, hopping on from the Futures Lab to the Wiki Cendekia is like seeing the experiments in action!

Cendekia in the program’s name is an Indonesian word that means “scholar”, indicating the program’s transformative and academic nature. Unlike the Futures Lab, Wiki Cendekia had been going on for years. The first Wiki Cendekia was held way back in 2018 and continued on annually, although it was shrunk down in the early 2020s due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic at that time. The program has since transformed from a training of trainers to a capacity building program directed for administrators of Wiki projects under the jurisdiction of Wikimedia Indonesia.

Before the offline sessions, there were several online sessions where we could learn basic administrator skills through Wikimedia Indonesia’s learning management system platform. As the only demands were the deadlines, we are free to adjust the pace of our learning so that we could ensure we got a good grasp of each material. Additionally, there is also three separate Wiki Cendekia online meetings, with the first an overview of Wikimedia Indonesia’s learning management system, the second a brief presentation on the local and global roles of administrators, which I had the honor of presenting, and the last being a presentation on administrators’ safety, brought by the Trust and Safety staffs of the WMF.

After a good night sleep following my return from the Futures Lab, I immediately headed to Surabaya by plane to attend the conference. The atmosphere were very friendly, as I’ve been acquainted to most of the administrators attending, since most of those who attend were from the Indonesian Wikipedia, and I myself was one of them. I also met with some new faces, which were admins who hailed from Wiki projects of local languages in Indonesia.

In Wiki Cendekia, administrators exchanged skills with each other as every training session were brought by an admin who is an expert on a specific skillset. The end goal of Wiki Cendekia was to prepare every admin with enough grasp of every essential skillset so that we could become “jack of all trades” that wouldn’t be confused in the face of a Wiki issue. We were trained on topics relating to abuse filters, MediaWiki, bots, templates, Auto Wiki Browser, and a lot of other stuff. The interactive training method, which allows me to receive feedback, makes Wiki Cendekia sessions much better compared to trying to learn the materials by myself. As the saying goes, “hitting two birds with one stone”, I got to make new friends and converse in diverse topics in the process of obtaining these new vital skills.

At the end of the three day training session, we had a mini Futures Lab designed locally for the Indonesian Wikimedia ecosystem, where we discussed a variety of topics such as AI, administrator retention, and – the most similar to the Futures Lab – the future of the Indonesian Wikimedia movement. It was by sheer coincidence that I had the privilege to facilitate the latter session. Overall, as iterated before, I left Wiki Cendekia with new skills, new knowledge, new friends, and new connection. The cool and fresh Surabayan air, combined with the local hospitality, doubles the entire training session as an adjustment in returning to the Indonesian atmosphere.

Farewell Frankfurt, farewell Surabaya, thank you for all the Wiki adventures. See you when I see you!