Capturing Local Stories – Wiki Village Ganggyeong Project

It sounds like a joke, but the weakest area on the Korean Wikipedia is Korea itself. At one point, the community even debated whether to fill the gap by translating Korea-related articles from the English Wikipedia. The reasons are tangled, but it comes down to a loop: the articles are in poor shape, so nobody wants to touch them; and because nobody touches them, they stay in poor shape. The Korean Wikipedia we have today is what that loop, left to roll on, has produced.

I expect everyone reading this is nodding along — yes, this is a problem, and some of you might have a similar problem on your Wikipedia. But how many of you would raise a hand and volunteer to sort it out yourself? And there is simply far too much of it for one or two people to take on. What is needed, then, is something that pushes people into going out, finding sources for themselves, and building Korea-related articles up.

The Wiki Village Project was created to be that something. We took our starting point from Japan’s Wikipedia Town, but where those events are led by local residents, we chose a form in which editors travel to the town instead.

Editing runs on affection and interest — so what if we asked people to come to the place itself? Wouldn’t they care more? Rather than wrestling with scattered online sources that make little sense even once you have found them, wouldn’t it be easier to receive, all at once, the material the town keeps itself? And on Wikipedia, where the only people editing are the people who already edit, could local residents become a new kind of contributor? Working from the idea that closing the physical distance would close the psychological distance too, we planned an editing event that would go there in person.

The story of Wiki Village Ganggyeong comes in two parts: the event, and the organizing behind it. This post is the event part, meant to be an easy read — how the day unfolded, what we managed to achieve, and where I felt we came up short.

A town called Ganggyeong

The question I heard most often while introducing the Wiki Village Project was: where is Ganggyeong? I can’t really blame anyone — that was my own first reaction too. So let me take a moment to introduce the place.

Ganggyeong — officially Ganggyeong-eup, in South Chungcheong Province — is a small inland town sitting on the Geum River, on the west side of Korea. It is known for its seafood, and above all for jeotgal, seafood salted and left to ferment… which does raise the question of how an inland town became famous for seafood at all. By all accounts, Ganggyeong long served as the place where seafood coming up the Geum River from the Yellow Sea was gathered and sent on into the inland area. The trade made it famous enough that Ganggyeong Port was spoken of alongside Wonsan as one of the two great ports of Joseon, and Ganggyeong Market as one of its three great markets. That flow held up through the opening of Korea’s ports to foreign trade, and modern-style buildings sprang up all over the town. But once the railways came and goods no longer travelled by boat, Ganggyeong shrank little by little, until it became the town it is now — one you may or may not have heard of.

For all its history and culture, Ganggyeong is not widely known today, precisely because of that decline. Its Wikipedia article was in much the same state: it existed, more or less. But as its history would suggest, the sources keep turning up the moment you go looking for them — which is exactly what makes it the ideal town for people whose goal is to build articles up.

The night before

Wiki Village Ganggyeong ran over two days. The main event was on Saturday, August 29, but the Ganggyeong National Heritage Night Tour — a night-time heritage festival held in the town — happened to fall on the day before, and some participants said they wanted to come early and see it. Getting people interested in the town was the whole point of the project, so if they wanted to start a day early, I was hardly going to complain.

Three of us, myself included, had dinner together and walked a loop around town to take some photos, then staked out a spot on the bridge for the highlight of the evening, which we had been told was a beautiful thing to see. Then the rain came down hard enough that we half-watched it at best. We got back to our lodgings soaked through, where I walked the early arrivals through what we would be doing at the main event the next day, and we spent a little time reading and editing articles.

A short morning talk

The main event started the next morning. Participants gathered at Ganggyeong Station at around 9:30, and by 10:00 we had all assembled at the local culture center, where we filled the wait for the talk to begin with a round of introductions and a little editing. From 10:30 we sat in on a talk on the history of Ganggyeong by the director of the Ganggyeong Institute of History and Culture. It felt less like a formal lecture than like “an event for hearing the stories of someone who lives there” — not by design, but it matched the intent behind the whole project perfectly.

Most of the participants had no particular interest in Ganggyeong; they barely knew of it, so I was honestly pretty worried about how much the talk would land. Watching the questions and the back-and-forth pick up, I realized the worry had been completely unnecessary. Reading about something and hearing someone tell it really are not the same thing at all. That alone made it feel worth coming all this way to hold an editing event. By the end, the questions showed no sign of stopping and I had to cut them off.

Photowalk and editing marathon

After lunch, we split into two groups for the photowalk. It was humid and raining, so we hurried around by car. One team concentrated on public institutions, and the other on heritage sites. The photowalk was a side activity this event could have done without, but it alone produced many good photos.

All the teams were back by around 2:30, and the editing event properly began. Just before we started, the books and other materials provided by the Ganggyeong Institute of History and Culture were piled up in front of us, and although it was really a stretch of everyone tapping away at their own laptop, questions kept crossing the room — “Anyone got a photo of this?” “Does anyone remember where this turned up?” “What was the title again?” — and “solitary work, done together” was exactly the phrase for it. One participant went so far as to ask whether the books could be borrowed, so that they could keep contributing once they got home.

(We asked the institute about the books, and they said they have plenty and to take as many as we needed… so they are currently kept at the Wikimedia Korea office. If you need them for your own contributions, do get in touch.)

The end of the event, but not the end of the story

Fifteen minutes before editing wrapped up, we took some time to share what everyone had worked on. Although we only had about two hours, the results were striking: existing articles had been expanded, and a substantial article — History of Ganggyeong-eup — had been written from scratch on the spot. That participants who half a day earlier had known almost nothing about Ganggyeong could get this far really did astonish me as the organizer. In some articles, the expansion came together with photographs taken only hours before, which was its own demonstration that coming to the place in person had been worth it.

The strangest part came afterwards. Editing events like this usually flare up on the day and then are forgotten, but this time unprompted contributions kept coming in after it ended. Below are four of the articles that saw the most work after the event. The full list and activity record are available on the event dashboard.

Article in Korean Wikipedia	Notes
Ganggyeong-eup	Expanded steadily before and after the event
History of Ganggyeong-eup	Created on the day, expanded steadily since
School Building and Residence of the Korean Chinese School, Ganggyeong	Created after the event
Battle of Ganggyeong	Created after the event

Compared with an ordinary edit-a-thon, participants stayed interested for longer and some of that interest turned into real contributions — which made me wonder whether it is simply easier to get drawn in once you have seen the thing the article is about with your own eyes.

What worked, what fell short, and what comes next

We had run earlier events aimed at building up local content — WikiTambang, built around photography — but the problem was that taking photographs was really all there was to them, so there was no expectation that related articles would be expanded at all. This time, by contrast, the photowalk element survived intact while the articles themselves were substantively filled out, and it was encouraging to see participants get a chance not just to photograph a subject but to study it.

The cooperation we got locally was positive too. Normally, when you set up an event out in the regions, what comes back is indifference; this time Wiki Village was given a venue, source materials, and on top of it, a talk from the local institute, and that fed into a great deal of enthusiastic editing. To that extent I think we managed at least part of the original idea — the Wikipedia community and a local community joining hands. Since the storytelling format went over so well, I have been thinking about combining the talk and the photowalk next time: walking the town together with local residents and hearing them explain it as we go.

One important limit remains, though. We secured the town’s cooperation, but we did not draw the town’s people into Wikipedia. To extend this project to other places, we will eventually need to bring in participation from inside and outside the region alike, so that something self-sustaining begins to happen — and on that front, this event left me feeling we have a long way to go.

All in all, given that this was a first attempt, it went very well. We got both effects at once: introducing Wikipedia to the town, and filling in local content on Wikipedia. I think the way forward is to hold on to this framework, grow the numbers gradually, and reach out to more places. How to gather more people, and how to adapt this for other regions, will be the work ahead.