In Search of the Region – Organizing Wiki Village Ganggyeong

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 organizing part, written from the organizer’s side — what putting a Wiki Village event together actually involved, in the hope that it leaves more people wanting to run one themselves.

Groundwork: looking at every example we could find

The direct model for the Wiki Village Project is Japan’s Wikipedia Town. It began with editors who lived in a given area filling out the articles about it, and has since grown into an outreach event that invites local residents in. Today it takes many forms — some still organized by editors, some by libraries and other local government bodies, some built around a particular theme — and it has established itself as the event that represents the Wikimedia movement in Japan.

Wikimedia events in Korea tend to be editor-centered, with cooperation slotted in around them; in Wikipedia Town, the center of gravity sits with local residents rather than with editors. Because of that, it happens of its own accord without any particular push, and it also acts as a chance to introduce Wikipedia to the people who live there. It is a good idea — but given that in Korea essentially every activity runs through Wikimedia Korea itself, expecting the kind of self-starting organization you see in Japan seemed unrealistic. At least for now.

Korea is not without its own attempts at building up articles through cooperation with the regions. Where Japan started from residents, though, attempts in Korea have always started from institutions. Wikimedia Korea has joined hands with local governments before — Seosan City, South Chungcheong Province, Pyeongchang County, Daegu Metropolitan City — and afterwards there was self-criticism within Wikimedia Korea that we had never managed to keep participants editing once the event was over.

The problem was motivation. For a local government, the fact that an event took place is already a result; what Wikipedia wants is the articles that remain once the event is over. We went ahead without closing that gap, so there was no chance of a participant arriving at any answer to “why should I be the one to build this article up?” Wiki Village is, among other things, an attempt to answer that question.

Early discussions and arrangements

Wiki Village first came up in earnest at Wikimedia Korea’s strategy meeting at the end of May. WikiTambang had by then become just a passing event where people took photographs and went home, and when the question surfaced — “what on earth do we do to connect this to actually building articles?” — bringing in Wikipedia Town was floated as one answer. If we were really going to do it, where, and how? The discussion ran through the night. What came out of it was Ganggyeong — or more precisely, the Ganggyeong Institute of History and Culture. The concrete arguments for Ganggyeong were these:

• A real sense of their own local history, and a wish to make it known. Holding an event is not, in itself, the point for them.
• Clearly outside the capital region, yet not far from it — so it genuinely counts as going out to the regions, while still being easy to reach from Seoul.

Most of you probably have no idea where Ganggyeong is. Neither did I, so — well. Briefly: Ganggyeong was for a long time the port where seafood coming in from the Yellow Sea met farm produce from inland, and it grew enough to be spoken of as one of the two great ports of Joseon and one of its three great markets. That is why so many of the modern-style buildings put up around the opening of Korea’s ports are still standing there. Once the railways were built and the port lost its purpose, the town shrank until it became the small rural village it is today — but the wealth of its past is still very much present in its history and its culture.

In early July I went to Ganggyeong in person to make the pitch. I had put together a simple slide deck to introduce the project, but explaining all of it on the spot was never going to happen, so I printed it out, handed it over in a “have a proper read of this later” spirit, and left it with them. The sad footnote is that I had wanted to produce something more like a full report alongside the deck, and simply did not have enough to say to fill one.

After that I kept in touch through July and August. The most important thing here was contacting them regularly enough that they did not forget about us. What I did was send what I had to say by email, then call the moment it was sent and say exactly the same thing again. A tip, for what it’s worth: the further out into the countryside you go, the better it works to simply ring rather than texting first to ask whether it’s a good time. The email is only there so that later, when they are wondering “now, what was it he said on the phone?”, there is something to go back and read.

At the same time I was building the event page and recruiting participants. Unlike the events I had run many times before, this one came with the added problem of having to explain what “Wiki Village” even was — and since nobody reads a long explanation anyway, keeping it short while still getting every essential point in was the hardest part of the whole thing.

The surprise in recruiting was that although we had really only advertised this whole Wiki Village thing on Wikipedia itself, people who don’t edit it took an interest and applied anyway. Of the twelve who applied through the form, about five had no Wikipedia account at all. Which is to say there are a fair number of people who read Wikipedia without editing it — and that gave me some hope, even before we started, that events like this might work in other places too. Given the nature of this particular event, though, people who were neither local residents nor familiar with editing naturally ended up lower down the list, and since there were plenty of applications from existing editors as well, we were unfortunately not able to invite everyone.

Preparing in advance

This hardly needs saying, but you see more, and take in more of what you are told, if you have done a little reading first than if you just turn up cold. With that in mind, the original plan was a preparatory meetup around the middle of August to build the articles up a little beforehand, but with various things going on inside Wikimedia Korea, there was simply no window in which to get people together, and it never happened. Had we managed it, the participants would surely have arrived more invested — though I do wonder how many would actually have turned up. Or might an extra meetup have felt like enough of a burden that some people would not have applied at all…?

Instead, from a week before the event, I encouraged people to edit the articles in advance. Talk alone would not do, so I set the example myself: I spent two full days rewriting the entire history section of the Ganggyeong-eup article, and then created the articles on Ganggyeong Port and Ganggyeong Market, which I felt simply had to exist. Then I put it to the participants — “give these a read before you come, and if you can add a sentence or two while you’re at it, even better.” One person did actually edit before turning up, so technically it worked; but one person was nowhere near enough, and the disappointment came right alongside.

Preparing on site

Honestly, the night before was a slot thrown together as things went along. We had settled the event dates and published them, and a few hours later the dates for the Ganggyeong National Heritage Night Tour were announced — overlapping with ours. Since the point of the whole thing was to get people to see the town and take an interest in it, we put the extra day together on the basis that anyone who wanted to come could be put up for the night. Free accommodation, so I expected plenty of takers; surprisingly few came forward. (I had been expecting around six; in the end three of us stayed, myself included.)

I arrived in Ganggyeong the day before and checked over the venue. I had not actually planned to — but they said, “you’re welcome to go in and use it from today,” so I went straight over to have a look. It was a different building from the one I had seen on the scouting visit, so I was slightly nervous about what state it would be in, and it was so well prepared that I was thrown the other way. Since an editing event leans on power strips and Wi-Fi, I had raised the point several times — and there turned out to be more than enough of both, which was a relief.

There was a photo spot upstairs and a back garden as well, both of which we could have put to good use — but I only found out they existed at that point, and in the end the event finished without ever using them. A slight shame — but then the main space was already about as good as anyone could ask for, so I have no complaints at all.

How the day ran

Setup, the talk, lunch

I got to the venue about thirty minutes before the scheduled start to set up. The desks and chairs were already laid out, so it came down to putting out the power strips and doing a bit of cleaning — though the building does not seem to get much use, and there was enough dust in the air that I aired the place out as well. Participants arrived around ten, we went round with brief introductions, and then waited about half an hour for the talk. The talk running unexpectedly late left us with a gap, and since there was nothing in particular to do with it, it turned into everyone quietly poking at their own laptop.

When I first raised the idea of a talk, what I asked was whether they could bring in one of the local heritage guides. Nothing much came back on that, so I assumed that was the arrangement — and then on the day it turned out that the director of the institute would be giving it. Wait, the director himself? I was slightly thrown. I had no idea how it would go; in the event it ran less like a formal lecture than like simply listening to someone talk, and the participants warmed to it far more for that.

For lunch we all went out together, and I was relieved that nothing in particular went wrong. The Japanese model is no help here — over there people eat separately and regroup in the afternoon — and once things start getting tangled up over food there is no fixing it, though we did go in without a plan… Thinking about it now, sharing a list in advance and taking a vote might not be a bad idea, though then you lose the fun of settling it there and then… Deciding where to eat really is the hardest part.

Photowalk, editing, and heading home

For the afternoon photowalk it was both raining and hot, so we gave up on walking and did it by car. With about seven of us, two cars were enough to cover separate routes, and since there was little point in the two staying together, we agreed that one team would shoot heritage sites and the other public institutions, and split up. The driving around itself went off without trouble, but sharing which objects we were meant to go to — and photograph — did not go smoothly, and the order we visited them in ended up all over the place, which brought home how short we had been on preparation.

The photowalk targets had originally just been written up as a list on the event page, but the participants couldn’t get a sense of where any of the places actually were, so in the end I shared the map list I had made for my own use (the shared list). The moment it went out, everyone could see what was where, and we became several times more efficient. Should have done that from the start… or better still, should have used OpenStreetMap and embedded it in the event page…

Just before the afternoon editing began, I stopped by the institute’s office again and came back with books and images of old maps. Only one of them was a properly serious book, though; the rest were closer to guidebooks, which made them a little awkward to actually use. Everyone there already knew their way around Wikipedia, so there was nothing much for me to do, and I concentrated on my own editing. Looking back afterwards, the editing always ends up concentrated in a few people while the rest do next to nothing, which is a shame, and I do wonder whether I should have pushed harder — but they were hardly going to do it because I told them to, so, we’ll call it good.

Editing after the event

Getting home after the event is not the end of it. If it were meant to be a one-off, that would be fine, but this time that would empty out the whole point of having done it. So I have been creating an article here and there myself, showing it off a little, and leaving notes asking people to join in — and the response is thinner than it was on the day, which has me wondering what to do about it. What worries me in particular is that interest is scattering this fast even while we are focused on a single subject, Ganggyeong; if the project later expands to other places, attention seems likely to thin out further still.

On the positive side: I had expected contributions after the event to be realistically zero, and there was in fact article creation by ordinary participants. That alone counts as something achieved — but seen objectively it falls hopelessly short. Of the ten editors who took an interest in Wiki Village Ganggyeong itself, quite apart from whether they attended, three of us, myself included, effectively did more than 90% of the editing. It is not that nobody else edited; whether those edits amounted to meaningful change is something I need to think about again.

Following the Wikimedia Foundation’s suggestion, I also tried putting it into numbers using the event dashboard, but there was no realistic way to restrict the count to Ganggyeong-related articles alone, so the data came out badly polluted, and for ordinary participants it only added confusion. Looking at the main articles, though, you can see that expanding existing ones (Ganggyeong-eup, History of Ganggyeong-eup) and creating new ones (Ganggyeong Port, Ganggyeong Market) happened side by side rather than one at the expense of the other — and there were contributions the numbers were never going to capture in the first place, like the template covering Ganggyeong-eup, or the addition of the Ganggyeong-eup boundary on OpenStreetMap.

And unlike Wikipedia Town, the model we took from, there was no sign at all of local residents touching Wikipedia themselves. We did explain what Wikipedia is, what we are trying to do, and that we would be glad if they joined in. Explaining alone, as it turned out, was not enough. What it comes down to is either (1) getting existing editors to care enormously about a particular area, or (2) turning the local residents who might already care into Wikipedia editors — and you can see straight away that neither is remotely easy.

There is one thing about this case in particular that needs watching. Because of where we held it, the theme became “let’s build up the articles on Ganggyeong” — but the ultimate aim of this project is not Ganggyeong; it is local content across the regions as a whole. Concentrating on the narrower subject of Ganggyeong is what made this event a success, but if that current is not steered properly, what we end up with is not a project that takes in the regions as a whole, but a series of piecemeal battles, each looking at one town at a time. That said, this is also a limitation built into a project organized from the center rather than one arising from the regions themselves, so it is not something I can draw a conclusion about right away.

In closing: how about you?

This is usually the part where you write something like “we hope many of you will take part.” I want to say something slightly different. Would you hold one yourselves? I am of course endlessly grateful when I hold one and you come — but what I ultimately want is for Wiki Village to keep being held, in as many places as possible and however small the scale, until the regions are building their own articles themselves. And that depends on each of you: on looking beyond simply taking part, and taking an interest in holding one yourself.

You may be thinking that where you live there is nothing like that much to write about, so it would not work. It is fair enough that it should look that way — but how often have you actually tried building up the articles about where you live? It may only look empty because nobody has tried. If anything, uncovering hidden gems like that is where the pleasure of Wiki Village lies — and the pleasure of Wikipedia too. You do not have to put on some grand event; a simple contribution, filling out the article on a heritage site near your home, is enough.

I will end here, with my sincere hope that a day comes when people say the richest area on the Korean Wikipedia is Korean culture. Thank you very much for reading this far.