Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2023 Campaign in the Philippines

Written by: Imelda Brazal and Anthony Diaz

Wiki Advocates Philippine User Group joined this year’s international Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign. This annual contest provides an avenue for Wikipedia editors to improve Wikipedia language projects with images and other relevant media. Adding more visuals to any Wikipedia article makes it more instructive and engaging to read.

Since 2021, Central Bikol language editors have participated in this campaign and helped improve the content on Central Bikol and Tagalog wikiprojects. On its third iteration, the user group was able to organize three training sessions, resulting in 2802 page improvements and 44 users engaging and contributing to various Wikimedia projects.

WPWP Training Sessions

On July 21, 2023, the Wiki Advocates Philippines User Group jumpstarted the first in-person session of the Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign for Central Bikol language editors. The session was filled with professionals, students, and open-knowledge enthusiasts. Fourteen (14) editors were successful in contributing to three local language wikiprojects. The top editors for this session were User:Even Barrameda, User:YamPikit and User:JBequio, with User:Kunokuno as the facilitator.

The second session was facilitated by User:Albinolongoria and User:JBequio on July 29, 2023. The team was able to train 19 volunteers, and all were able to create usernames and contribute to two local Wikimedia projects.

Another training session was conducted on August 9, 2023. User:Albinolongoria, User:JBequio and User:Mhille_26 co-facilitated this session. There are 11 volunteer editors who have successfully contributed to the Central Bikol Wikiprojects.

WPWP on Wikiquote

Originally, this campaign was designed to add images to Wikipedia articles to provide more visual information. However, with the group’s newly hatched wikiprojects; Central Bikol Wikiquote and Tagalog Wikiquote, we have collectively decided that this campaign will be a strategic move to gather more editors for these specific wikiprojects. Being a new project, most of the pages are still stubs and lack visual information. With these three sessions on WPWP, the two projects have now been edited to provide images, especially for quotations from notable people. One lesson we learned with this modification is that we can maximize the existing campaigns based on the needs of the community and specific wiki projects, without being confined to specific rules. We also appreciated the positive response of Isaac Olatunde, the global coordinator of the WPWP Campaign, when we asked to make Wikiquote our target project for this year.

While we were successful in making the pages more engaging to readers with the images the participants added, we also considered the success of having new lead organizers for this year’s WPWP Campaign. It was also timely that we organized these sessions with the team’s aim of adding editors for these new Wiki projects, and to add to that, the top three editors during the second session were now regular members of our User Group. Campaigns such as this are not merely for developing wikiprojects but also provide pathways for volunteer editors to be part of the global Wikimedia Community.