Wikidata 12th Birthday Celebration in the Philippines

The Wiki Advocates Philippines User Group has joined the global community of Wikidata editors in celebrating its 12th birthday from October 26, 2024 to November 3, 2024. A 5-day event was conducted in the learning hub, including Wikidata editing sessions, basic training for newbies, exploring possibilities of lexemes, and fun interactive games. This celebration was made possible with Wikimedia Deutschland’s support for different communities and affiliates who wanted to organize celebration events. 

As a group, this was the first time we held an edit-a-thon for Wikidata, although some of our volunteers have already started to edit individually based on their interests and capacity. Imelda Brazal started editing as early as 2020 during the 1Lib1Ref campaign, together with other librarians. Anthony has also worked on Wikidata lexemes, transferring the word entries on the Central Bikol Wiktionary to Wikidata. The call for organizers was a good opportunity for the team to make extra effort and time working with this project and also introducing it to newbies. 

Aftermath of Typhoon Kristine

We have managed to run the program smoothly together with the help of our 3 interns and other volunteer organizers under the Hatch-A-Wikimedian program. Initially, this was planned to be conducted in another venue where we could accommodate a larger number of participants, but the Philippines was just then recovering after Typhoon Kristine, and there were major road closures due to heavy flooding, and some areas were inaccessible. Another problem we encountered was that some of the registered participants would not be able to attend the actual session, for they were also recovering from the onslaught of the typhoon. 

Lexemes and Wiktionary Integration

Currently, the Central Bikol Wiktionary has 7,500+ word entries. It was approved in 2020, and although we had used it during editathons and even random searches by end users, we saw that doing some work in Wikidata Lexemes would greatly help our language preservation initiative. Seeing the functionality of lexemes, especially their characteristic of being understandable by programs and language models, we foresee a future wherein we can easily query words based on our needs; machine translations will be more efficient and grammatically correct. Seeing that we can manage to organize this event with the help of the Wikidata Birthday support fund given by Wikimedia Deutschland, we pursue working with Wikidata Lexemes, particularly in the Central Bikol language. 

Event Highlights

We conducted our kick-off on October 27, where we included sessions on introduction to Wikidata, a 3-hour edit-a-thon, and also a simple celebration through the “Guess the Answer through a Book Title” game and afternoon snacks. The days between October 28-30 were scheduled for an open house and also online promotion of our event through our social media account. During these 3 days, volunteer editors were invited to visit our learning hub, where they could do edits on Wikidata and watch tutorial videos. The closing program was on October 31, where we awarded the top 4 editors during the entire 5-day celebration. The closing program was scheduled from afternoon to late evening, where we played different team and individual games, had dinner, each with a slice of the Wikidata cake, and shared our experiences and learnings from the 5-day training. 

The Hangor Tool was able to track 1066 lexemes, and 900+ of those are new entries. We were also able to create 31 items and edit 63 of them. More detailed results can be checked on our Wikidata editing dashboard. 

Learnings

This was the first time we worked on Wikidata. Although the focus of this event is on Wikidata Lexemes, we have also incorporated sessions that tackle the basics of Wikidata. Participants were taught how to add items; in this case, we utilized local literary books. They were also taught the difference between the Wiktionary and Wikidata Lexemes and how to integrate both. We observed an interest in working with Wikidata among the participants, considering that it has an easy template for editing, as compared to other Wiki projects that require coding for some instances or drafting articles, which consumes a lot of time and would need proper research before even being published. 

To add, since we used local literary books, the participants and volunteers were engaged in reading. Knowing the title of the book, the publisher, the ISBN, and even the number of pages led them to discover more about the book and eventually try to engage in reading. 

We run several campaigns in our annual activities concerning gender equality, human rights, language preservation, and leadership development. For the past years, we were able to utilize the Wikimedia Incubator project in developing our new language projects and also improved the quality of word entries in our Central Bikol Wiktionary. The Wikidata Birthday celebration has opened a lot of ideas for the work we will be doing in the upcoming months. We expect to explore the project more, learn from experienced Wikidata editors, and collaborate with existing or new projects until we can also share with the global community our learnings and expertise in Wikidata editing.