Our community has the potential to liberate the knowledge for the common good. The community needs opportunities, i.e., funding access, technical assistance, and administrative support, to be empowered to reach the common goal.
Dana Wiki is our primary funding program for 16 local Wikimedia communities in Indonesia. It’s inspired by Rapid Fund to allow our local community to create small to medium projects.
Dana Wiki is a development from Beasiswa Daring, our funding scheme for the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beasiswa Daring is limited to online activity and covers communication and meal expenses only, but everyone is welcome to apply. Despite the good programs created with these tight budgets, the main problem during Beasiswa Daring is non-performing grantees. Some do not finish or even do a single work for their program plan. Dana Wiki is created to address this problem, limiting the participants from the community only and offering more significant funds.
What activity can be funded?
Similar to Rapid Fund, our communities may apply for support for editing training on Wikimedia projects, workshops, meetups, or, as most proposed by the community, documentation and curation of the cultural and heritage site. The community created a more straightforward project in the early years, such as improving Liverpool FC-related articles on Javanese Wikipedia. Later, we funded several programs on multiple Wikimedia projects.
When the community created the applications, we chose the hands-off approach. That means the community is free to propose activities on every Wikimedia project, with the target they set and requested budget, as long as the budget does not exceed the cap and their goals are reasonable. Wikimedia Indonesia may advise them during the planning stage, but they are free to implement or reject the advice.
The requested budget may be used for meals, communications, accommodations, transport, and stationeries. Furthermore, Wikimedia Indonesia gave additional support, such as tools and introduction letters to other organizations.
Unlike Rapid Fund, however, Dana Wiki does not cover some expenses, such as working space costs, compensation for non-volunteer activities, and inter-island travel.
Results
When Dana Wiki began in the fiscal year 2022-2023, 9 of 14 communities received project funding. A year later, nearly all of the community received funding, 13 of 14 communities. Because most of them are created documentation and curation projects, Wikimedia Commons was used as their primary platform. Nonetheless, they also edited several Wikimedia projects in addition to Wikimedia Commons, such as Wikidata, Wikisource, and even Wikibooks.
One of the projects funded by Dana Wiki is WikiPatriot, organized by Wikimedians of Jakarta. WikiPatriot aimed to document Indonesian national heroes’ gravestones and added these photos to their respective articles and items on Wikipedia and Wikidata. The documentation of gravestones was also conducted by the Wikidata Indonesia Community, which focused on colonial-era graveyards, and Banjar Wikimedians, which documented local figures’ gravestones.
We observed continuity while reviewing Dana Wiki applications and reports, as some communities created a series of projects spanned over several fiscal years. One of the cases is Wikimedians of Bandung. During FY 2022-2023, they uploaded Sundanese cuisine photographs to Wikimedia Commons. In the next fiscal year, they created a Sundanese cookbook on Indonesian Wikibooks and used those photos as illustrations in their recipes. Wikimedians of Denpasar created the WikiTirta series to snap melukat (self-purification) places across Bali. For WikiTirta#1 they are focused on Gianyar and Bangli Regency. Their recent WikiTirta#2 will explore melukat places in Badung, Tabanan, and Karangasem Regency.
The results of Dana Wiki in the FY 2023-2024 are shown below:
- 664 new articles were created, and 436 articles were expanded across Wikipedia in Indonesian and local languages
- 141 pages proofread on Wikisource
- 4.254 new entries on Wiktionary
- 5.308 photos were uploaded, and 1.640 structured data were added on Wikimedia Commons
- 100 new recipes and 46 short stories were created on Wikibooks
- 1.875 new items were created, and 825 items were improved on Wikidata
Dana Wiki also helped us release new projects from Wikimedia Incubator. Such as:
- Gorontalo Wiktionary (funded during FY 2022-2023),
- Madurese Wiktionary (funded during FY 2023-2024), and
- Gorontalo Wikiquote (funded during FY 2024-2025)
One of our significant limitations is the budget cap. When the Dana Wiki began, the cap was Rp10.000.000 (US$625) per community. It has proved inconvenient to create projects with that meager budget. We decided to raise the limit to Rp15.000.000 ($940), which makes it easier for the community to develop a project.
What’s next?
We will continue the non-interventionist approach because it will grow initiatives from the community. Our job as grant officers is to ensure the project execution and evaluation are within the guidelines.
However, as some of our communities are able to fund their projects via Rapid Fund, we are reorienting Dana Wiki to beginners as a platform to learn and practice how to propose, manage, and evaluate their projects before they can seek more funding via Rapid Fund. We will guide them to develop a simple theory of change or set a goal based on SMART criteria. Also, Dana Wiki is an opportunity for beginners to learn further about reporting and evaluating projects, especially the budget report, which must be precisely prepared. After they finish projects under Dana Wiki funding, they may try to apply for the Rapid Fund.
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