Education/News/February 2020/Respati Project

Author: Raymond (Wikimedia Indonesia)

Summary:

WikiLatih, an education training program from Wikimedia Indonesia for new participants, has been done since 2016. Thousands of participants from various regions and backgrounds in Indonesia: from academic institutions, communities, even government boards, have participated in the programs. However, their interests to keep contributing to Wikipedia are still very low. Most of them only contribute during the event but disappear after the event finished (only a few that are still consistent in editing Wikipedia and now have become active contributors). In the end, we have to find a way to solve this problem.

The solution came up as Respati, a project that aims for beginners in editing Wikipedia, has started in January 2020. The registration of the program is divided into 3 batches and the program in each batch has 3-months period to complete. We opened the first batch in January 2020, and the last batch will be opened in March 2020.

The competition works this way, if you sign up in the first batch (started in January 2020), you will have time until the end of March to complete all the challenges. We designed Respati as a very user-friendly for the beginners; therefore, the “seniors” contributors who have more than 200 global edits cannot join this program.

The program is divided into 5 small challenges, that is writing articles, expanding existing articles, uploading photos, giving opinions on the proposal of featured articles, and posting on social media about the activity, such as on Facebook or Twitter. Those challenges were designed not only to write articles, but also to contribute photos, to actively participate in a Wikipedia discussion, as well as to share what they have written to the public on their social media. With 3 months of time to complete, the participants have plenty of time to complete it, besides, they will learn many basic skills to become a better Wikipedian. Once a participant has finished all the challenges, a backpack will be ready for him as a prize.

We hope this program will bring a breath of fresh air to our Education Program. We want to see if this program can increase the retention of our participants from our Education Program, especially from WikiLatih, as well as bring new high-quality editors to the community. We also expect that the awareness of Wikipedia in Indonesia will increase (because many people still do not know that Wikipedia can be written and edited by anyone).

You can find out more about Respati project in Indonesian Wikipedia via this following link.

To learn more about this program, please contact Raymond at raymond.sutantowikimedia.or.id.