ESEAP Conference 2024/Report/Bahnfrend

The author at the Karaoke Party on the Saturday night

About the participant

I have been attending, and greatly enjoying and benefiting from, ESEAP conferences since the first one was held in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, in 2018. I believe I was the only native of Western Australia, other than the quokka mascot, to attend ESEAP Conference 2024.

In my report on the previous ESEAP conference, held in Sydney, Australia, in November 2022, I provided some background information about myself. Since writing that report, I have attended Wikimania in Singapore in August 2023, WikidataCon in Taipei in October 2023, and Australian WikCon in Brisbane in November 2023. All of those attendances were kindly sponsored by Wikimedia Australia, of which I am a Board member (of course the decisions about sponsorship were made by others).

My sponsorship for, and attendance at, WikidataCon 2023 was to enable me to give a presentation entitled Tying Wikidata to English Wikipedia – experiences and proposals. In that presentation, I advocated for improvements in the currently less-than-optimal ties between those two projects.

I have also kept up with contributing to Wikimedia projects, mainly English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and also occasionally Wikidata (amongst others). I understand that the three projects I have just identified are probably the three most active ones overall. Although I agree that it is important to foster all Wikimedia projects, it is also vital that the leading projects continue to be as comprehensive and up-to-date as possible. That's because all of them provide essential backup to other projects, particularly as a source of material for translations or transclusions.

One thing I always do when travelling to and from, and attending, Wiki conferences is take lots of encyclopedic photographs to upload to Commons. In connection with this conference, I took photographs in Singapore as well as in Malaysia. Since attending ESEAP Conference 2018, I have taken photographs for Commons in 10 different ESEAP countries/territories, most of which I had either not visited since the 1990s, or never previously visited.

Things learned at the conference

Thursday

Prior to attending ESEAP Conference 2024, I had visited peninsular (West) Malaysia several times, including on an overland trip from Singapore to Thailand, but had never been to any part of Borneo. That was one of the reasons I was keen to attend the conference.

Flying into Kota Kinabalu was therefore a real treat. It was a lovely sunny day, and as I looked through the window I could see deep blue water, very green grassy areas, and a lot of cheerful modern architecture. My initial impression, confirmed over the next few days, was that KK and its environs seemed to have a very festive, holiday atmosphere, especially by comparison with West Malaysia.

By the time I arrived at the hotel, the organised daytime pre-conference activities had already started. So I joined with a group of other conference participants in learning about the local cuisine, by sampling some of it for lunch at a nearby cafe.

The opening reception and dinner was similarly very educational. I learned immediately that the KK waterfront has amazing sunsets, which two days later I photographed as depicted above. I also had a friendly chat with some enthusiastic members of a school Wiki club. They were attending to give us one of the opening ceremony's song and dance performances, which, in combination, taught me quite a lot about the traditional local culture. In particular, I learned that north Borneo has several different indigenous tribes, each with its own distinctive cultural practices.

Friday

During the formal opening ceremony and subsequently, audience members witnessed some further local cultural performances. In the introductory presentation about the ESEAP Hub, a recommendation by the ESEAP Prepatory Council that finalisation of the ESEAP charter be delayed due to a development at the recent Berlin summit was foreshadowed.

As the development was a delay in the finalisation of the proposed worldwide Wikimedia Movement Charter, the recommendation would be that finalisation of the ESEAP charter be delayed until after the Wikimedia Movement Charter had been ratified.

We were also told that such a delay would not lead inevitably to a delay in the creation of an ESEAP Hub, because all that was required for creation was suitable funding; the ESEAP charter could be finalised later. I, for one, think that an ESEAP Hub should be created sooner rather than later, so I was pleased that the delays with the charters would not necessarily delay creation of the Hub as well.

The first breakout session I attended was "Can Oral Hokkien Language be Written? How Can Wikidata help?". It was a bit of a follow-up to some things I had learned about east Asian languages while at WikidataCon 2023. Hokkien is the majority language in Taiwan and a substantial minority language elsewhere in the ESEAP region; the presenter, Supaplex, was suggesting various ways its online presence could be strengthened.

I followed up that session with "Wikidata Data Partnerships: use cases for the Region". The presenter, Alan Ang, is a Singaporean who works for the Wikimedia Deutschland team that runs Wikidata. He discussed three examples of cooperation between Wikidata and outside institutions. He is also strongly advocating that similar cooperative projects be developed in the ESEAP region, and I wholeheartedly agree.

I then switched rooms to watch "Editing Wikipedia to understand our past: Enriching Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s local history on Wikipedia". The four presenters, Helen, Harry, Anjuli and Rebecca, had each completed a Wikimedia Foundation-funded summer internship at Auckland War Memorial Museum, during which they had adding content to Wikipedia about a local history subject of special personal interest. I was impressed not only by the presenters' enthusiasm and the benefits they had received from the project, but also by the quality of the content they had created, some of which I inspected during the presentation by reading a couple of the relevant Wikipedia articles on my phone.

The following presentation, "A Partnership Perspective on Collaborative Efforts to Preserve Cultural Heritage", was about the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WILMA) program, which had been piloted in Bali, Indonesia, and then been the subject of a presentation at ESEAP Conference 2022. I was pleased to learn that the program had been extended to Malaysia and the Philippines, which just goes to show that a very worthy effort developed in one ESEAP country can be applied also in other ESEAP locations.

Next on the program for me was "Bridging IPGM Campus Kent’s Collaboration Network With the Community through Wikimedia". I had already learned about the Wiki club at the high school, and now a senior official of a Malaysian university spoke about collaboration between that institution and Wikimedia Foundation. The focus is on using Wikimedia projects to improve knowledge of ethnic Kadazan Dusun culture, language and literature.

I finished the day's presentations by attending two lightning talks: "Wikimedia Australia’s Partnership with Alice Springs Public Library: Adding an Image Collection to Wikimedia Commons" by Aliceinthealice of Wikimedia Australia (on a topic with which I was already familiar, having had communications with the presenter about it), and "Lisa's Wikipedia Bookclub and other initiatives from Aotearoa New Zealand", during which Lisa Maule described the Bookclub, a local initiative aimed at supporting new and emerging Pasifika and Māori editors.

The evening's activity was a visit to the Mari Mari Cultural Village. It began with a time consuming bus ride through heavy Friday night traffic, and continued with a lengthy tour of replica tribal village buildings, where we were given interesting and instructive demonstrations of day-to-day indigenous cultural practices. The tour was followed by another song and dance performance, which further showcased the various local tribes and their traditions.

In combination, all of that activity made our concluding Mari Mari dinner very late (a not entirely satisfactory arrangement for me, an insulin-dependent diabetic), but fortunately there was much less traffic to negotiate on the way back to the hotel.

Saturday

The weekend's activities began with a more detailed presentation about the ESEAP charter and hub as foreshadowed on Friday morning, and another cultural performance.

I then moved to one of the breakout rooms to attend "Sip and Chat with the Wikimedia Foundation Trustees", presented by two of the trustees, Victoria Doronina, a Ukrainian who lives in the UK, and Lorenzo Losa, a former president of Wikimedia Italia. Both had travelled from Europe to attend.

Being a trustee of any organisation, particularly on a voluntary basis, is an onerous responsibility. That must be especially so of the trustees of WMF, one of the world's most active and influential NGOs. However, my impression is that both presenters enjoy being WMF trustees. Lorenzo even said that his trustee work was easier than being at the apex of WMF's Italian affiliate, which may say more about the latter organisation than the former one.

My next attendance was at Margaret Donald's workshop, "Korean wikidata & Mix'n'Match". It was focused on a project by a very determined and dedicated individual Wikimedian to make Wikidata entries about Korean topics more accessible to those who, like the Wikimedian herself, cannot speak Korean. The techniques Margaret demonstrated are also applicable to Wikidata entries about topics in other countries that use non-Roman scripts, and so the workshop was clearly highly appropriate for an ESEAP conference.

Then it was time for me to conduct my own workshop, "How to improve the categorisation of uploads to Commons (with particular emphasis on ESEAP-related uploads)". I had chosen this topic partly because many, if not most, Commons images are not very well categorised, and also because I had learned, while uploading to Commons a collection of photos I had taken in Kuala Lumpur on my way to Wikimania 2023, that Malaysia has a very broad FoP law, which makes it very easy to take photos of Malaysian buildings, publicly displayed artworks, etc, suitable for such uploading.

It is said that the very best way to learn about a topic is to write about it, or give a presentation about it. When it comes to presentations, the learning takes place not only when the presentation is being prepared, but also when it is being given. While presenting my workshop, I learned that some Wikimedians (well, Margaret Donald at least) think it is more important to add structured data to Commons images than to categorise them more comprehensively, and that Mongolia (of all places) had recently amended its FoP laws to make them friendlier to Commons uploaders. Perhaps most importantly, I was reminded that some Wikimedians think that less is more when it comes to categorisation, and that there probably needs to be more discussion amongst Commons contributors about precisely how much categorisation is preferable (I tend to favour a more is better principle).

After a short break, I attended a couple of lightning talks, "An Invitation of Joining the Reshaping of Wikipedia Asian Month and its Future" followed by "Hatch A Wikimedian". During the first one, I learned that participation in the annual Wikipedia Asian Month has reduced substantially in the last few years, and that Wikimedians in Taiwan are hatching a plan to revive it. I must confess that I'm one of the people who has ceased to participate, not because I am no longer interested in expanding Wikipedia content about Asia (quite the opposite, in fact), but, rather, because I just have not had the time and inclination in recent Novembers to make a contribution to the event. As for "Hatch A Wikimedian", that was a brief account of another worthwhile project created locally in an ESEAP country that could easily and usefully be adopted elsewhere in the ESEAP region.

I then shuffled rooms a couple of times to witness two more lightning talks. The first, "A 70-year-old Wikipedian talks about the charm of libraries" was itself a charming presentation by a mature Japanese Wikipedian about how she contributes to the Wikimedia movement. Not only does she add online content; she has also written a Japanese-language book about Wikipedia that some of the conference participants have now encouraged her to have translated into English. An excellent idea, I think. My last lightning talk of the day was "Creating a wiki club in a university & encouraging students' engagement on wikimedia projects", which described a very active Wiki club at another Malaysian university. I think it's very impressive that the Malaysians are achieving so much in a country that has only a User Group, not a full Chapter.

For me, the evening's activity, the Karaoke Party, was mainly an opportunity to take some Commons photographs from the rooftop bar, and enjoy yet another example of Le Méridien KK's superb catering; after a couple of very busy conference days, I was just a little too tired to stay up late.

Sunday

I began the final day of the conference by participating in the Gaya Street Sunday Market Photowalk. Our visit to the market was particularly interesting for the exposure it gave us to the culture of KK in 2024. There was a wide range of merchandise on sale, and the purchasers were a mix of locals and tourists; I had previously sampled some of the other KK markets, which tended to be focused on either one or the other type of customer, not both.

The more formal conference sessions I attended later in the day were concerned primarily with Wikimedia movement governance, with particular emphasis on the ESEAP region, and on the proposed Movement Charter and its impact on ESEAP communities.

Especially interesting to me were the final two breakout sessions. The first, "Fostering Collaborative Growth: Non-Conventional Approaches to Engaging, Networking, and Affiliate Advancement", described the process by which the Wikimedia movement approves, engages with, and, sometimes, disaffiliates, the many organisations around the world that support the movement by affiliating with it. I had not been previously aware of how comprehensive each process is (and also needs to be), or even that there is an Affiliations Committee (AffCom) established specifically to carry out those processes.

The second breakout session, "Learnings from the Global Wiki Advocacy Meet-up - Implications for the ESEAP region", drew to my attention the importance to the movement of its various advocacy tasks and the work that must be done on them. In the ESEAP region, some of these tasks, such as advocating for more liberal FoP laws in places such as the Philippines, fall within the scope of the work that should be assisted by the Hub.

The conference's final sessions were focused on further discussions about the ESEAP charter and hub, and on choosing the venues for ESEAP Summit 2025 and ESEAP Conference 2026. Only as a vote was being taken for the venue of the former event did I become fully aware of the highly fragmented nature of the affiliates and Wikimedians in the Philippines, the capital of which, Manila, eventually emerged as the winning proposed venue. At that time, there was at least a degree of reluctance on the part of many of the Filipinos/as to support that choice. However, I understand that since the end of the conference more fulsome support has been forthcoming.

As for ESEAP Conference 2026, the leading candidate, Kaohsiung, was always likely to win, and eventually did. However, while I was pleased by that choice of venue, I was even more pleased that a Vietnamese conference participant nominated Ho Chi Minh City as an opposing venue. An important reason why ESEAP Conference 2024 was held in KK is that it showcased the Wikimedia movement in a place 'a little off the beaten track'. That would be even more so if an ESEAP Conference were held in a country such as Vietnam. Partly for that reason, and also because I had visited Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of days on my way home from WikidataCon 2023 and had enjoyed that stay, my vote for ESEAP Conference 2026 went to that city, and I was pleased that it also received some support from other conference participants.

After the formal sessions had wrapped up, I joined a group of Australians, New Zealanders and the two WMF Trustees who had dinner at a waterfront Japanese restaurant, and, in so doing, learned a little more about the cuisine of another ESEAP country.

Things I contributed to or participated in or since the conference

I have briefly described above the workshop I conducted during the conference.

As usual, since returning home I have uploaded to Commons many photographs that I took while at, or on my way to or from, the conference. However, I still have others to upload, mainly of airliners that were flying past Le Méridien KK on final approach to the airport. Many of the individual aircraft I photographed are not yet depicted in Commons, and so it was worthwhile setting aside some time between presentations to capture them.

My conference roommate Chinneeb, the first Mongolian Wikimedian ever to attend an ESEAP Conference, has arranged for the Commons rules about FoP in Mongolia to be updated and re-applied. I have reviewed those updates.

I have also been considering how some of the other things I learned at the conference should affect my future activities as a Wikimedian.

Plans after the conference (from what I learned or contributed in the conference)

I would like to follow up the topics of tying English Wikipedia with Wikidata, and categorising Wikimedia Commons files, on which I have given a presentation and conducted a workshop, respectively, at recent conferences.

Both of these topics are are of interest and importance worldwide, and therefore worthy of discussion at a future Wikimania (I am not yet sure which), as well as online.

I am also motivated, by my attendance at the conference, to contribute to any future discussions about the ESEAP charter or hub, and about advocacy activities, especially in the ESEAP region.

Comments/ suggestions about the conference

Congratulations to all the Wikimedians who were involved in organising and running the conference. My special thanks to Pru Mitchell, who hosted, and assisted me greatly with, the workshop I presented.

I thought that all the various service providers, with one minor part exception, did an excellent job. Particularly impressive was Le Méridien KK, which provided first rate conference facilities, social function rooms, hotel rooms, and above all, catering services, along with the very friendly, efficient and attentive staff who carried out the various services.

My one quibble is about the very late dinner we were given at the Mari Mari Cultural Village. Even if it was not possible to arrange for the dinner to be held any earlier, it would have been nice to be told in advance that we would effectively be having a supper rather than a dinner, and perhaps also to be given some snacks to tide us over in the meantime.

Last but not least, thank you to the scholarship committee for awarding me a scholarship to attend the conference. Without it, my attendance simply would not have been possible.