English: Video recording for Wikimania 2023

Title: Rebranding Wikimedia Wikimedia for Anime, Cosplay, Gaming (ACG) World
Speaker: Dody Ismoyo (Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia)
Abstract: Wikimedia users have remained more or less the same in the past few years, while at the same time we can see so many youngsters are into YouTube, Instagram, TikTok etc in making contents. If Wikimedia doesn't change its rigidness, we are losing out to these platforms in the near future. Thus, Wikimedia needs to change its image from academic-centric platform to also include these segment of society.

Wikimedia outreach movement have been restricted to only academic-related theme in which most people have been studying at school (e.g. history, languages, anthropology etc). While it is good to indulge around such topic, many of the youngsters find those similar like school tasks/assignments, in which they really need to allocate their time for the sake of completing the task. This phenomena is what I've drawn after making more than 30 meetups around Malaysia with many institutions, which many of them are from the academic institutions. While the participants showed high enthusiasm during the session, there were very few of them who continue to become active and loyal editors to Wikimedia. This is indeed a very sad reality. And don't forget on how rude Wikipedia admins can be to newbie editors (e.g. giving them non-stop warnings for the very small mistake the editors did, reverting & deleting their edits etc).

While at the same time, we see the growing popularity of people focusing on creating contents for social media platform (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube etc). They did actually spend time to learn such skills (e.g. video editing, streaming etc) and they remain loyal content creators (weekly or even daily). For cosplayers, they spend months in creating their suits and practicing their stage performance before joining the main competition. So, in short, people are willing to spend time and energy to things that they really love to do. It is not about language barrier or less-of-instruction barriers.

We need to dearly transform Wikimedia into such inclusive, friendly & welcoming platforms. If not, once the senior editors of Wikimedia have retired, Wikimedia will slowly die. As you can see, many WikiProjects in Wikipedia have become inactive or even defunct.

So, as an electrical engineer, cosplayer and Wikimedia editor myself (I have created more than 2,300 new articles and more than 300,000 edits in English Wikipedia, so I know what I'm talking about), we need to fully rebrand Wikimedia to capture those new generation. We should not only focus on writing articles in Wikipedia about culture, history etc. We can start by telling those cosplayers or event goers (e.g. music), please take photo of the events, cosplayers, stage performers etc and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. For each event they attend, you can write the Wikidata page of it (e.g. name, location, date, coordinate, organizer, part of any bigger event). For those movie lovers, you can always create each of the main, supporting and secondary characters inside Wikidata, and link them to any existing fandom website as their identifier in Wikidata.

I once attended a gaming event called Noizu Con in Putrajaya, Malaysia in 2022. Although the topic is a software/website-based company, they can make a convention which are opened to the public and attract many vendors (from computer industries), attract cosplayers, gamers, entertainers etc to make the event more happening. They even have side events such as gaming competition, maid cafes etc.

Wikimedia itself is exactly the same as that website-based organization (I shall put it that way - more or less). Instead of having the same style of conference again & again (even 60-70% of the attendees are the same people again & again from the previous years), we should also need to have an ACG (anime, comics, games) style of Wikimedia Conference. I said 'should also' means we need to have a new one, while the existing WMCON etc can be kept running as usual.

So this new ACG-style of Wikimedia Conference, we can always make a convention where we have maid café where the maids are cosplayers dress in Wikipe-tan (the official anime character of WMF). We can make a competition style of Wikipedia in the event (e.g. quiz, trivia, coding competition) in a fun way. We can promote event documentation in Wikimedia Commons for each event, including every single cosplayer who attended, to have their own photo taken and upload to Commons. This needs to be done to capture those new generation into using Wikimedia projects in their day-to-day life.

If you browse, what are the most popular Wikipedia articles people usually visit? Aside from any breaking news or any politicians who have just taken office (or made any worldwide news), most of the most popular pages visited by readers in English Wikipedia are mostly popular culture, which consists mainly movie actors/actresses, singers, bands, movies, music songs, games, etc. These are what our Wikipedia readers are interested into mostly, thus we need to rebrand Wikimedia to be really inclusive of these popular culture to grab our biggest share of readers.

Presented at: Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, 2023-08-19 05:55 to 06:10 UTC