Wikimedia Asia meetup
Friday August 11th, 19:00
Centre stage, level 4, La Centre Sheraton, Montreal

Video link

For those who are part of Facebook group Wikimedia Asia Forum, they can view the recorded conversation at this link.

Wikipedia Asian Month has been one of the biggest edit competitions of the Wikimedia movement
Wikimedia Asia list needs to be revived
- Name list has been circulated. Please request to subscribe yourself to the mailing list by clicking the link in the line above!

What should we do as the Asian community?
- Collaborate with each other, not just within a country
- Tatar Wikipedia joined Wikipedia Asian Month last year and it was very positive. It brought experience of northern Asia and Russia into the community.

There is frustration that we sometimes talked about things at Wikimania and they didn't happen. We should go for small things we can do and share recent success stories.

Success: Flexible grant for camera to do many events, not just meetups, but also wiki-expeditions
Frustration: There's no good decision-making process in the community. We need a to avoid indecision and build consensus.
- Problem: conflict; perception of seniority

We're very well represented in the Chinese context and the Indian context. But how about the countries that aren't represented? Laos? Cambodia? Can the WMF reach out to them?
When Wikimedia did things in Central Asia there was endless conflict. How do we resolve them and move forward?

Need to send people from minority groups to Wikimania so the Wikimedia movement gets exposed to these people.

We have a lot of Wikipedia articles, but we need to save our cultures and knowledge.
Wikisource can collect old documents and get thousands of them in one import
The scope of Wikisource is different from Wikipedia though and some languages might not have as many sister projects. For example Chinese Wikisource accepts Cantonese entries and Cantonese community isn't keen on starting Wikisource yet.

We can all contribute to someone else's language. An Asian Wiktionary Month is a possible idea!
With lexemes for Wikidata we won't need the full set of separate language editions of Wiktionary at all! Existing Wiktionary content will keep functioning but new content can be centralized, particularly lists of translations that are currently manually duplicated many times between wikis.
Benny Lin (not with us today) is working with lots of Indonesian languages. Very often, one country alone has a wealth of languages to be documented. Same for India.
Ido (conlang) community used Wiktionary to expand the use of the language in Wikipedia
WMF manual: there's a requirement for a small language community to concentrate on one Wikimedia project to get it to work.
- It's hard to get new language off the ground, but you can always contribute to the coverage of your language in another language. With Lexemes coming up, the contributions will be propagated in the future!

Addis Wang has been running the show for the last few years but will need to step down next year due to difficulties with editing from China.
It's gained a lot of momentum but WMF is finding difficulty funding local events because it's hard to for WMF to get involved in China.
- It'll be nice to have a committee to run a centralized repository of funding from WMF

Asia is the only continent that doesn't have a regular regional Wikimedia conference.
We need a programme committee.
Indonesian community has offered to provide a venue and the Indian community can offer to provide organizers.
Next two weeks, we'll have a programme and (following up from Berlin) we should try to put forth a comprehensive proposal and get a WMF grant.
CIS (India) can be a formal sponsor