Crowdsourcing Media for Public Knowledge: A Case Study of Indonesia’s August Unrest and November Floods
Speakers
Jeromi Mikhael is a longtime Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons user who has been contributing to the projects since 2018 by writing articles (esp. biographies) and contributing photographs (esp. prominent people). He is a member of the Wikimedia Indonesia user group and the Wikimedia Jakarta Community and has been involved in several community projects such as the Wikipatriot and Hibah Buku. He is currently writing on Indonesian ambassadors at the English Wikipedia and doing administrator duties at the Indonesian Wikipedia.
Abstract
This brief talk aims to inform the audience regarding the crowdsourcing process in Indonesia to collect valuable media, such as photo and video, on two separate important incidents: the 2025 August protests and the 2026 natural disasters. The talk begins with the importance of media for Wiki projects and discusses methods to gather media from first-hand sources that witnessed and documented the incidents, as well as ways to attract public attention on the matter through social media and word-of-mouth. The talk would also discuss the role of this media in ensuring an uncensored and unfiltered coverage of events in an hybrid democracy such as Indonesia, with the government frequently limiting a transparent and uncensored coverage of events. The session concludes with lessons learned and recommendations for future attempts on media crowdsourcing for Wikimedia Commons. It is expected that the lecture would inspire other contributors to get involved in covering ongoing events in their country, especially public unrests, and organize a campaign to involve the general public in gathering relevant information for the wikiprojects.
Additional information
This presentation focuses on égalité, by ensuring the role of the public in contributing knowledge to illustrate articles and resources via the Wikimedia Commons. Public contribution results in a fairer, more varied type of media, both in format and perspective, which would make articles more visually appealing to readers and a richer repository of media. The talk would also relate to the liberté regarding the role of media as a form of democracy, disseminating information via pictoral depictions to Wikipedia to enrich the reader’s understanding of an event or incident in a more honest and transparent way.
My presentation would be suitable for Wikimedians that are heavily involved in social campaigns as well as regular contributors to Commons media via photographs. In order to convice the audiences that the campaign is worth pursuing, I would tailor my presentation such that it would focus on visual materials instead of boring texts
Everyone can participate in this session