On 9th September 2026, 70 students from 15 primary schools across Sabah gathered at Sekolah Kebangsaan Tengkurus in Kota Belud with a purpose that may seem simple, but carries great significance: to document Kadazandusun vocabulary in the digital world through Wiktionary.

This was SoKiD 2.0, short for Sompuruan Komi Boros Kadazandusun, or Kadazandusun Vocabulary Group.

From Vocabulary to the Digital World

Kadazandusun is one of the major languages spoken by communities in Sabah. However, like many heritage languages, its use among younger generations faces various challenges.

In schools, students may still have a limited command of basic vocabulary. Some may recognise a word but have difficulty understanding its meaning, context, or how to use it in a sentence. When vocabulary is limited, learning, writing, and communicating in one’s mother tongue can also become more challenging.

This is where SoKiD takes a different approach.

Rather than simply memorising words, students are encouraged to identify, understand, edit, and document Kadazandusun vocabulary themselves in the digital world through Wiktionary.

This approach is not entirely new. The SoKiD programme was first implemented at the Kota Belud district level in 2025 through the Kadazandusun Wiktionary Workshop. The positive response and feedback from that programme opened the door for it to continue and expand to the state level, bringing together 15 schools from various districts beyond Kota Belud.

What began as a school-based intervention is now showing potential as an approach that connects language, education, and technology.

One Workshop, 15 Schools, Thousands of Words

The SoKiD 2.0 workshop was organised by the Kota Belud District Education Office (PPD Kota Belud) in collaboration with Sekolah Kebangsaan Tengkurus, with the support of 10 Wikimedia Malaysia volunteers serving as facilitators.

Students came from 15 schools:

• SK Tengkurus, Kota Belud
• SK Torintidon, Kota Belud
• SK Melangkap, Kota Belud
• SK Lasau Podi, Kota Belud
• SK Timbang, Kota Belud
• SK Piasau, Kota Belud
• SK Dudar, Kota Belud
• SK Linongkuan, Tuaran
• SK St. John, Tuaran
• SK Kimondou, Ranau
• SK Kauluan, Ranau
• SK Dallas, Pitas
• SK Maringgan, Pitas
• SK Gana, Kota Marudu
• SK Barambangon, Kudat

Over the workshop of approximately two hours, the students did more than simply learn about Wiktionary. They became contributors to an open language resource.

The result?

2,849 new Kadazandusun–Malay words were added to Wiktionary.

In addition, 3,280 edits were made to improve and add example sentences to existing translation pages. On average, around 41 new words were contributed by each editor during the workshop.

These numbers may look like ordinary statistics. But behind every word is a student learning about their own language through Wiktionary. 

Students Are Not Just Learners, They Are Contributors

Among the top contributors was Lestley10 from SK Tengkurus, Kota Belud, who contributed 163 new words. This was followed by Hannah Evangeline Valerie Cornie Bryan from SK Kauluan, Ranau, with 131 new words, and Loevellyca from SK Lasau Podi, Kota Belud, with 102 new words.

Stories like these highlight something important: primary school students can also become part of the open knowledge movement when they are given the space, guidance, and trust to contribute.

In this context, Wiktionary is more than just a website for looking up word meanings. It becomes a learning space where students can see their language as something valuable enough to be documented, shared, and passed on.

SoKiD Is More Than Just a Name

There is something interesting about the name of the programme.

In Kadazandusun, “sokid” means “highland.”

Symbolically, the name reflects the programme’s aspiration to take the Kadazandusun language to greater heights, not only in the classroom, but also in the digital space.

Through Wikimedia, words that may once have been used only in family conversations or within local communities now have the opportunity to be discovered by anyone searching for, learning about, or simply wanting to understand the Kadazandusun language. Perhaps, one day, a student from outside Sabah will type a Kadazandusun word into a search engine and discover the work contributed by these students.

From SK Tengkurus to More Schools

The success of this workshop also brings hope that SoKiD can continue as an annual programme of the Kadazandusun Language Committee, particularly through collaboration with the Kota Belud District Education Office (PPD Kota Belud) and the Sabah State Education Department, with support and guidance from Wikimedia Malaysia.

Madam Lorendah, a Deputy Officer at PPD Kota Belud, also expressed support for this collaborative effort, while Mr Sisom bin Awang, Headmaster of SK Tengkurus, Kota Belud, expressed his willingness to assist other schools interested in implementing a similar programme.

For SK Tengkurus, this journey may have begun with a single workshop. But its goal extends far beyond a one-day programme.

It is about building an ecosystem where students learn the language, teachers provide guidance, communities contribute, and technology helps ensure that the language continues to exist in the digital world.

One Word at a Time

Language preservation does not always have to begin with a large project.

Sometimes, it begins with one word.

One word known by a student.
One word contributed to Wiktionary.
One word that can then be read by someone else.
And eventually, one more piece of a language that does not simply disappear.

SoKiD 2.0 demonstrates that when education and Wikimedia come together, students are not only users of knowledge but they can also become creators and custodians of knowledge.

From the 2,849 new words contributed in a single workshop, this may be the beginning of thousands more Kadazandusun words continuing to live in the digital world.

We, Malaysian Wikimedian strongly encourage and hope to see more programmes like this, bringing more contributors of ethnic languages into the movement and encouraging them to continue contributing and expanding ethnic-language content across Wikimedia projects, especially content from the Kadazandusun community.

One word at a time. One student at a time. One community towards the future.

The instruction was simple, and Matete Lesele had given it many times. Choose an article on the English Wikipedia, he told the students in front of him, and translate it into the language you grew up speaking. Most reached for the wiki in their mother tongue. This student reached for Afrikaans; not her mother tongue. When he pointed her back toward her own language, she told him she couldn’t write it — the school she had gone to never taught her how.

Lesele, a librarian at the City of Johannesburg and a board member of Wikimedia South Africa, repeats some version of that exchange to almost everyone who asks why he does this work. It was the moment a vague worry turned specific. A language can live in conversation, in songs, in the things a grandmother says that no one writes down. But a person who cannot write their own language is unlikely to add it to the places people now go to look — and the largest of those, by a distance hard to overstate, is the one he spends his evenings inside.

That worry is the engine behind the campaign he launched this month. Through September — Heritage Month in South Africa — Lesele is running a translation drive across all ten of the country’s indigenous and Afrikaans-language Wikipedias, asking volunteers to carry articles about South African heritage from English into the languages those articles are missing from. Thirty days, ten wikis, one simple mechanic: translate rather than create, so that no one has to compose from nothing. He chose September because Heritage Month already gathers these languages, and the cultures behind them, under a single banner.

The scale of what he is pushing against is easier to feel in numbers. As of writing this, the English Wikipedia holds 7.2 million articles. Afrikaans has around 130,000. Zulu, the most-developed of South Africa’s indigenous languages online, has about 12,000. Sepedi has 9,000; Xitsonga, roughly a thousand, kept alive by 41 active editors. Ndebele has 330 — the written record, in a country of eleven official spoken languages, that a schoolchild searching in their own tongue would find waiting for them.

Lesele came to this by a route he did not plan. He opened a Wikipedia account in 2014 and left it untouched for six years, until a 2020 campaign for African librarians called 1Lib1Ref pulled him in during the first hard months of the pandemic. He finished among its top 50 contributors across the continent, the only South African on the list. He kept editing, then started teaching others — at library meetups, at universities where he sometimes arrived to assist and ended up leading. On the side, he is building the case for a Wikipedia in Sepulana, his home language, which is not among the official eleven and which, he says plainly, no one else is likely to carry if he sets it down.

The campaign began in an in-between moment, the way a surprising number of them do. At Wikimania he met an editor from India writing one article a day for a hundred days, each in her own language. Her project was one person and one language. South Africa has ten wikis, all of them short of hands at once. A thirty-day, ten-language campaign had come from nothing more than two Wikimedians in a queue, telling each other what they were working on. 

At midnight on the first of the month, the tracking began. Lesele had set up a campaign on the Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard (the movement’s own tool for tracking impact in the country, movement and world), which records every edit contributors make across the ten wikis. He checks it each morning the way other people check the weather; on the third day it showed 39 articles from 23 people, a figure he expects to look quaint by the thirtieth. Before the launch, he spent a Saturday walking volunteers through the translation tool by translating a whole article together, English into Sepulana, so they would leave having done the thing rather than heard about it.

One of those volunteers is Lindani Sikhakhane, a librarian from KwaZulu-Natal now based in Johannesburg, translating into Zulu. He has been editing since 2024, and describes the hardest part as staying consistent — and hunting for the Zulu meaning of an English word that doesn’t have a tidy one. The most rewarding part is simpler: finishing an article and knowing the content of a place like his own will now be readable anywhere in the world. To anyone hesitating at the edge of it, he offers the argument the whole campaign rests on. “Focus on your own language,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you have to understand English. Join, and learn as you go.”

What Lesele hopes other affiliates across the continent take from the month is not the campaign so much as the reasoning under it, which travels better than the specifics. The languages are worth the trouble of digitising. The smallest wikis are held up by one or two people who cannot hold them up forever. And nearly every country has a period in its calendar heavy enough to gather volunteers around.

On the thirtieth, he wants a larger number than the one he started with. But pressed on what he is really after, he reaches past the dashboard for something harder to count. He wants his son to be able to read about their heritage, in Sepulana, long after he is gone — and his son’s children after that. The world he is working toward is one where a Zulu speaker can speak Zulu to him and he can answer in Sepulana, and neither has to retreat into English to be understood. It is not, he says, the kind of thing a person builds alone. 

Highlights

• Data center switch: All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23 at 14:00 UTC as part of a scheduled switchover to allow for essential maintenance and improvements. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes in advance.
• Baseline NPOV Policy: The public conversation regarding the proposed baseline NPOV policy for Wikipedias that do not yet have one has been concluded. Read the summary report and the updated baseline NPOV policy text and enforcement guidance here.
• Save the date. Wikimania 2027 will be taking place in Santiago, Chile, and online from August 18 to 21, with the theme “The Internet we want”. See the Wikimania 2026 coverage highlights and a brief update on what’s ahead.
• Chart extension is now beginner-friendly: Creating graphs and charts previously required manual JSON editing. In response to a Community wish to make the Charts extension more user-friendly, a new Visual mode for adding values has been introduced.

Annual Goals Progress on Engage

See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia

• Introducing TextMatch: Communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch to create custom suggestions that are tailored to their own policies and writing conventions. Share your feedback.
• Visual editor becoming default: Design work on the user experience for visual editing for newcomers is underway. This follows visual editor becoming default on English Wikipedia following a community discussion.
• Community Wishlist 2027 consultation: The consultation on the proposed new Wishlist process is closing this week. This year’s cycle plans for wish submissions in late October/early November, triage completed by late November, and voting in early to mid January. Share feedback in any language on the talk page.
• Improved Add a Link feature: Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods.
• Wikipedia Android app: Latest release includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• Domain change for thumbnails: The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. Original files, videos, and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• Reading lists rollout continues on desktop: Following the initial deployment to Bengali, Chinese, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, reading lists went live on Arabic, French, and Indonesian Wikipedias and will go live on English Wikipedia on Sep 14, with all remaining wikis following on Sep 28.
• New features of Pageviews Analysis: Several new features have been added to the Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
• Article guidance: As part of an A/B experiment, Article guidance is now available in Turkish and Simple English.
• Latest experiments: A current experiment for logged-out mobile readers on Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias is testing whether simplifying the Minerva navigation bar improves reader retention. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Wikifunctions status updates: Thanks to all contributors, Wikifunctions has now reached 5,000 functions.
• Latest highlights from Tech News: Weeks 36 and 37 of Tech News include the Article guidance feature is now enabled by default for editors with less than 100 edits on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia.

Annual Goals Progress on Enable

See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• Affiliates and grant funding: Have your say on proposals establishing (1) a new model and set of expectations for movement affiliates; (2) new, connected requirements to determine eligibility for receiving Community Fund grants from the Wikimedia Foundation; and (3) updated criteria for affiliate recognition processes.
• Community Fund reflections: Read the reflections on the fiscal year 2025–2026 of the Rapid Fund and General Support Fund, covering $17.73 million across 427 grants in 90 countries, with 56.2% distributed outside North America and Northern & Western Europe.

Annual Goals Progress on Reach

See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers

• World of Wikipedia launches: The World of Wikipedia game has been released. It is an online collectible card game where players sort fact from fiction across Wikipedia articles to build their card library. The game is the latest experiment in reaching younger audiences through familiar formats, following Wikispeedia on Roblox and Which Came First? on the Wikipedia app.

Other updates

See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

• Celebrate Women 2026: Read the impact of Celebrate Women 2026 as the campaign concluded with 112 events, 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added.
• US staff union vote: On Sep 3, eligible Wikimedia Foundation staff in the United States voted in favor of union representation in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news

See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

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Here are the two key steps you need to take to enter Côte d’Ivoire:

1. Visa Requirements (Depending on Your Nationality)

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The recommended procedure: E-visa

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2. Health Requirement: Yellow Fever Vaccination

Côte d’Ivoire has strict requirements regarding yellow fever vaccination.

An International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) showing that you have been vaccinated against yellow fever is mandatory. You may be asked to present it upon arrival at Abidjan airport.

Make sure your vaccination is up to date before travelling!

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For any questions, please contact Emmanuelle Guebo directly at emmanuelle.guebo@wikimedia.ci and Evrard Aka : evrardaka@gmail.com.

The event is organised by Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group in partnership with Făgăraș Research Institute and hosted by Babeș-Bolyai University through its Faculty of European Studies, Office for Open Science, Centre for Students with Disabilities, and the Doctoral School “History. Culture. Civilisation.”

What is the Wikimedia CEE Meeting?

Wikimedia CEE Meeting is the flagship annual conference uniting volunteer editors, tech developers, cultural heritage (GLAM) partners, and community organisers across the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. Since its inaugural edition in Belgrade in 2012, the gathering has served as the core engine for cross-border cooperation in the region—driving initiatives like CEE Spring, multilingual translation drives, and shared strategies to safeguard cultural heritage and linguistic diversity across Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and sister projects.

Why CEE Meeting 2026 Matters More Than Ever

Held under the slogan “CEE Beyond the Crossroads,” the 2026 conference represents a strategic turning point for knowledge communities in the region: for years, CEE digital spaces have navigated complex geopolitical volatility, digital disinformation, rapid technological disruption, and linguistic fragmentation. Rather than merely pausing to react to external pressures, CEE 2026 marks the collective transition toward intentional empowerment, regional resilience, and shared infrastructure.

By deeply embedding the event into the academic ecosystem of Babeș-Bolyai University—partnering with university bodies dedicated to open science and historical research—the conference bridges the gap between grassroots Wikipedia volunteers and institutional research.

The conference will welcome Bernadette Meehan, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Wikimedia Foundation, who assumed leadership of the global organisation in January 2026. Her in-person participation underlines the strategic importance of Central and Eastern European communities in shaping the global movement’s future policies, equity goals, and technological transitions.

Key Novelties and Program Highlights

Accessibility and Radical Inclusion at the Core: In direct partnership with Babeș-Bolyai University’s Centre for Students with Disabilities, CEE 2026 places physical and digital accessibility at the forefront of its logistics and venue design, setting a new benchmark for regional Wikimedia conferences.

The “Buddy System” for Grassroots Integration: To lower barriers for first-time attendees, emerging communities, and youth participants, the 2026 edition implements a structured peer-onboarding buddy program pairing new contributors with experienced delegates throughout the event.

Event Details

• Dates: September 18–20, 2026
• Host City: Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, Romania
• Main Venue: Babeș-Bolyai University (Faculty of European Studies)
• Official Information & Program Hub: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2026

Media & Inquiries Contact: wmceem2026@icf-fri.org

After discovering the Wikimedia platform, I began my journey of promoting and preserving my community’s language, Kadazandusun, through my participation in Wiki Club Kent. The club gave me an opportunity to learn more about the Wikimedia movement and to contribute to the world of free knowledge.

Today, that journey continues with the same mission. Although my time as a student and as a Wiki Club member has come to an end, my passion for contributing remains. I hope to take the Kadazandusun language further into the world as part of this community.

On 30th August 2026, I had the opportunity to participate in the Malaysian Wikimedia Strategy Summit 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, which brought together Wikimedians and community leaders from diverse backgrounds across Malaysia. For me, this was more than just a conference. It was a space for us to pause, reflect on the journey we have taken so far, and envision where the Malaysian Wikimedia community wants to go next.

From Diverse Communities, One Movement

One of the most meaningful aspects of the conference was the opportunity to meet fellow contributors from various communities, including Kadazandusun, Kimaragang, Malay, Chinese, and others. Each community has its own stories, languages, and challenges. Yet, we share one fundamental belief: knowledge should be accessible to and shared by everyone.

The first session, “Movement”, discussed the role of the Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia in expanding the movement within communities across Malaysia. It also explored ways to build partnerships with educational institutions and other organisations, particularly in areas such as language, culture, tourism, and libraries.

How Do We Bring Communities Together?

The second session, “Society”, and the third session, “Ecosystem”, raised an important question: how can we bring more people into this movement?

Among the ideas shared were editing campaigns, gamification, and recognition for volunteers, as well as approaches that are more closely connected to young people who have the potential to continue contributing to and expanding content across Wikimedia projects.

Programmes such as WikiGap Editathon, Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos, and various edit-a-thons demonstrate that communities can grow when we create opportunities for people to contribute according to their interests and abilities.

Wikimedia is also about more than just Wikipedia. Wikidata, Wikisource, and Wiktionary open up even more opportunities for us to build, connect, and preserve knowledge.

Imagining the Future

The discussion about the future was perhaps the most interesting part of the fourth session, “Future”. Over the next one to five years, the community envisions more editors and more content in the ethnic languages of Sabah and Sarawak, as well as the development of tools that can make contributing easier, such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata applications.

Looking further ahead, over the next ten to fifteen years, the aspirations are even greater: establishing Wiki Clubs in more states and educational institutions, creating physical hubs in Sabah, developing more specialised Wikimedia applications, and using Wikimedia data to support the development of local technology and artificial intelligence.

For me, one of the most important dreams is to see ethnic languages continue to grow as languages of knowledge in the digital world.

Hopes for My Community

As part of the Kadazandusun community, I hope that more young people from my own community will come forward and contribute. We have so many stories, terms, traditional knowledge, history, and cultural heritage that can be shared. Our language should not live only in everyday conversations. It should also live in the digital space.

One Day, One Wake-Up Call

The conference lasted only one day, but it left a much longer-lasting impact on me. I returned home with a wake-up call to become more active and committed to editing than ever before, to create more content and encourage more people from my community to contribute as well.

From Wiki Club, I learned about community.

From community, I learned about the movement.

And through this movement, I began to see the future.

Perhaps our contribution today is only a small edit. But when thousands of people do the same, we are building something much greater: a world of knowledge that can be passed on to future generations.

Thank you, Wikimedia Malaysia, for reminding me that every edit is part of a much larger journey.

In our daily life, there are things we do not notice while they are still around us. A mother tongue can be one of them. We grow up hearing it at home, in conversations with family,  jokes exchanged between neighbours, or stories told before bedtime. We rarely stop to think about how many of our memories are carried by the words we inherit. However, when those words begin to disappear, we do realize that a language is never simply a collection of vocabulary, It is a way of remembering who we are.

I am a Sundanese woman, and Sundanese is part of the memory. 

For me, the question of whether the Sundanese language will continue to live is not merely a linguistic question. It is a deeply personal one. It is connected to the kind of world we will leave behind for the generations that come after us. Will they still be able to read old expressions, understand the stories told by their grandparents, recognize the names of plants and places in their own language? Or they simply have the freedom to say, “This is my language.” 

The world around us, however, is changing rapidly. Most of our everyday lives have moved onto screens. We read, learn, work, socialize, watch videos, and exchange information through digital platforms. Languages meet one another there every second. Some have enormous amounts of content behind them; others appear only occasionally, or not at all.

This is where I began to think differently about the future of Sundanese. Perhaps preserving a language today does not only mean teaching children to speak it at home. It also means making sure the language has a place where knowledge can grow.

Talking about language, a language needs books. It needs stories, dictionaries, photographs, historical records, scientific information, local knowledge, and people willing to write in it. It needs a presence in the spaces where future generations will learn and seek information. Likewise with  Sundanese language, it cannot live on only through documents it also needs a home, the digital world.

From the Old Place to the New Home

Women play a special role and have a particularly meaningful connection to the preservation of the Sundanese language. Within families, women especially mothers and grandmothers have traditionally played an important role in passing down the language and cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. A child may first encounter a Sundanese expression through a conversation with their mother, hear stories from their grandmother, enjoy traditional recipes prepared in the kitchen, or listen to songs sung at home.

However, I do not think women’s role should end there. If the spaces where knowledge is produced are changing, our participation must change with them.

Women should not only be the people who pass culture down within families. They can also become the people who document, interpret, question, and bring it into new forms. For example, a traditional story can become a digital story, a recipe can become an audio-visual record, and a forgotten word can be added to a dictionary. Moreover, a local historical site can be photographed or documented, and manuscript can be digitised. Therefore, a piece of knowledge that once existed only in someone’s memory can be placed in a space where others can find it. None of these acts may seem monumental on their own. However, culture is often preserved through small acts repeated over time. This is one reason I became interested in Wikimedia.

Why Women’s Voices Matter

There is another reason why I believe women need to be more visible in this kind of work. Knowledge is never entirely neutral. What ultimately gets documented often depends on what we pay attention to, what we consider important, and whose experiences we consider worthy of being recorded.

If women are absent from the process of documenting knowledge, some aspects of women’s lives may remain underrepresented. Consider the knowledge traditionally associated with women’s everyday lives: household practices, food preparation, childcare, textile traditions, local healing knowledge, oral histories, family stories, and countless forms of labour that rarely appear in formal historical records. These are not insignificant pieces of knowledge. They are part of culture.

When women document them, they are not simply preserving “women’s topics.” They are expanding the picture of what a community considers worth remembering. This is why digital literacy among women matters to me. It is not only about learning how to use technology. It is also about having the confidence to participate in the production of knowledge.

A woman does not have to be a historian, linguist, programmer, or academic to contribute. She can start with the things closest to her: a word her grandmother used to say, a family recipe still kept at home, a photograph of an old building in her village, or a story about the place where she grew up. Even a plant whose Sundanese name is slowly being forgotten, or a manuscript she comes across in a local collection. These can become a starting point, that may seem small and ordinary, but when they are documented and shared, they can become part of something much larger, a broader body of knowledge.

Finding Sundanese in Wikimedia

My involvement in Wikimedia projects, particularly through my work with Wikimedia Bandung, has given me a different understanding about the definition of contribution to the knowledge.

Wikimedia is often associated with Wikipedia, but the movement is much broader than an encyclopedia. Its projects create spaces where people can contribute knowledge in different forms: articles, dictionaries, quotations, historical texts, photographs, audio, video, and structured data.

For languages like Sundanese, these spaces matter. Sundanese has a long literary and cultural history. It has manuscripts, oral traditions, local histories, traditional knowledge, place names, food traditions, agricultural knowledge, and countless words and expressions that cannot be replaced by other languages. For this reason, it needs people who are willing to make that knowledge accessible to others, because a rich cultural heritage does not automatically make its way into the digital world. 

For me, there is something deeply meaningful about that idea. Knowledge does not have to belong to one person. It can be shared. Through Wikimedia Bandung, I’am lucky to be able to meet so many people, from different backgrounds: students, teachers, university lecturers, and members of the wider public. What connects as is not necessarily the same profession or academic background, but a willingness to contribute something to the commons of human knowledge. 

A Language Needs More Than Speakers

A language can remain alive and spoken at home while, at the same time, gradually becoming less visible in the wider public space. This distinction becomes increasingly important in the digital age.

Imagine a young Sundanese speaker is searching online for information about a traditional plant, a historical figure, an old manuscript, a village, or a cultural practice. If the information is available only in another language, the young person may still find an answer, but the connection between the subject and their own linguistic world becomes weaker.

Now, imagine that the same information is available in Sundanese. The difference is not merely linguistic. It says that the language is capable of carrying knowledge. It tells the speakers that their language is not only something used at home or in informal conversation. It can also be a language for history, science, education, culture, and contemporary knowledge.

That is why I see Wikimedia projects as more than digital platforms. They can become places where a language proves that it is still alive.

Wikipedia can provide encyclopedic knowledge in Sundanese. Wiktionary can help document vocabulary. Wikisource can preserve texts that have entered the public domain. Wikimedia Commons can hold photographs, recordings, videos, and other media. Wikidata can connect information in structured forms that can be understood and processed by both humans and machines.

Each project serves a different purpose. Together, they create a kind of digital ecosystem. Besides, within that ecosystem, a language such as Sundanese can find room to breathe.

Wikimedia Bandung and the Work of Continuity

This is where the work of Wikimedia Bandung becomes meaningful to me. The community organizes training sessions, educational activities, cultural documentation programs, documentation of traditional Sundanese food, and projects documenting local flora and fauna using their Sundanese names, along with various other initiatives that encourage people to contribute to Wikimedia projects. These activities create opportunities for people who may never have previously imagined themselves as “knowledge contributors” to take part.

I have seen how a workshop can turn curiosity into contribution. Someone who comes simply to learn can grow into an editor; a student can begin documenting cultural sites; a teacher can bring Wikimedia projects into the classroom. A volunteer may even discover that the language they use every day also has a place as a language of digital knowledge.

The process does not happen overnight. A language is not “saved” by one grand act, but through many small contributions: an article, a photograph, a word, a recording, a correction, or a story that is finally documented. Over time, these pieces become part of something larger.

Perhaps that is what I love most about Wikimedia. Something meaningful and far-reaching does not always come from large institutions, but from the care of ordinary people who are willing to share what they know.

Wikimedia Projects: Keeping the Light Alive

Sometimes I imagine language as a light. It does not disappear simply because one person stops using it, but a light needs someone’s willing to keep it burning.

The Sundanese language has endured because generations before us continued to use, write, sing, teach, and carry it from one generation to the next. Our responsibilities may be different, but the principle remains the same, we have new tools. We have new spaces and we live in a digital world that offers far greater possibilities for sharing knowledge than ever before.

The question is: will we use those spaces?

For me, contributing to Wikimedia is one small answer.

I do not imagine that a single article, dictionary entry, or photograph can determine the future of a language. However I believe that thousands of small contributions can change how visible a language is and perhaps, more importantly, change how the speakers see themselves.

A language which presents on the internet is a language that can be found. A language capability of carrying knowledge is a language that can continue to grow. A culture documented by the people who live within it has a greater chance of being understood from its own perspective.

That is why I hope to see more Sundanese women entering the digital world, not only as users, but also as contributors. We can start with simple things: writing about what we know, documenting what is around us, adding a word, sharing a story or photograph, or improving an article that needs correction. When we know it, why don’t we help others by doing the same?

All of these things may seem simple. Yet, perhaps cultural continuity has always been built in this way not through grand declarations, but through people who quietly decide that something they have inherited is worth carrying forward into the future.

As a Sundanese woman, I want to be one of them. I want the Sundanese language to remain present not only in the voices of our families, but also in the places where future generations go to seek knowledge. I want the language to remain visible, read, heard, and discovered not as a language trapped in the past, but as a living language moving toward the future.

In conclusion, perhaps this is how we can keep the light of Sundanese culture alive in the digital age: not simply by protecting what has been passed down to us, but by creating new spaces for it to continue shining. Wikimedia provides one such space. We can contribute Sundanese-language articles to Wikipedia, write and publish books on Wikibooks, add vocabulary to Wiktionary, help transcribe and digitize Sundanese manuscripts on Wikisource, or document Sundanese cultural heritage through Wikimedia Commons. There are many other ways to contribute. What matters most is that we do not remain mere spectators in the digital world, but take part in shaping the knowledge we will pass on to future generations.

Weekly highlight

• The Future Audiences team has started a discussion on English Wikipedia about a proposed new experiment to show a temporary notice about the new Google Preferred Sources feature to Wikipedia readers coming from Google. The experiment is to test whether this notice makes visitors come back to Wikipedia more often. Preferred Sources feature lets users choose websites they trust so Google can highlight content from those sources more prominently in Search and AI experiences. We are interested in testing this on other languages that Google supports and would welcome assistance with starting conversations on other wikis. If interested, please reach out to Future Audiences on the talk page.

Updates for editors

• The chat platform Discord is releasing a new self-service framework that websites can use to specify how their links should look when shared on Discord. The Future Audiences team is planning to start using this new framework to improve how Wikipedia links look when shared on Discord, giving better attribution and credit to contributors. The link appearance and behavior won’t change in the first phase of this project as we want to first collect some baseline data to assess the impact of future changes. However, if community members who are active on Discord spot any issues, they can reach out on Phabricator or Metawiki.
• The Reader Growth team will be running an experiment to test whether compacting article lead sections on mobile with the addition of a “read more” button improves reader retention. The test will begin on September 17 on Arabic, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Wikipedias and will run for four weeks.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming week. [1]
•  View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was returning an HTTP 500 error and could not be reached, has now been fixed. [2]

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikimedia Commons links tables need to update their code to connect to the new x4 database cluster. The links tables have been moved from the s4 cluster to x4, and will no longer receive updates on s4. The page and redirect tables remain available on both clusters. A wiki replica for the x4 cluster will be set up afterwards. The change is being made because the s4 cluster has grown too large to operate efficiently. You can read more.
•  Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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Hosted by Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group in partnership with Făgăraș Research Institute and Babeș-Bolyai University (UBB), this year’s regional conference marks a defining step forward for one of the most interconnected community networks in the Wikimedia movement. 

Under the slogan “CEE Beyond the Crossroads,” the meeting signals a profound shift: moving past reactive survival amid geopolitical and digital fragmentation toward long-term regional resilience, institutional empowerment, and intentional cooperation. 

The Novelties Shaping This Edition

Every CEE Meeting brings its own flavour, but the 2026 edition introduces several institutional, academic, and structural firsts:

• Deep Academic & Open Science Integration: Unlike many regional conferences held in commercial venues or isolated auditoriums, WMCEEM 2026 is co-embedded in the fabric of Babeș-Bolyai University. With direct leadership from UBB’s Office for Open Science, the Centre for Students with Disabilities, and the Doctoral School “History. Culture. Civilisation,” the conference directly bridges Wikimedia projects with higher education and scientific research. 
• Concurrent “Open Science at UBB” Exhibition: A dedicated spin-off exhibition runs alongside the conference sessions, highlighting collaborative initiatives and open science campaigns between Wikimedia communities and academia since 2018. 
• A Re-Engineered Inclusivity Model: For 2026, the organisers introduced a data-informed delegate allocation policy. Rather than default seat quotas, spots were allocated based on four-year participation trends, actively reserving dedicated tracks and travel support for emerging communities, minority linguistic groups, and underrepresented regional dialects across Romania, Moldova, and neighbouring borders. 
• The Community Buddy System: Recognising the recurring challenge of integrating new volunteers into long-standing regional networks, WMCEEM 2026 institutionalised a formal Buddy System to pair first-time attendees with experienced contributors before arriving in Cluj. 
• Visual Identity by Dan Perjovschi: Reflecting the region’s spirit of commentary and grassroots voice, the official visuals feature contributions by renowned Romanian contemporary artist Dan Perjovschi.

A Journey of Connection – Short History of the CEE Meeting

CEE Meeting began as a shared realisation. During an informal side-meetup at Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, community leaders from across the region discovered they faced striking commonalities: 

1. Shared cultural and post-communist historical heritage. 
2. Common copyright dilemmas (e.g., handling orphan works and public domain shifts from dissolved state entities). 
3. Smaller or isolated language communities operating with limited local philanthropic NGO infrastructure. 

That conversation led to the inaugural Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2012 in Belgrade, Serbia, which drew around 45 pioneers. In the decade and a half since, the conference has evolved through distinct epochs: 

Cluj-Napoca Compared: How 2026 Distinguishes Itself

While recent editions like Istanbul (2024) and Thessaloniki (2025) set high benchmarks for scale, regional reach, and operational governance, Cluj-Napoca represents a pivot toward depth and integration: 

• Campus vs. Hotel/Conference Centre: Previous conferences often operated in self-contained hotels; WMCEEM 2026 places participants inside a vibrant academic campus at Babeș-Bolyai University’s Faculty of European Studies. 
• Affiliate Evolution: In earlier years, the focus was often “how do we form user groups or join CEE Spring?” In 2026, discussions focus on ecosystem sustainability: how hubs, chapters, and the Wikimedia Foundation interact as peers, and how small user groups can operate multi-layered university partnerships without relying solely on large, centralised grants. 
• Accessibility as a Standard: Working together with UBB’s Centre for Students with Disabilities, Cluj sets an intentional standard for venue navigation, session materials, and digital inclusion. 

Practical Sessions, Workshops, and Strategy Panels

While keynotes set the vision, the heart of WMCEEM has always beaten in its interactive working spaces. In 2026, the schedule heavily favours hands-on collaboration over one-directional slide decks:

1. Hands-on Technical & GLAM Workshops

Hands-on rooms give Wikimedians space to solve practical dilemmas in real time: Wikidata modelling for regional cultural heritage, automated tool building, and AI-assisted workflows for smaller language Wikipedias. Attendees don’t just hear about tools—they test and debug them together.

2. Strategic Panels on Movement Governance

With global movement landscape shifts, sessions such as the “Future of the Ecosystem of Movement Organisations” bring volunteers and affiliate leaders into active dialogue with the Wikimedia Foundation and the CEE Hub. These panels ensure regional voices actively sculpt funding mechanisms, affiliate lifecycles, and hub governance rather than adapting to decisions after the fact. 

3. Replicable Capacity Building

Interactive presentations—ranging from WikiDonne’s accredited university internship models and Moodle courses to minority-language documentation clinics—provide actionable playbooks. A participant from a small user group in the Balkans or the South Caucasus can leave a 90-minute workshop with an adaptable syllabus ready to implement at their local university back home. 

Looking Beyond the Crossroads

As the CEE region navigates evolving digital landscapes, shifts in search platforms, and complex regional histories, Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026 reaffirms that the movement’s greatest asset remains its community of practice. 

By bringing together grassroots editors, university leadership, and cross-border organisers under one roof in Cluj-Napoca, CEE Wikimedians aren’t merely waiting to see where the road leads—they are building the path forward. 

Follow conference updates, session notes, and documentation on the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026 Meta-Wiki page and on Wikimedia Commons. 

One of the biggest shifts for me came when I began working through topics connected to countries such as Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The issue was not always that information did not exist. In many cases, there was meaningful, valuable content, but the references were difficult to access, difficult to verify across languages, or difficult to adapt to the standards expected on English Wikipedia. That challenged one of my earlier assumptions. I had often thought that content gaps were mostly about missing knowledge. During this fellowship, I saw more clearly that they are also about language barriers, discoverability, and the limits of the tools we rely on to make knowledge usable.

The Gap in the Gap

This realization matters to me because it changes how I understand Wikimedia itself. When a topic from an underrepresented context is missing, the problem is not always unwilling contributors or lack of interest. Sometimes the knowledge exists, but the path to verifying and presenting it is much harder. For communities working on African subjects, this creates a painful tension. We are invited by the movement’s mission to bring more of the world’s knowledge into view, yet we often meet policies that are better designed for already well-documented contexts than for places where records are fragmented across languages, institutions, or formats.

Remote Learning Has its Limits

Another lesson from this fellowship was more personal. I learned that teaching and mentoring new contributors online is much harder than I had admitted to myself. In physical community spaces, I have often been able to read confusion, hesitation, or excitement in real time and respond with patience. Online, much of that disappears. You cannot easily tell when someone is lost, distracted, or quietly discouraged. That forced me to rethink not only my patience, but also my teaching style. I now see that remote mentorship requires more intentional feedback, more spaced learning, and more supportive structures than I once assumed.

What stays with me, then, is not only a sharper understanding of Wikimedia’s knowledge gaps, but also a more grounded sense of what meaningful contribution requires. Pan-African work cannot be treated as if every context is equally searchable, equally documented, or equally legible to global systems of verification. If we truly care about knowledge equity, then we need better tools, more contextual flexibility, and communities that are supported not just to contribute, but to persist.

Conclusion

As I look ahead, I know I will approach multilingual projects and remote programs differently. What excites me most is the possibility of a future where Africans overcome unfavorable policies instead of avoiding them and, in the process, allowing content gaps to widen.

This Diff post is part of the African Wikipedian Alliance (AWA) Fellowship Programme 2026, an initiative supporting African Wikimedians to contribute to closing knowledge gaps across Wikimedia projects while strengthening their skills, experiences, and communities. Through the fellowship, fellows contribute to Wikimedia projects, engage with knowledge gaps across African contexts, and share reflections on their learning and experiences throughout the programme.

The AWA Fellowship Programme is coordinated by Code for Africa and delivered in collaboration with partners supporting the growth and development of African Wikimedia communities.