Wikimedia project policy - Cases from Sundanese and Indonesian Wikipedia | #Wikimania2023
Channel: Wikimedia Foundation
Date: 2023-12-01

Wikimedia has [[m:Cross-project policies|Cross-project policies]] but they may not be applied easily by local sysops who rely on more defined policy for a project. Some terms in the existing cross-project policies are vaguely defined, e.g. "vandalism". Lack of a defined policy may lead to critiques of a ruling by a sysop or users using a loophole and stretching their capabilities to exploit. Cases from the Sundanese and Indonesian Wikipedia will be presented.

A policy as being talked here will be focused on day-to-day policies on Wikimedia projects, ranging from policies and guidelines for project content, language, namespace allocation, generally what edits someone can do or cannot do in a Wiki site. The Sundanese Wikipedia regularly experiences behavior such as vanity pages, machine-translated pages being created and then abandoned, or spams or non-encyclopedic content from anons or newly-created accounts. For a sysop to rule a page as worthy of deletion, we need a policy. The lack of such policy in a project with a relatively small community leaves the judgement to the sysops.

That may not pass easily in a bigger project like the Indonesian Wikipedia. Although more policies are available and enacted already, holes and absence are still there. A lot of Indonesian editors translate contents from English Wikipedia with good intentions but varying quality of translation. This leads several users to be banned. Vandalism as stated in the Indonesian Wikipedia policy only happens when the intention to the edit was malicious and the block policy never mentions well-intended behavior warranties a ban. The speaker may throw questions to the attendees and several other examples may be explained if enough time is left during the lecture. Participants/attendees are encouraged to share their ideas of project policies or their experience regarding the topic, not limited to their experience in ESEAP region languages/contributors.

Presenter:  RXerself 

Presentation slide: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_project_policy_-_Cases_from_Sundanese_and_Indonesian_Wikipedia.pdf