When people think about Wikimedia projects, most only know the world’s largest online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Many do not know that Wikipedia has dozens of sister projects, including Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and Wikiquote. One of the lesser-known projects is Wikiquote. It is a collaborative project that collects and preserves notable quotations from famous people, films or series, fiction and non-fiction books, proverbs, and well-known sayings.

In Indonesia, Wikiquote is currently available in three languages, Sundanese, Banjar, and Gorontalo. In Wikimedia Bandung Community, we believe that community collaboration is essential to enriching Wikiquote’s content and introducing the project to more people. With this goal in mind, we launched WikiSuarana, a community initiative to enrich the Sundanese Wikiquote with quotations related to memorable events and popular trends from 2025.

Project outcomes

WikiSuarana project was carried out by four members of Wikimedia Bandung community: Hasnanf, Raflinoer32, Zulaihamaryam, and Sonofbrahma from March to May 2026. Together, we created 224 Wikiquote articles featuring quotations related to events that took place throughout 2025. Each team member contributed 56 articles to Sundanese Wikiquote.

In addition to our work on Wikiquote, we also contributed to Sundanese Wikipedia by creating 56 articles about notable events from 2025. We know that many Sundanese speakers still use Sundanese Wikipedia as a source of information. By enriching Wikipedia with these articles and linking them to the related Wikiquote pages, we make it easier for readers to discover and explore our collection of quotations on Sundanese Wikiquote.

Community outreach through training and meets up

Community outreach for Wikisuarana was carried out during the month of April 2026, consisting of a series of training and meet-up activities. As a warm-up activity, in the first week of April, we conducted a community meet-up to edit on Sundanese Wikipedia together focusing on creating new articles regarding remarkable events that happened throughout the year 2025 and the notable figures related to it. This event was attended by 13 participants, both online and offline, which created 14 new articles on Sundanese Wikipedia. By starting WikiSuarana with this thematic edit activity, it was expected to provide a thematic context regarding the purpose of this project, which is to document remarkable events and notable figures in Sundanese Wiki projects. Some of the articles that were the results of this event, for example Tambang Grasberg, Satelit Nusantara Lima, and Sri Rejeki Isman.

On April 18, the Asia-Africa Conference is annually commemorated in Bandung, since the city was the first host of the conference back then in 1955. On that day this year, we conducted a Wikiquote training activity partnering with an independent library in Bandung, which carried out the theme of anti-colonialism spirit. In this activity, we focused on training new contributors to edit and create new quotation articles on Sundanese Wikiquote regarding anti-colonial figures, anti-colonial literatures, and those related to the Asia-Africa Conference. The training was attended by 13 participants, which created 15 new articles. Hopefully, other than attracting new contributors, this event could be the beginning of a consistent effort to amplify and document the voice of anti-colonial figures through Sundanese Wikiquote. Some of the articles that were the results of this event, for example Behind The Scenes – Story of The Bandung Conference Committee, Teh dan Pengkhianat, and Leila Khaled.

The series of WikiSuarana was concluded with another community meet-up as a continuation of the prior training, which was focused to create and edit quotation articles on Sundanese Wikiquote regarding the theme of anti-colonialism and remarkable events that happened during the year 2025. This event was attended by 11 participants, both online and offline, which was also attended by some of the participants of the previous training event, and produced 14 new articles. Some of the articles that were the results of this event, for example Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Yamin, and Ali Sastroamidjojo.

Lesson learned

Through WikiSuarana project, we all learned two valuable lessons:

The first is the importance of partnerships. As a local community, collaborating with organizations that share our mission is essential to promoting free knowledge, especially about the Sundanese language and culture. These partnerships help introduce Wikimedia projects and our community to a wider audience. During this project, we collaborated with an independent library in Bandung. In the future, we hope to work with more partners to organize Wikimedia activities such as workshops, research projects, and community meetups.

The second lesson is about promotion and outreach. In today’s digital world, many people get information through social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Throughout the project, we created promotional content, from the project launch to activity announcements. However, we learned that relying on just one or two social media platforms is not enough. Recently, Threads has become increasingly popular, and one of our team members found that project posters shared there reached a wider audience and received positive engagement. Based on this experience, Wikimedia Bandung plans to use Threads alongside our other social media channels to promote future Wikimedia activities.

What’s next?

Documenting and amplifying the voices of the people who are part of history is a way to preserve our collective memory. By narrating them in their own voices, hopefully we can make sure that the history being told is honest-to-goodness. Through contributing it to Wiki projects, especially Sundanese Wikiquote, we also hope to be able to preserve them in our mother tongue.

Our plan forward is to keep documenting other voices that are still unheard while also promoting the sister projects of Wikipedia, which already has the Sundanese version, such as Wikiquote. We also plan to reach outward to other parts of West Java to attract many other contributors so that our community can keep growing while also adding much other knowledge to the Wiki projects itself.

Hatur nuhun!