He associates himself with Albert Camus’ Meursault; an outsider, a stranger. But to more than a thousand Wikipedia Indonesia collaborators, Revo Arka Giri Soekatno is quite a legend.
Courtesy of Revo Arkagiri
People dubbed him the father of Wikimedia Indonesia, an offline forum of the free encyclopedia website. The man himself sees what he’s done as a mere productive pastime.
Whether he realizes it or not, the 34-year-old is the engine that kick-started a snowballing collaborative movement.
“Actually when I started, I didn’t realize that I was starting a community,” Revi — as he is called by his friends — said in an email interview, adding that his Wikipedia “addiction” started in 2003.
Addiction probably best explains why Revi, a Netherlands resident, and 1,400 active Wikipedia users in Indonesia keep doing what they do, without personal gain, be it financially or in any other form. It is the feeling of having contributed something for others that fuels them.
“It was a productive pastime. It felt good to be able to write an encyclopedic entry in your own language and to disseminate it on the Internet,” Revi said.
In 2004, using the nickname Revoarkagiri, Revi started writing, spending hours in front of his computer building dozens of Wikipedia entries. His name was first listed in the website’s log contributing to an entry on Israel.
“At that moment I was eager to start contributing to the Indonesian version; however it hadn’t been set up yet. Instead, the Malaysian version was already there.”
Back then, several Indonesians had already written some entries in the wiki-based website initiated by Jimmy Wales in 2001, but they wanted to remain anonymous, Revi said.
“There were only a few other contributors. But it started to snowball at the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006,” he said, adding that he had to register under a different nick — Meursault2004 — as his initial account had mysteriously disappeared.
Monitoring the increasing number of entries in Indonesian written by Revi, the Wikimedia headquarter appointed him the first Indonesian administrator.
He was invited as an Indonesian representative at the global Wikimania gathering in Frankfurt in 2005.
Several other fellow activists took turns the year after in similar events, establishing Indonesia’s place among the global radar of Wikipedia collaborators.
Currently, Wikipedia Indonesia ranks third in terms of entries and users in Asia with more than 116,000 entries and around 165,000 registered users.
“We are currently a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation,” he said proudly.
He has reason to be proud in seeing what he initiated grow into one of the major collaborative movements in the country.
“A collaborative movement is basically good to share knowledge and be idealistic to reach a neutral point of view. However, if the community becomes too big, the danger is that it becomes a reflection of the society itself,” he said.
“We must ensure that the spirit of cooperation stays alive.”
Revi remains a role model for fellow contributors by continuing to write new entries or editing existing ones.
He has so far written more than 26,000 entries — a majority of which he humbly claimed to be a stub or a start-up unrefined entry —and edited more than 13,000 others. With the number of entries he’s written, Revi had contributed almost a quarter of the current total of entries in Wikipedia Indonesia.
Doing a little math, he wrote on average of 12 entries a day. And remember, writing for Wikipedia is not like writing a diary. It resembles more academic writing than the more casual, self-indulgent style for blogging.
“I find it more rewarding than writing a blog. A blog is just a personal opinion while an entry on an encyclopedia is a greater contribution to the dissemination of knowledge,” he said.
Yet, looking at the entries he wrote, perhaps Revi did had some self-indulgent moments while writing Wikipedia entries. His articles reflect his interest in linguistics, languages, letters, literature, history and philosophy.
Revi’s main interest is old Javanese literature. He recently finished his doctoral dissertation at the University of Leiden, researching the philology of ancient Javanese script Kidung Tantri Kediri.
No wonder then, that part of his project at Wikipedia Indonesia is developing entries in Javanese. He even translated the whole interface of MediaWiki software into Javanese.
Being almost always away from his cultural roots as he moved from one city to another following his father, Revi seems to want to stay grounded by studying his ancestors’ cultural legacy.
He spent most of his life in the Netherlands, finishing most of his education there, from junior high until today.
Revi said no matter how long one stays in a foreign country, it’ll never feel like home.
“In the near future, I‘m planning to go back to Indonesia and perhaps I can teach at a university.”
1 comment:
Revo seems like such a nice guy. It's too bad that he's laboring away for an ethically bankrupt organization, the Wikimedia Foundation.
Post a Comment