Building a Living Archive of Karo Culture on Wikimedia

How can a culture continue to thrive in the digital age? Through WikiKaro, the Wikimedia community and the Karo community worked together to document traditional dances, cuisine, language, and other cultural heritage across Wikimedia projects. The result is more than hundreds of freely licensed media files and dozens of new articles, it is the beginning of a Living Archive, where cultural knowledge continues to grow through community contributions. Bridging the Knowledge Gap Indonesia is home to hundreds of ethnic groups, each with unique languages, traditions, and cultural heritage. However, not all cultures are equally represented in the digital world. Karo culture, one of the indigenous cultures of North Sumatra, remains underrepresented across Wikimedia projects. Freely licensed photographs of Karo cultural heritage are still limited. Articles on Wikipedia covering Karo traditions, history, and cultural practices remain relatively few, while structured knowledge in Wikidata and language resources in Wiktionary are also sparse. As a result, reliable and openly accessible information about Karo culture is often difficult to find—not only for researchers and educators, but also for young Karo people who wish to learn more about their own heritage. Another challenge is that many local communities and cultural practitioners are still unfamiliar with Wikimedia as a platform for preserving and sharing knowledge. Without active community participation, much local knowledge remains undocumented and inaccessible to a wider audience. Recognizing these challenges, WikiKaro was created to build a Living Archive, an open and collaborative effort to document, preserve, and expand access to Karo cultural heritage through Wikimedia projects. About WikiKaro WikiKaro is a collaborative initiative that aims to improve open access to knowledge about Karo culture through Wikimedia. By combining cultural documentation with Wikimedia editing workshops, the project encourages local communities to preserve and share their cultural heritage under free licenses, making it accessible to people around the world. The project began by working closely with Karo cultural communities and practitioners to identify cultural elements that should be documented. Field documentation focused on traditional dances such as Piso Surit Dance, Lima Serangkai Dance, and Gundala-Gundala Dance, as well as traditional clothing and Karo culinary heritage. The resulting photographs and media files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under free licenses, ensuring they can be reused for education, research, and cultural preservation. Beyond documentation, WikiKaro organized WikiLatih workshops to introduce participants to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wiktionary. Participants learned how to upload media, improve articles, create structured data, and contribute to free knowledge. The workshops concluded with collaborative editing sessions, where participants created new articles, improved existing content, and enriched Wikimedia projects with information about Karo culture. Through this process, participants became not only users of knowledge but also contributors to the global free knowledge movement. Outcomes and Impact WikiKaro made meaningful contributions across four Wikimedia projects while also strengthening local participation in open knowledge. During the project, we uploaded 491 media files to Wikimedia Commons, documenting various aspects of Karo culture, including traditional dances, clothing, culinary heritage, and cultural activities. On Wikidata, contributors created and improved 192 items, consisting of 178 new items and 14 expanded items, providing structured knowledge about Karo cultural heritage. On Wiktionary, participants contributed 195 entries, including 120 new entries and 75 improved entries, helping document and preserve Karo vocabulary as part of an open linguistic resource. Meanwhile, Wikipedia benefited from 73 articles, consisting of 33 newly created articles and 40 expanded articles, covering topics related to Karo history, traditions, arts, and culinary heritage. The project’s impact extends beyond these numbers. Through training and mentoring, local community members, many of whom had never contributed to Wikimedia before, gained the skills and confidence to document their own culture and share it with the world. The project also strengthened collaboration between cultural practitioners and Wikimedia contributors, demonstrating how community participation can enrich open knowledge while helping preserve local heritage. The WikiKaro organizing team showcases the project’s journey and impact during the poster exhibition session at WikiNusantara 2026 highlighting community efforts to build a Living Archive of Karo culture on Wikimedia Continuing the Living Archive WikiKaro demonstrates that cultural preservation does not end when a project is completed. Instead, it marks the beginning of an ongoing community effort. Many aspects of Karo culture remain undocumented, including oral traditions, traditional musical instruments, handicrafts, local knowledge, folklore, and everyday cultural practices. These represent opportunities for future contributors including community members, researchers, photographers, students, and Wikimedians to continue expanding the Living Archive. The project also offers a model that can be replicated by other communities across Indonesia. By combining community participation, cultural documentation, Wikimedia training, and open licensing, local heritage can become part of the global commons while remaining rooted in the communities that sustain it. Through Wikimedia, Karo culture becomes more than a collection of historical records. It becomes a living body of open knowledge that anyone can access, learn from, improve, and share. As more people contribute, the Living Archive will continue to grow, ensuring that Karo cultural heritage remains visible, accessible, and relevant for future generations. Can you help us translate this article? In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out? Start translation