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span class="caption">Delivering stories: Managing editor of kumparan.com, Anggi Kusumadewi (top, second right), gives a presentation on the news portal during a press conference for Project Ganesha at GoetheHaus Jakarta in Menteng, Central Jakarta.

With hoaxes and other falsehoods swirling online, finding the right information can prove to be tricky at times.

Even if you are on the right track in pursuing an issue, conflicting statements from people that are held in esteem can throw you right off again. What is more worrying is that hoaxes have been infamously used as political smear campaigns both locally and internationally.

Because of the dominating use of social media and a growing distrust of mainstream media, the public seems particularly vulnerable to falsehoods. Social media sites like Facebook or Twitter create an environment where it is very easy to create a bubble in which users only see what they want to see.

One of the ways to tackle hoaxes is by having adequate knowledge and analytical thinking skill. As netizens hit the search button of their preferred search engine, they will likely feed their thirst for information with whatever appears at the top of the resulting page. This is where we usually find the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the local iteration of which is run by Wikimedia Indonesia.  

By writing and uploading articles in the Indonesian language, it aims to make the site more accessible to Indonesians.

“We have a huge demand from Indonesian speakers to read content on Wikipedia,” says Ivonne Kristiani, deputy chair of Wikimedia Indonesia.

In February alone, Wikipedia Indonesia received 18 million unique visitors.

“In 2006, only 18,000 articles were available on Wikipedia Indonesia, and now it’s 420,000,” said Wikimedia Indonesia co-founder Ivan Lanin.

However, while the number of articles might be growing rapidly, several problems remain with regards to subject matter.

“Now, the focus of the articles on Wikipedia is popular culture, like the characters of comics and things like that,” Ivan said.

Furthermore, the site has trouble attracting contributors to help expand its Indonesian language content.

Kumparan.com managing editor Anggi Kusumadewi acknowledged that Wikipedia Indonesia was still very limited, despite the urgent need for reliable sources of information online.  

“Nowadays, there are a lot of hoaxes, and with the political events ahead, it is very important to raise the quality of the content in every media, not just Wikipedia,” she said.

To achieve that, Wikimedia Indonesia recently teamed up with Goethe-Institut Indonesia to create Project Ganesha, a writing competition on social sciences and Germany for Indonesian Wikipedia that ran from September to December 2017. In total, 1,439 participants contributed 4,062 articles on topics ranging from democracy and sociology, to civil rights and the economy.

Ivonne explained that information on such topics can usually only be found in academic literature, which is costly and difficult to access. The project aimed to help make this information easily accessible to the public, and in language that everyone can understand.

“We both strongly believe in the importance of free access to knowledge, of free access to understandable knowledge,” said Nico Sandfuchs, head of information services at the Goethe-Institut.

“We need gateways to knowledge that can be understood by everyone, despite the educational background of the people that consume the knowledge.”

The winner of the competition, I Wayan Nadi Antara from Bandung, West Java, believes that the contributions he and the other participants had made would help combat hoaxes.

“I think Wikipedia is playing an important role [in fighting hoaxes], because when we search for keywords on Google, the first link that appears is Wikipedia,” he said.

While Nadi believes that netizens would recognize a hoax when it is not corroborated by Wikipedia, or at least doubt the information, Anggi is not as optimistic. She contends that social media users were not really interested in finding out whether what they had read was accurate.

“They don’t look for the truth, they just read what they like,” she said.

Ivan agrees that Wikimedia Indonesia’s work would be a long-term process, adding that there needed to be a change in culture, in which netizens become more critical and don’t just believe everything they see or read on social media.

While his foundation may not be able to make a direct impact, it can raise awareness on what a neutral and informative article looks like, Ivan said.

“People have to learn to differentiate between a good source and a bad source. That’s where Wikipedia will help.”  

— The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post

— Photos by Goethe Institut