​Meet UTP electrical engineering alumnus Dody Ismoyo, one of the world’s top 200 most active English-language Wikipedia editors

 

Dody Ismoyo with Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia
@ Wikimedia Conference 2017, Germany - 31 Mar 2017

“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it,” said American journalist Margaret Fuller. For one Dody Ismoyo, the candles are from people worldwide thanks to his contributions to the well-known online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Founder and president of the Wikimedia Com­mu­nity User Group Malaysia, Dody is one of the most active Wikipedia contributors in the world. As of press time, Dody has created almost 2,200 new Wikipedia articles, uploaded nearly 2,400 photos to Wikimedia Commons, and made over 200,000 edits in Wikipedia, making him the 180th most active English-language Wikipedia editor in the world. For comparison, at last count, there are more than 123,000 active Wikipedia editors worldwide.

UTP offers an International Environment

Currently working as an application technology engineer in Johor, Dody was born in Medan, Indonesia, to an oil engineer father and a lawyer mother. One of seven students selected to further his studies in Electrical and Electronics Engineering under the Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS scholarship, he applied for the scholarship after learning about it through a local newspaper, having heard warm reviews from his mother and cousins who studied in Malaysia years ago.

Like his predecessors, he thoroughly enjoyed his time in UTP. “Learning in a more international environment at UTP taught me to be more adaptive when it comes to dealing and working with people from various backgrounds. When I went to Sydney to continue my master's degree, I was more well-prepared in terms of social skills.”

UTP is also where Dody started to delve into the world of Wikipedia.

“I didn't have a full understanding about some particular theory for an assignment so I turned to Wikipedia,” he explains. “I was surprised that each article in Wikipedia is so interconnected to each other. For every single difficult-to-understand terminology, you can always find a full written article just to explain that jargon. Wikipedia changed my thinking about learning. The more I read information from Wikipedia, the more I longed to contribute back to this free knowledge movement.”

Multiple topics, multicultural representation

Dody edited his first article in 2009 and wrote his first one in 2012. As he familiarised himself with navigating Wikipedia, he went on to explore topics beyond electrical engineering topics. Ac­cord­ing to Dody’s pro­file page, he has tackled top­ics rang­ing from pol­i­tics in Tai­wan to tourist at­trac­tions in Malaysia such as mu­se­ums, theme parks and religious places.

From there, Dody further expanded his coverage to subjects based on his own observations. One topic that has become close to his heart is accessibility for people with disabilities, as he noticed a lack of accurate information about this topic in Malaysia. To improve factual accuracy, Dody visited various public places around Malaysia and took photos of establishments that provided accessibility for people with disabilities, especially disabled parking lots and wheelchair ramps. He even organised a Wikipedia meetup at a disabled home in Johor in 2018.

He says, “All these efforts are done in the hope that the content can serve as a comprehensive database for people with disability to have ease in their mind, knowing which places they can comfortably go around Malaysia and that there will be special dedicated facilities to help them to move around.”

During the weekends, Dody and his team would teach students about the mechanism of Wikipedia and how to optimally use it with hopes that they will grow and continue to write and edit on the website, ultimately improving and creating more new articles in other languages besides English. These languages include Malay, Chinese, Tamil, the West Coast Bajau language from Sabah and the Semai language from the indigenous Pahang Semai tribe. “Our group is trying to engage with the local community to get input contributions so that those language versions of Wikipedia will be made available one day to the public,” he shares.

Making human knowledge available to every person

Dody’s work for Wikipedia has not gone unrecognised. The group has been recog­nised by the Wikimedia Foun­da­tion and early last year it was reg­is­tered with The Reg­istry of So­ci­eties Malaysia un­der the Home Af­fairs Min­istry.

 

Wikimedia Conference 2017 Group Photo @ Berlin, Germany - 1 Apr 2017 

Personally, Dody has attended two Wikimedia conferences in 2017 and 2019 and had the opportunity to present his IEEE technical papers in Hong Kong and Japan, which were about Wikipedia in electrical engineering education as he used Wikipedia heavily to build up the content database. Most recently, he was a keynote speaker representing the Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia at a joint event (online-based due to COVID-19) between Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia and the Swedish Embassy in Kuala Lumpur.

Though the group has about 50 mem­bers, Dody said only ten are edit­ing con­sis­tently now. Most people who are interested in becoming editors eventually drop off because of the lack of monetary reward. As a non-profit, Wikipedia re­lies on do­na­tions from read­ers to run the site, as it doesn’t host ads for rev­enue. Vol­un­teers do not get paid for their work, as the do­na­tions are mostly used for main­tain­ing servers, le­gal ser­vices and tech sup­port, but are united in a common desire to make human knowledge available to every person on the planet.

Dody’s writing for Wikipedia is his way of teaching the whole world about topics that interest him. Even from his high school years, he would tutor his sisters and friends whenever they needed guidance in certain subjects. “I’ve always believed that life is more than getting a good paying job, having a family, and retiring. Even when life and work are doing well, I still want to contribute to society. My Wikipedia experiences gained me many international friends, self-fulfillment and satisfaction that money can never buy.”

^{Published: 29 September 2021}