 Okay, hello everybody. Oops, let me click play here because now my screen is stuck. Okay, hold on, one moment. Ah, not letting me play the slides. Oh, there we go. Okay, hi everybody. My name is Josh Lim. I am the Wiki Society of the Philippines. I'm currently based in Madrid, Spain, which is the reason why you can see that it is actually nine o'clock. That's nearly 10 o'clock in the morning here. And I actually really wish I could have been there in Singapore. I usually give talks at Wikimania about topics related to the Philippines. So this year I look forward to sharing with you a little story about Philippine Diplomatic Missions on Wikipedia and how you can write them too. This is actually a project that I've been working on for more or less the last 10 years now. And it's really been an exciting journey, especially in the year since the pandemic started where I really started really writing about diplomatic missions on Wikipedia. So as you can see, the title is Wikipedia Diplomacy, precisely because it was through here that we really got engagement with the diplomatic community, especially with the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines and some of their diplomats in some of the missions around the world. This actually you see here in the first slide is the Philippine Embassy in Madrid, which was established in 1951. But let's get on with the show here. So I started writing Wikipedia articles about Philippine Diplomatic Missions in 2013. And this wasn't really a thing that just, I didn't suddenly decide one day I'm going to write about Philippine embassies and consulates. It just started off originally as a small project, initially to write about my time in Poland. I studied in Poland between 2011 and 2012, enjoyed my time with Wikipedia, Wikipedia Polska, for example, while I was there. And then when I came back from Poland, after studying, after integrating myself with the various Wikipedia communities in Central and Eastern Europe, I figured, you know, let's write about some things about the relationship between the Philippines and Poland. And so I ended up writing about this. This is the Philippine Embassy in Warsaw. This is actually not the picture that I took. The picture that I took is uncommon. So you can take a look at it there. This is what the embassy looks like as of, I believe, 2019. But it's been here since 2009. And so this article that you see here on the left, this is what the article originally looked like. It doesn't look like this anymore. And the reason for that is because from 2013, when I first started writing, when I first wrote this article, there was no template for how to write about diplomatic missions. And so there were various ways to write about different embassies and consulates. And in fact, you still see that, you still see that disparate way of writing about this type of article throughout Wikipedia. So for example, embassies of the Philippines are written differently from, let's say, embassies of the United States, embassies of Ukraine, embassies of Indonesia, which actually is one of the templates that I used for writing this article. So on September 24th, 2013, when I first wrote the article on the Philippine Embassy in Warsaw, my template for writing about Philippine diplomatic missions was really US and Indonesian embassies and consulates. And the reason for that is because at the time, those were the countries with arguably the most comprehensive or at least the most structured way of writing articles about embassies and consulates. And in fact, before this article was written, there were only articles about three other Philippine diplomatic missions. And so for context, we only had one-off articles and they weren't that good, to be honest. They were not particularly consistent. They were not well-referenced, nor did they have structured data that we could then import. Well, then again, Wikipedia wasn't really a thing. And it was only starting to become a thing in the early 2010s. And so these articles weren't really that good, to be honest. And which embassies and consulates, then, am I referring to? I'm specifically referring to these three missions. The image on your left, this is the Philippine Center. This is home to the Philippine Consulate General in New York. And actually, the Philippine Consulate General in New York City deserves to have its own article because it has a history. So for example, the Philippine Center, as you see here, this was not the original home of the Philippine Consulate General. Before the Philippine Consulate in New York was based in this building, it was actually based in a mansion that Emelda Marcos, the wife, the mother of the current president of the Philippines, and wife of the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., bought this expensive house on Park Avenue. And that was actually bought with elicit with money that was stolen from the Filipino people. And to make it look legitimate, they based the Philippine Consulate there. And so whenever Emelda would be in New York City, she would host lavish parties in that house. The property has since been sequestered and sold off and the proceeds return to the Philippine government. But right now there isn't even an article about the Philippine Consulate General in New York City. It's one of the projects that I want to work on. Because you have the article about the Philippine Center and it was actually written by a Wikipedia based in New York City. Following that, we have the Philippine Embassy in Washington, DC. This article was written by a Wikipedia in DC and it was part of a project that they had on writing about embassies and consulates to the United States. So this article is not even particularly structured. It's one of the articles that I have not even touched. But I look forward to working on that as well. Currently it's just a long series of paragraphs about the history of the embassy. There's not much about the building itself. The building was built in the 1990s. And so there would be a lot of information about how this building came about. And then at the bottom is the Kudan. This is the former Philippine Embassy to Japan in Tokyo. This is now the residence of the Philippine Ambassador. And so for many, many years, the link Philippine Embassy of the Philippines comma Tokyo actually linked to this building because there was no impetus to write about Philippine embassies and consulates in Japan. And so not until 2021 when I wrote the article. Today, in fact, look, all the countries in blue that you see on the map here, these are countries with Philippine diplomatic missions, embassies, consulates, both, or in the case of Taiwan that you see there in light blue, the Philippine, it's the Taiwan, I'm sorry, it's the Manila Economic Office in Taiwan. So the countries in red that you see here, these are all countries with Wikipedia articles regarding their relating to their embassy or consulate. And much of this work outside of the three that I mentioned earlier were articles that I had written starting in 2013. So I wrote about the embassy in Poland in 2013. For several years, and I really do anything that I figured, okay, I'll start again. Wrote the article on the Philippine Embassy in Tel Aviv in 2018 when I was there for the Glam Wiki Conference. And then throughout the years started writing more about Philippine embassies and consulates and then really took off during the pandemic. And then countries in light blue, these are articles that I had started writing. So the Philippine embassy in New Delhi, the Philippine embassy in Brasilia, the Philippine embassy in Vienna. And then I look forward to writing more as time goes on. It really is dependent on the, it really is dependent actually on the resources that are available, especially online. Whoops. And in fact, now several of these articles have made it to the English Wikipedia as the UNO section, three consulates general and seven embassies. And so what we see here is that a lot, we try to promote these articles. And in fact, a lot of these embassies and consulates have very interesting stories to tell. So for example, the Philippine embassy in Baghdad, the diplomats there agreed, let's all, we will agree to a suicide pact. We will kill each other. We will die together if ISIS decides to invade the embassy at the height of the war between Iraq and the Islamic state in 2015 and 2017. The Philippine embassy in Berlin, one day the Senator Franklin Drillon said, wait a minute, why is the embassy on top of a supermarket? I see sausages, this is embarrassing. So that was quite funny. The Philippine embassy in Cairo, wait a minute, we put, we named the ambassador in 1960, but we have no idea where the embassy was actually established. Normally it's when the ambassador was appointed, so it's 1960, right? And then the Philippine embassy in Buenos Aires, it was the former building that since moved, it used to be a house, a hotel, a retirement home. A former Philip, a diplomat that was once based there, we actually removed all this information because he said it was embarrassing to the consulate. It's like, no, Wikipedia is not censored because he told me, oh, wait, it's not a brothel, so we should remove it. Yeah, no, we're not going to do that. I did not put that it's a brothel because there's no reliable source that points to that accordingly. And so a lot of these consulates and embassies have interesting stories to tell and these stories deserve to be put on Wikipedia. Therefore, since I actually started working on these articles that branched out to other languages too, I am an active editor on the Spanish Wikipedia and one of the few Filipino Wikipedia's have actually write in Spanish. And so we branched out into writing about articles in that language and mostly right now about embassies of the Philippines and other Spanish speaking countries and then the one in Bahrain, which is the most recent one that they wrote because someone decided to translate it. So moving on from that, I hope that this is something that will inspire other Wikipedia's to write articles about their diplomatic missions using the structure that I will elaborate below. So we follow a standard template for writing diplomatic missions of the Philippines. So there's always an info box. The info box should always have, it could be a template info box, diplomatic mission, which is for the English Wikipedia for the Spanish Wikipedia, it's Ficha, Mission Diplomatica, or something similar. The mission's name should always be in the language of the Wiki and the official languages of the sending and receiving countries. So here you see the Philippine Embassy in Tel Aviv has the name in English, which is an official language of the Philippines and the language of the Wiki, the name of the mission in Filipino, national language of the Philippines and the name of the mission in Hebrew, the official language of Israel. If there's a shield, which is normally the case with many countries, they have a special logo or coat of arms for their embassies or their consulates. It should be in the info box. And of course the picture of the mission were available. The lead paragraph, in this case, it's always the embassy of country in city is the diplomatic mission of the country sending the mission to the country receiving it. And then some small information, it was open in this year, it's located here, maybe near some major landmark. A section about the history of the embassy or consulate where one is available, whatever you can find in reliable sources. Usually this will be old newspaper clippings. And I think the Wikipedia library for giving the access to newspapers.org, for example, which has been a gold mine of information, particularly for Philippine diplomatic missions in the United States. And also the internet archives own library, which has been wonderful for this type of resource. And also a section on staff and activities. Normally it's the ambassador who they are, who they've been appointed by and when they were received by the host country. One thing that you might wanna know is that an ambassador is not an ambassador until their credentials have been received by the host country, meaning the president actually accepts the credentials from the ambassador. Usually this can be several months after their credentials have been received. So make sure to look at that accordingly at the minor dispute with an editor who says, oh, the Philippine ambassador to Indonesia is actually the ambassador because they were named as such by the government. But their credentials are not received until June of this year, even though they were appointed in September of last year. So something that you want to keep in mind. And then a couple of interesting things that the mission does. So for example, the Philippine embassy in Tel Aviv is actually the mission responsible for all the other ASEAN countries which don't have an embassy in Israel. So for example, if you're Malaysian, go to the Philippine embassy, they will help you as was the case in 2010. Occasionally, if there's a lot of information about the building itself, as I mentioned earlier, it would make sense to have a section about the Chancery, the building where the embassy or consulate is located. And that adds character and depth to the article more than just a brief mention of the history because this actually shows you that this mission is quite historical. So for example, there was a long history about how the Philippine embassy in Tokyo was built in Japanese war reparations or how the Philippine embassy in Berlin, they originally wanted to buy the property that where Jose Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines, wrote Noli Matangere, his seminal work. The building was not for sale, so they couldn't buy it. This picture actually was taken by Eugene Villar, Tea, who is a seam who's actually in the audience. So if you're looking for Filipino Wikipedia to interact with, I highly recommend you talk to him. Now, because there is no standard way of writing articles about diplomatic missions, the goal of this project is really to provide a comprehensive template that others can emulate for their countries because these articles deserve the care and respect that we can give them. These are representatives of our country abroad. And so if we're able to give them the care and respect that we can on Wikipedia, it actually helps elevate not just what people perceive of our countries, especially in Eastern Southeast Asia, but also how it also gives interesting information that people can then look back to. And in fact, this led me to getting a barnster on the English Wikipedia because people do appreciate the work that we put into these articles. People notice that, you know, oh, a lot of the articles on the English Wikipedia about diplomatic missions are quite stubby. So it's nice to see more extensive coverage. And so if we're able to really put in the effort to do the research required, a lot of this information is actually available online or you can reach out to the Department of Foreign Affairs of your country or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of your country to get this information. And this is information that would be beneficial for anyone to know about. Let's say, if they want to know more about, oh, this country, I need to go to the embassy of this country in my city. They will very likely go to the Wikipedia article. It'll tell them where it is, what is the mission about, and more about the country and how they interact with the country that the embassy or consulate is located in. So that's the end of my presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And let's give our diplomatic missions the love and treatment that they deserve. I do only have three minutes left in my presentation. So in my presentation time, so I am open to any questions that you may have. And I will stop sharing my screen. I will briefly open. I actually closed Eventier. So I will check if you have any questions on Eventier. I will be able to answer them as well. Josh, Ramzi from Indonesia. Actually, Ramzi, long time no see. Yeah, long time no see. I really appreciate of phylo diplomatic nerds doing this all these. I'm just curious. I understand there is no freedom of panorama in the Philippines. And I understand that an embassy of a country is like its own country abroad. Are you concerned with the copyright status of these embassy photos that you took, all the excellent photo experiments? Actually, the worry there is not the Philippine lack of freedom of panorama. And I personally think we should have them. I know Johnny Allegre was talking about it yesterday. Actually, the worry was the country that's hosting the embassy. So the position of commons is that it doesn't matter if the country has freedom of panorama, the sending country. The receiving country has to have it too. So for example, the Philippine embassy in Jakarta, there was a picture. And they got that from a Philippine government image, which means it's public domain. But because Indonesia doesn't have freedom of panorama, Thomas said, sorry, it can't be there. I'm very likely going to upload it back to the English Utipedia just so there is a picture. But yes, freedom of panorama can be an issue in countries that don't have it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, very welcome. I wish I could be there. Any other questions? Thank you very much, Josh. Thank you for your session. All right. Thank you very much. And I look forward to seeing all of you when the opportunity comes. Thank you for attending my presentation.