I'm Ng Yi-Sheng, a Singaporean writer who frequently consults Wikipedia for research, though I hadn't edited it for a long time. Earlier this year on Facebook I proposed a Wikithon to my fellow writing group, Sing Lit Station, to further develop public resources on Singaporean writers:
https://www.facebook.com/ng.yisheng.9/posts/10104078508418232 .
We ended up meeting on 1 December to hold this Wikithon, using Facebook to notify the public (including writers) about the edits, e.g. in this post :
https://www.facebook.com/SingLitStation/photos/a.1777589175795849/2204175556470540/ and this post:
https://www.facebook.com/SingLitStation/posts/2204260036462092 .
The editors did not edit their own pages, though I believe Zeekyang (writer Kevin Martens Wong) did add his own photograph when he heard about this. As one of the few editors who had set up his Wikipedia page, I had to approve the final edits. Two members of the team have Wikipedia pages devoted to us (Joshua Ip and myself), which we did not edit. The other so-called sock puppets were emerging writers and literary enthusiasts who embarked on this journey with us.
Please understand that, though we were experienced, we were merely using Wikipedia to expand knowledge of our fledgling literary scene (one based in a city-state, so many writers are actually friends of each other, making conflict of interest hard to avoid).
UPDATE: The ten Wikithon participants included myself, crimson24, M00thu2, Enterokinase, JayDubYewHo, Ravencrispin88, Admiral_laksamana, vlorz and eyeyannuh. I think I've left someone out. One reason why it looks like we're one or two people is that only Crimson24 and I were senior enough to approve the edits, so all their work ended up being funnelled through us (we also played the role of final editors). Zeekyang was one of the authors we profiled, and he added his edit after we Facebook tagged him to let him know what we'd done.
NEW UPDATE: I've seen discussions about why we didn't approach a Singapore administrator to let them know we were doing the Wikithon. Admiral_laksamana did in fact approach Mailer_diablo and Khaosworks, as can be seen in the below record:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AMailer_diablo&fbclid=IwAR03icjkWVQl0tCPwFyPq2VnlgJ-i-ohC-M_-sQZyoaPUS4LCSJbgK5D_0E#Help_for_an_edit-a-thon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Khaosworks?fbclid=IwAR0rJNQbikqgPL4Noy9B4XYF45p4GnxJcQ8PoJ8RzDGoFsvdA5K9ud6y7TQ#Help_for_an_edit-a-thon I've also figured out why we had ten participants but only nine usernames. One of the participants didn't have a Wikipedia account and was writing up stuff on Google Docs to be shared with the others. Not sure about the extra so-called sock puppets, but they're definitely not me.
I'm hoping this can be resolved, because we're hoping to hold future Wikithons on Singaporean and regional topics, this time with the help of more established administrators. As commenters have noted, there is a western bias on this site, and we're hoping to ameliorate that.
