How My Colleagues and I Revitalised Thai Wikipedia – Diff

After a few years away from Thai Wikipedia, I returned to find that the Main Page had become stagnant. It lacked the dynamic energy a landing page needs. So, my colleagues and I decided to revitalise it—and here is exactly how we did it.

Before diving into the details, let me explain the structure of Thai Wikipedia’s Home Page. It was heavily inspired by the original English edition‘s layout, featuring four core content sections:

• This Month’s Featured Articles (TMFA): An excerpt of a well-written article (Thai Wikipedia lacks the volume to change this daily like the English site).
• Did You Know (DYK): Interesting facts pulled from recently expanded or created articles.
• In The News (ITN): Recent global (and occasionally space-related) events.
• On This Day (OTD): A look back at historical events on the current date.

When I returned to active editing in mid-2024, I realised these sections were frozen in time. Sometimes, content remained identical for days. After a thorough review, I found the issues were threefold: stagnant content, unpredictable update schedules (except for the strictly automated OTD), and complex, opaque backend procedures for publishing content to the Main Page.

To build a sustainable solution, we had to attack the problem from two angles: community contribution and technical infrastructure.

On the contribution side, we introduced clear, easy-to-follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to ensure nominators and reviewers wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. We also lifted several legacy constraints that were discouraging newbie and intermediate editors.

On the nerdy side, we introduced a “Nested Transclude Template System” to make pulling content to the main page seamless. No more messy, bespoke coding required. All nominations can now be tracked and recalled without digging through a chaotic page history.

For the less tech-savvy, here is how simple it is now: You no longer need to deal with any messy, complicated coding. As shown in the diagram, everything is built like a set of nesting dolls:

• Write your content: You just write your proposal or excerpt in a standard form.
• Name it with the date: You save it inside a specific date format (like YYYY-MM-DD).
• The system does the rest: When that day arrives, the Main Page template automatically fetches the correct date’s content and puts it live—completely on its own!

This means no one has to lift a finger to update it manually, and we can track past nominations without digging through a chaotic page history.

Did You Know it’s now easier than ever to nominate your articles?

The first backlog I tackled was the DYK section. There, I crossed paths with Taweethaも, a renowned Thai Wikipedian. That chance encounter inspired a complete revolution of our process. We teamed up to clear backlogs that had been sitting untouched for over six months. Together, we drafted new SOPs and built a backend system to support them—queuing content chronologically by nomination date, enforcing character limits, and scheduling release dates.

Once the system stabilised, we launched a content contest to diversify the topics and test our new workflow under pressure. The campaign was a massive success: 16 contributors created or improved over 90 articles. Crucially, three of those contributors remain highly active “DYK editors” today.

We also noticed that while some nominators were incredibly prolific, they rarely helped review others’ work. To keep the backlog manageable, we implemented a Quid Pro Quo (QPQ) policy, requiring nominators to review a peer’s submission to qualify their own.

Opening the Gates: Allowing Good Articles onto the Main Page

With DYK running smoothly, we turned our attention to TMFA. This section had suffered from a decade-long drought of new Featured Articles (FAs) to showcase. Beyond adapting our new DYK SOPs, we made a major policy shift: we lifted the strict FA constraint and allowed Good Articles (GAs) to be featured. To reflect this, we renamed the section from This Month’s Featured Article to Recommended Articles.

Whilst long-form, high-quality writing requires significantly more energy from contributors—meaning it wasn’t as explosive as the DYK campaign—the initiative still successfully brought 7 brand-new, high-quality articles to the front page from 7 different writers.

A new solution brings a new quirk

Every new system has its bugs. Just a day into the DYK campaign, a participant noticed that logged-out readers were seeing stale, outdated main page content, while logged-in users saw the updates perfectly.

We spent days hunting for a fix. Thankfully, User:Chlod—a perennial savior of Wikipedia infrastructure—pointed out that the server cache just needed to be manually “purged” (which simply means appending ?action=purge to the URL string).

To automate this, I sat down for some classic “vibe coding” and wrote a Python script. Hosted on Toolforge (Wikimedia’s dedicated server for customised scripts within the Wikimedia Movement) and linked to my bot account, it now runs via a cron job twice a day to keep the page fresh. I also added a secondary feature to the script: it automatically archives the Main Page to the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine daily.

For those unfamiliar with the tech jargon, here is the simple version: I asked the AI chatbot, Google Gemini, to help me write a program in the Python language. After testing it repeatedly until I was sure it worked, I uploaded the code to Toolforge—which is essentially a free, 24/7 computer server available to Wikipedia volunteers. I set the server to run my code twice a day to automatically fix the glitch and keep the Main Page fresh. As a bonus, I also programmed it to save a daily copy of the Main Page to the Wayback Machine (a digital archive of the internet) so we always have a historical record.

I’ve published my source code in GitHub if you’re looking for: https://github.com/sarawutkhs/wthpurge

What about the other two sections?

You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned ITN or OTD. To be completely honest, I tried to implement similar reforms for OTD, but couldn’t find anyone in the community available to jump in. If you have ideas on how we can spark interest and bring that same magic to the remaining sections, please drop a comment!

Acknowledgements

This transformation wouldn’t have been possible without an incredible support system. Beyond those already mentioned, I want to thank the original architects of the Main Page structure, as well as every single campaign participant who dedicated time to improving Thai Wikipedia. Finally, my deepest respect goes to Taweethaも, whose guidance both on- and off-wiki was invaluable.

Declaration: This case study was previously presented at the ESEAP Conference 2026 and the October 2025 ESEAP Community Call. The initial phase of this project was also published on the ESEAP’s Substack.

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