Participation
Hong Kong's civil-society websites, independent newsrooms and public memory are vanishing — some taken offline overnight, others quietly self-censored out of existence. SHKO (Save Hong Kong Online) is a community effort to preserve them before they disappear, and it runs on volunteers. You don't need to be an engineer to help: a single photograph, a memory, or a flagged link all add to the record.
This project is anonymous, open source, and global. Everything lives in a public repository that anyone can read, copy, and contribute to.
⚠️ Before anything else, read Protect yourself below. Preserving this material can carry real risk. Please take a moment to understand it and to shield your identity first.
Ways to help
| How you can contribute | |
|---|---|
| 📸 Submit materials | Photos, video, screenshots, documents, oral histories, and ephemera from Hong Kong's civil society and protest years — vigil images, programmes and banners, or captures of a site about to go dark. |
| 🔗 Flag sites at risk | Know a Hong Kong website, page, forum or account that may soon disappear? Tell us so it can be archived while it's still up. |
| 🗄️ Archive the web yourself | Save endangered pages with the Wayback Machine, or crawl a whole site into a self-contained file. |
| ✍️ Improve the archive | Corrections, added context, translations (Chinese ⇄ English), research, and new topic pages. The whole site is Markdown — edits are welcome. |
| 📣 Spread & mirror | Share the archive, and — because it's open source — clone or mirror the repository so no single takedown can erase it. |
| 💛 Sponsor | Help cover hosting and preservation costs. |
Guides & links: see How to archive and replay for the archiving tools · Sponsorship to help with running costs · the Tiananmen Vigil page shows the kind of submissions we're gathering.
How to contribute via GitHub
The archive is kept in a public, open-source repository on GitHub:
→ github.com/China-Digital-Times-CDT/wepreserve
- To submit material or flag an at-risk site: open a GitHub Issue describing what you have or what's in danger. You can attach images and files to an issue. If you'd rather not attach sensitive files in public, say so in the issue and describe the material instead.
- To fix or add content: open a pull request. Pages are plain Markdown in the
vault/folder; images go invault/assets/. Small corrections are as valuable as new pages. - No GitHub account? Creating one takes a minute — see the safety notes below on doing so anonymously.
Not sure where something fits? Open an issue and ask. Every contribution is reviewed before it goes live, so nothing you send publishes automatically.
Protect yourself
Preserving politically sensitive material from Hong Kong can carry legal and personal risk, especially under the National Security Law. Please take these precautions:
- Understand the risk. Only contribute what you are comfortable contributing, and think through your own exposure first.
- Separate your identity. Use a dedicated, anonymous GitHub account — not one tied to your real name, phone number, or main email. Consider a fresh email alias (e.g. a privacy-focused provider) for it.
- Hide your connection. Use Tor or a trusted VPN when submitting, so your IP isn't logged against the contribution.
- Strip metadata from files. Photos and documents can carry hidden GPS coordinates, device IDs, and timestamps. Remove EXIF/metadata before uploading, and crop out anything that could identify you or bystanders.
- Talk securely. For any private conversation, use an encrypted messenger such as Signal rather than plain email or SMS.
- Don't self-incriminate. Leave out details that reveal where you were or who you were with unless they're essential to the record and safe to share.
When in doubt, share less about yourself and more about the material. The goal is to preserve the heritage without putting the people who saved it at risk.
Who we are
SHKO is a decentralised, volunteer-run preservation project supported by a global network of contributors and partner organisations, including the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Filecoin Foundation, Starling Lab, and China Digital Times. There is no central office and no membership roll — just people who believe Hong Kong's digital memory is worth keeping. You're welcome to join them.
Backlinks