CEE/Newsletter/Newsroom/Wikimedia Ukraine’s work in July and August – top five activities
Anton Protsiuk, Programs Coordinator at Wikimedia Ukraine
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Wikimedia Ukraine’s work in July and August – top five activities
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Throughout the summer Wikimedia Ukraine has worked on many of our core projects – organizing photo contests and article campaigns, developing the Wikipedia Education Program, supporting the local community, and more. Here’s a quick look at five of our most notable activities in the past two months.
- Wiki Loves Earth in Ukraine
Wiki Loves Earth has been held every year in Ukraine since 2013 – except for 2022 when we canceled the photo contest for security reasons amidst Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thankfully this year we’ve been able to gather a great organizing team and resume the contest, although with notable security restrictions – only photos taken before February 24, 2022 were accepted.
Throughout July we received over 4600 Ukrainian nature heritage photos from 120+ participants, and the team is now working to identify and award best photos & most prolific contributors.
- Launch of Wikimedia Ukraine’s first mass open online course for educators
July 24 was the official start date for the first installment of the “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” course in Ukraine developed by Wikimedia Ukraine. 300 Ukrainian educators have studied for five weeks and will complete a final assignment designing an integration of Wikipedia their lessons.
To implement the course, we partnered with Prometheus, Ukraine’s biggest platform for online courses. The project is possible thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation, which developed the international program.
(Read more about the course’s launch in the Wikimedia Education newsletter)
- A major in-person conference for wiki educators
In early July we held the first big offline gathering of Wikimedia educators since before the pandemic. The two-day event gathered close to 35 people and included around a dozen talks on experience sharing among educators, as well as discussion on the strategy of Wikipedia Education Program’s development in Ukraine.
- Presence at Wikimania – four sessions, scholarships for virtual participation
Wikimania in Singapore was the first in-person global gathering of the Wikimedia community since 2019. Over its four days there were four sessions about Ukraine and/or Wikimedia Ukraine’s projects (links to recordings included):
- Decolonizing knowledge — a perspective from the Ukrainian community (a 20-minute presentation by Antanana and Anton Protsiuk)
- Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month 2023: three different years (a 10-minute lightning talk by Renvoy)
- Motivating volunteers and retaining newcomers – case study of Wikimedia Ukraine’s “wiki condensed milk” program (a 5-minute lightning talk by Anton Protsiuk)
- Wiki Loves Earth International — 10 years of experience (a 20-minute presentation by Olesia Lukaniuk)
Three Ukrainian Wikimedians managed to make it to Singapore in-person, and three more received small scholarships for virtual participation from Wikimedia Ukraine. (Read more about our virtual scholarships experience in a past Diff post)
- Trainings for community members on verification of information and Wikidata
Wikimedia Ukraine regularly holds training sessions on various skills that might be useful to community members.
In July and August we held two online events within this program:
- Training on verification of information organized in partnership with the National Democratic Institute and led by external expert Viktoria Romaniuk, who is a prominent Ukrainian media literacy researcher. Over 40 people joined in real time.
- Introductory training on Wikidata, with the wiki education community as the target audience. The training was held by Wikimedia Ukraine’s board member (and Wikimedia steward) Base and attracted around 15 people in real time (as well as close to 100 views on YouTube so far).