North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group/Annual reports/2022
In 2022 our User Group grew up by 6 new members and so has reached the number of 35 participants. Unfortunately, one of our members — Сергей Корнилов — died this year, but we decided to leave his name in our member list with memorial purposes as a tribute to the fact that even in his last days he was with us.
Some of our new participants are highly active in different Wikimedia projects, but their contribution is not shown in this report as colective one due to the fact they've joined us at the very end of the year. We hope to involve them to our collaborative online and offline activities in 2023.
Geographic representation of our members also have widened. Sadly, some of our active members have decided to flee from Russia because of the difficult political situation here. As a result, now we have members in Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Tbilisi (Georgia) adding to members who still live in Moscow, Moscow Oblast, Kazan and in the regions of our interest.
Offline activity
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Last year showed notable decrease in offline activity compared to the previous one. Mainly this was caused by actual imposting of martial law in Russia and the government campaign to discredit Wikipedia, because of that many users do not feel safe anymore. In addition, cases of negative behaviour of both law enforcement structures and suspicious citizens towards photographers, especially equipped with drone, have become more frequent. This also was the reason of emotional bunout inbetween our members. Photowalks, that traditionally were most favoured by our members, suffered the most; we succeed in organizing them more rarely, and those that were organized, had less participants. For example, our Annual Meeting in January 2022 had 13 participants, but spring and summer events had 5 to 7 participants. In the end of 2022 the most frequent were events with 2 or 3 participants. But we've made a lot of solo photowalks, especially in suburbs of Saint Petersburg, because they don't need to be organised: all you need is to grab your camera and go.
Anyway, we've made 16 collective expeditions to photograph different locations and objects of North-West Russia in 2022. The biggest one was expedition to Vologda Oblast during our Annual Meeting: 13 participants with 4 automobiles visited 3 towns and 1 large settlement not mentioning some other locations between. We've taken a lot of photos of culture heritage monuments and city infrastructure and made outstanding number of edits in different Wikimedia projects (the exact figures can be found in this report). Also we've made 2 trips to Novgorod Oblast, 1 trip to Karelia and 4 trips to faraway locations in Leningrad Oblast. Our Petrozavodsk division also continued exploring Karelia and participants from Saint Petersburg conducted regular photowalks in poorly photographed parts of the city alone or in pairs. We haven't counted solo walks precisely, approximately we've done near 100 photowalks in different locations. Last but not least, this happened as part of the 'fight' against poor illustration rate of articles about the Saint Petersburg streets launched by the User Group. As a result, from spring to autumn, we've illustrated 344 articles that didn't have any photos before, mostly by pictures taken by ourselves. And, of course, we've photographed cultural heritage monuments, buildings, transport and nature objects and improved the content of illustrated articles.
This year we had only 2 live meetups to discuss different topics. On the other hand, we've made video calls more frequent and activated discussions on different work topics in our chats and mailing list.
Online activity
Restrictions that circumstances in 2022 put on our offline activity have freed much more time for online activity. This year User Group members have written 75 articles in Russian and English Wikipedias and noticeably imroved nearly 70. «Month of Vologda Oblast» organized within UG after our Annual Meeting when we decided to write and improve articles in Wikipedia along with guides, lists of cultural heritage monuments and nature monuments in Wikivoyage on this topic was a huge success inbetween our members. Some users who couldn't attend the meeting also participated in the «Month» and some were so carried away that they continued creating articles until the very end of 2022. Many articles written during this edit-a-thon and some others received 'recommended' and 'good article' statuses.
We also want to mention the development of one of our internal projects that is «Library» where participants can write down books and journals on local history they own. Plenty of Wikipedia articles that we're written in 2022 was based mostly on 'paper' sources. This happened because notable part of locations that we're interested in has little to no representation in the Internet, including Wikimedia projects. We think that such activity is very important to complete one of our missions: to promote history and culture of North-West Russia in the Internet.
We also continued painstaking work improving the categorization of files in Wikimedia Commons and place the coordinates in lists of cultural heritage monuments. At the same time, we can note a strong decline in the intensity of writing and editing Wikivoyage guides: the surge in activity was observed in January and February after our Annual Meeting, but after February 24 and until the end of the year the number of edits in guides can literally be counted on the fingers. This is due to the fact that the situation in the country did not at all favor either travel or active recreation in general, so even after going somewhere the participants did not find the moral strength to contribute to Wikivoyage.
Organization and representation
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Our User Group traditionally participates in different global competitions such as «Wiki Loves Folklore», «Wiki Loves Earth» and «Wiki Loves Monuments». At WLM-2022 the User Group organized its special nomination for the third time inviting the participants of the Russian part of this photo contest to pay special attention to the wooden architecture of the North-West. As for personal participation, members of the User Group uploaded 330 images to WLE-2022 and 3909 images to WLM-2022. It should also be noted the high percentage of images uploaded by UG members that were included in the long and short lists of Russian part of WLM-2022. One picture taken by UG coordinator Nikolai Bulykin was among 10 finalists of the Russian round of the competition and right now is participating in WLM international round. In addition, our uploaded images do not remain unclaimed and are actively used in articles of various Wikimedia projects. Some were installed in articles and Wikidata elements by the participants themselves during the «Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos» contest and others. By the way, in 2022 the interest of UG members in the «Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos» contest noticeably increased with 8 people participated (it was only 2 in 2021). As a result we illustrated 477 articles during WPWP-2022 - while in Russian Wikipedia, according to general statistics, 486 articles were illustrated in total.
In addition, our User Group is actively involved in the Wikimedia community both in Russia and globally. In 2022 our representatives participated in 2 events held by other organizations and helped organize the Wiki Conference in Saint Petersburg. At Wiki Conference 2022 three presentations were made, one of which was directly about our activities. User Group coordinator Ekaterina Borisova received the Wiki Award for 2021 (nomination «Leaders in the number of edits in Wikimedia projects in Russian», 17,780 edits in Wikivoyage project); this is her fourth Wiki Award received for this type of activity. Also, Ekaterina took 2nd place in the spring competition organized by Wikimedia.Ru «Discover the Moscow region with Wikipedia 2022» (nomination «Illustration», 371 article illustrated).
Also our User Group participated for the first time in «CEE-Spring» contest creating the list of articles on different topics related to North-West Russia for translation. As a result we had 55 translations of 44 articles (of 161 presented in the list).
Also our representatives were invited to CEE Summit in Ohrid, North Macedonia, but we had to decline the invitation at the last moment due to the drastic change of the political situation in Russia.
Also we haven't stopped the duty of promoting Wikimedia projects everywhere we can. For example our User Group actively helped in organizing «Wiki Loves Earth» in Kazakhstan in 2022, that was the first one in the Middle Asia and had a huge success. This case has rised awareness on Wikimedia in local communities and strenghtened local Wikimedia Community in Kazakhstan. In 2023, along with Kazakhstan, Wikimedians of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan also want to organize the competition.
Financial activity
In 2022 we continued our project of drone photographing, that was realised with financial aid of Wikimedia Foundation Rapid Grant (with some personal funds of User Group members added). You can read and review the report here. Also in January we've received another Rapid Grant to organize our Annual Meeting, you can read and review the report here. At any other times we continued to use only personal funds especially since political circumstanses made it impossible to receive WMF grants in 2022. Receiving funds from inner sponsors is also impossible since Wikimedia as a whole and especially Wikipedia now is claimed as an «enemy» organization by officials in Russia. That fact is repelling any potential sponsor.