Education/News/February 2022/Celebrating the 18th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia
Celebrating the 18th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia!
Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom is closer to Ukrainian teachers every minute!
Wikimedia Ukraine started this year by fulfilling a new year's promise and a strategic goal of the Education program in Ukraine — to expand and support a teachers' community, providing them with opportunities to grow professionally. First, we are working on the local presentations of the Handbook for Ukrainian teachers – a 100-page collection of advice, recommendations, and best practices from teachers who utilize Wikipedia at school, aiding with the implementation and integration of Wikipedia in an educational environment. It was published late last year.
Our next big goal is to provide Ukrainian teachers with access to a free-of-charge program for professional development on a reputable online learning platform. After graduating, teachers will know how to use Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in their classrooms and will form a network to support each other by sharing experiences and knowledge on using Wikipedia and other wiki projects in their work.
From October to December 2021, Hanna Osadchuk (education and GLAM manager at Wikimedia Ukraine) took part in the «Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom» training for trainers course and studied facilitation and project management with Wikimedia Foundation experts and participants from more than 20 countries. The final task was to develop an implementation plan for the program in the Ukrainian secondary school environment. She graduated from the class on the new user-friendly online platform and became a certified trainer, ready to plan and manage localization projects and invite Ukrainian teachers to participate in the brand new course.
We have already established contact with Ukraine’s largest MOOC platform Prometheus and have had negotiations about working on this project together. The platform has 1,800,000 users; the teacher's community has over 50,000 people and is one of the most active and willing to learn. We have also applied for the funding for local implementations of the «Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom». The funding would speed up all the processes and Ukraine would be able to meet the first 100 teachers who graduated from the program in October 2022!
Educators and the edit-a-thons to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Ukrainian Wikipedia.
Traditionally, Wikimedia Ukraine holds an annual Wikimarathon dedicated to Ukrainian Wikipedia’s birthday. In 2022, it ran from January 27th to January 31st. We organized an online marathon and supported offline events across Ukraine. The mechanics of Wikimarathon 2022 were similar to Wikimarathons we had in 2021. This January we again prioritized the online part for new editors and relied on the existing network of local organizers for the offline activities.
School teachers and university professors are among the most active communities when talking about in-person events. This year, eight of Wikimedia Ukraine's experienced volunteers organized 12 events for approximately 150 participants, including other teachers, university, and school students. Here's a full list of the local events during the 5-day long celebration of Ukrainian Wikipedia.