Education/News/January 2023/Integration of Wikipedia in Ukrainian universities – teacher-led and student-led

Integration of Wikipedia in Ukrainian universities – teacher-led and student-led

Summary: Wikimedia Ukraine regularly supports projects aimed at integrating Wikipedia into the educational process in schools and universities. The work continues despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent widespread power outages. We have multiple collaborations in place, and in this article, we’ll look at two of the recent ones – a teacher-led initiative at the Lviv Polytechnic National University and a student-led initiative at the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University.

Wikipedia (and Wikivoyage) contributors from Lviv Polytechnic National University

Since 2021, we are helping to implement the Wikipedia Education Program at the Viacheslav Chornovil Institute of Sustainable Development of the Lviv Polytechnic National University. (Read more about the previous round here).

In the first semester of the 2022/2023 academic year, a new group of students under the guidance of associate professor of the tourism department, Maryana Senkiv, joined the Wikimedia projects. For the first time, Dr. Senkiv’s students contributed to Wikipedia (in previous semesters she oversaw contributions to Wikivoyage).

A total of 19 students contributed; 8 of them received the highest score. For example, the students improved a Ukrainian-language Wikipedia article on bicycle tourism and created articles about language tourism and pilgrimage tourism.

In October, Wikimedia Ukraine held a wiki training to help program participants learn how to contribute to Wikipedia, and in December we awarded students with certificates and souvenirs.

“Because of the war, we faced considerable challenges during our joint work for the benefit of Ukrainian Wikipedia, but we coped with them thanks to the enthusiasm of the students and the hard work of the trainers – Andrii Hrytsenko and Viktor Semeniuk. Thus, the tourist topic on [Ukrainian-language] Wikipedia has been significantly enriched”, Dr. Senkiv recounts.

Students from the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University writing about sports

Cooperation within the Education Program is often organized with the support of the university’s leadership or individual professors, but it can also take place at the level of student governance. This was the case with another project that we supported last semester – a campaign with the sports department of the student council of the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, one of Ukraine’s largest and most prestigious universities.

Participation in the campaign was voluntary; participants could receive additional rating points from the Institute’s student council, as well as certificates and souvenirs from Wikimedia Ukraine

Because of the regular power outages, we were unable to hold a webinar for the participants, but we shared educational materials about Wikipedia and helped to improve the articles they created.

In total, seven students successfully joined the campaign, having written eight articles on sports topics in Ukrainian, from the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics to “muggle quidditch”.

“We are grateful that the student initiative to expand Ukrainian Wikipedia with sports-related articles received was supported by Wikimedia Ukraine. We have gained unique experience and are satisfied with the result achieved in [wartime] conditions”, says Artem Kucherov, a junior-year student at the university and head of the student council’s sports department.