Education/News/November 2022/“Wikipedia for School” contest was held in Ukraine for the third time
“Wikipedia for School” contest was held in Ukraine for the third time.
Summary: Wikipedia for School contest was organized in Ukraine to enhance the qualitative articles on Ukrainian Wikipedia.
From December 2021 to February 2022, the “Wikipedia for School” contest was held in Ukraine for the third time. The project’s goal is to increase the number and quality of articles in the Ukrainian language on Wikipedia on school curriculum topics.
The days when teachers considered Wikipedia an obstacle to learning are long gone. Now, Wikipedia is one of the tools that modern teachers can use to provide their students with always verified and up-to-date information. And the benefit for students is difficult to overestimate – what used to be contained in many different large encyclopedias, most of which remained from many decades ago, can now be found in one place and literally from your smartphone.
As a result of the contest, almost 30 Wikipedia users improved more than 230 articles in the Ukrainian-language section of Wikipedia on the topics of 9 school subjects. The end of the competition in late February coincided with Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, which upended the whole country. Still, some people submitted a few articles even in the first days of the war.
Due to Russia’s invasion, work on the evaluation of articles was delayed for many months – but finally, we have the results of the competition.
The vast majority of participants in this year’s campaign have been school teachers. Still, other people whose work is related to the field of education also participated: teachers of colleges and universities. Participants contributed to articles on 9 school subjects (world history, Ukrainian history, world literature, Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian language, mathematics, physics, informatics, and geography). They together wrote more than 230 articles, which will now help students have access to high-quality and complete articles in the Ukrainian language.
The task of the competition is not only to write as many articles as possible but also to ensure that these articles are of high quality and comply with the competition regulations. For this purpose, we formed a professional and impartial jury to evaluate the articles. Eight volunteers served on the jury this time.
Soon we will have an online award ceremony, where the participants will receive their diplomas and be able to communicate and share their impressions. Meanwhile, the team is already working on the next competition. To break a little secret, it will be significantly different from the previous one; there will be new lists of articles and subjects as Ukraine has undergone changes to school curricula in recent months.