Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Ukraine/2021
- Application or grant stage: in progress
- Applicant or grantee: applicant
- Amount requested: US$114,085 + US$4,000.00 unforeseen = US$118,085
- Amount granted: 118,085 USD
- Funding period: 1 January 2021 - 31 December 2021
- Midpoint report due: 15 July 2021
- Final report due: 30 January 2022
Application[edit]
Background[edit]
Annual Plan[edit]
Our annual plan for 2021 coincides with our grant plan. See also a document with key highlights (list of activities and changes compared to 2020) here.
Budget Plan[edit]
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Staffing Plan[edit]
| Wikimedia Ukraine's 2021 staffing plan |
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Strategic plan[edit]
Introduction[edit]
Founded in 2009 and operating for over 11 years, Wikimedia Ukraine is the only organization consistently working on the support and development of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in Ukraine, as well as one of the largest Wikimedia chapters in the Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) region.
For the first five years of Wikimedia Ukraine, the organization was driven solely by volunteers. Since 2014, we have been gradually building the personnel of employees and contractors. Since 2018 and 2019, we have also begun major improvements in financial and organizational management.
Over the eleven years, we have developed a large portfolio of projects and programs. Running large photo contests in Ukraine (Ukrainian editions of Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth are among the largest national competitions within these contests, and we also run the international part of Wiki Loves Earth), long-term Wikipedia Education Program, GLAM cooperation, organzinging annual Wikiconference in Ukraine and two CEE Meetings (in 2014 and 2018), holding several hundred training sessions, several dozens article contests, and more are among our major achievements.
In 2019, Wikimedia Ukraine adopted the first multi-year strategic plan in its history. The 2020—2022 strategic plan is informing our work in 2020 and will continue to serve as a guide for the organization’s activities in 2021.
All activities proposed here were shared and discussed among the chapter members (via an on-wiki discussion and an off-wiki survey) who have provided inputs and suggestions. These activities are aligned with our vision and mission and confirm our course outlined in the strategic plan. Thus, we will take our 2020 projects & operations as a baseline, with some alterations reflecting our 2020 experience, as well external factors (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) and new opportunities (such as Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary).
Programs[edit]
Content Enrichment
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This program centers on the activities designed to close specific content gaps on Wikimedia projects and support initiatives around content enrichment, including text content on Wikipedia and sister projects (Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikisource), as well as media content on Commons.
In 2021, we will continue to support time-tested models of sparking content enrichment, such as article contests and challenges (WikiGap, CEE Spring etc.), photo contests (Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments), and support of community initiatives (thematic weeks, wikiexpeditions etc.). We are also aiming to pay more attention to researching and identifying specific content gaps, as well as to the quality of content produced — the efforts that we have been pursuing in 2020 but still have a lot of work to do on. For international Wiki Loves Earth, we will organise a strategic discussion to understand how the community wants WLE to develop in the forthcoming years. Our survey shows that most members consider these projects very important for our mission and generally efficient.
We want to increase resources allocated to the GLAM project, as its impact is currently rather limited, and our members rate this project as important but requiring a major boost to become efficient. COVID-19 pandemics forced many Ukrainian institutions to become more digital, and we have many volunteers who have an interest in working with GLAM institutions. Thus, we believe this is the right opportunity to make the GLAM project in Ukraine more structured and more efficient by adding a new role of a GLAM & Wikipedia Education contractor who will be in charge in supporting volunteers and developing partnerships.
- Program Objectives
- Work with volunteers to close specific text content gaps through creating or improving 5,400 articles on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
- Organize contests to enrich Wikimedia Commons with media content, attracting 40,000 photos from Ukraine and additional 60,000 international photos.
- Promote the use of mediafiles gathered thanks to photo contents on Wikimedia projects by making sure at least 10% of photos (10,000) are used.
- Support community initiatives around content enrichment by supporting at least 5 community-driven thematic weeks.
- Involve at least 30 GLAM institutions, with collaborations resulting in at least 400 new or improved content pages (media donations, text content improvement etc.)
- Improve access to information (arrangement, structuring, and categorization) by requiring all Wikipedia articles created within content enrichment projects to be categorized and connected to Wikidata.
Planned activities
- Bridging text content gaps
- Cultural diplomacy article challenge
- WikiGap challenge
- CEE Spring 2021 article contest
- Challenge on uploading existing sources published under free licenses
- Local Content promoting contests/challenges
- Thematic weeks and months
- Sister Wikiprojects initiatives
- Improving content
- A wikiproject/challenge contest to improve articles
- Wikigrants (for books)
- Organizing pilot expert evaluation of articles quality
- Attracting media content
- Wiki Loves Earth International
- Wiki Loves Earth in Ukraine
- Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine
- Wikiexpeditions and photography grants
- GLAM
Why are we doing this?
Content enrichment is one of the oldest and largest directions of Wikimedia Ukraine’s work. The nature of Wikimedia projects, which are developed by volunteers without a general plan, inherently leads to the emergence of content gaps — and organizational resources of Wikimedia Ukraine are well-poised to address this problem in Ukrainian-language wiki projects. Based on our experience, contests and challenges are a powerful way to enrich content (whether the project is organized directly by Wikimedia Ukraine or supported as a community initiative), and so is working with partners in GLAM and other fields.
This direction aligns well with Wikimedia Ukraine’s strategy (it’s the first direction of our 2020—2022 strategic plan), as well as with the movement strategy (for example, with the recommendation “Identify Topics for Impact”).
- Program metrics and targets
- Number of participants: 5210
- Number of newly registered users: 3220
- Number of content pages improved or created: 106120
- Number of volunteers involved: 110
- Number of organizations engaged: 70
Increasing Participation
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Within this direction, Wikimedia Ukraine aims to increase participation in Ukrainian Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Our goal as set by the strategic plan is increasing the number of active volunteers in all fields of Wikimedia activity. Apart from striving for a bigger community, our goal is also to enhance its diversity and engage underrepresented groups.
In 2021, we plan to organize the annual Wikimarathon, our flagship project which covers almost all Ukrainian regions with Wikipedia events and training sessions (the pandemic will likely impact its format, of course). We will also support educational initiatives (Wikipedia Education Program, Wikipedia MOOC and others). Diversity activities will include support of sister projects community development, as well as groups underrepresented in the Ukrainian Wikimedia community.
This direction has been rated as very important by our members. However, there are discrepancies between the projects: while Wikimarathon is considered the most efficient project of Wikimedia Ukraine, Wikipedia Education Programme is most frequently cited among suggestions for improvement. While our education activities are currently significantly based on offline events, we are willing to invest more, on the one hand, in the online course (Wikipedia MOOC), on the other hand, in more models to engage schools and universities with offline activities. We hope to advance our educational projects by hiring a dedicated person responsible for Education and GLAM; this contractor will be tasked with developing a strategy of advancing our Education program, as well as will be in charge of sustaining and developing partnerships in the field, supporting volunteers and educational projects participants (such as MOOC participants)
- Program Objectives
- Organize training sessions within Wikimarathon and education projects, attracting 190 newcomers to Wikipedia.
- Attract 80 newcomers to Wikimedia projects by running an online course (MOOC) about Wikipedia.
- Work on increasing editor retention by making sure at least 30 people stay on as long-term editors.
- Collaborate with educational institutions and other organizations to increase Wikimedia participation, engaging 40 organizations.
- Promote diversity by organizing or supporting at least three diversity initiatives.
Planned activities
- Attracting new editors to Wikimedia projects
- Wikimarathon
- Wikipedia in Education
- Wikipedia MOOC
- School curriculum contest
- WikiScience contest
- Increasing diversity of the community of editors
- Sister projects & non-Ukrainian language projects community development
- Diversity initiatives
Why are we doing this?
Wikimedia community’s growth is key to the success of Wikimedia projects — it’s important that we as a movement stay relevant in the fast-changing environment. Apart from increasing the size of the community, we believe it’s important to support knowledge equity and be open to everyone who supports our values — the value of diversity needs little explanation.
This direction is an inherent part of Wikimedia Ukraine’s 2020—2022 strategic plan. It also aligns with the movement strategy as it helps advance the concept of knowledge equity in the strategic direction.
- Program metrics and targets
- Number of participants: 590
- Number of newly registered users: 295
- Number of content pages improved or created: 2070
- Number of volunteers involved: 70
- Number of organizations engaged: 40
Community Support and Development
As well as the last year, this direction consists of two tracks. We are planning to keep investing in community capacity (instructing community members via training sessions, facilitate experience sharing via holding Ukrainian events and providing scholarships for international ones etc.), as well as to work on motivating editors and helping keep them updated about Wikimedia Ukraine’s work (e.g. Wikizghushchivka [condensed milk award, physical equivalent of barnstars], newsletters for the community).
We are not planning any major changes within this direction as compared with 2020 (except adjustments based on external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic); we will continue to navigate the course charted by the 2020—2022 strategic plan. This is confirmed by the community survey which ranked all these projects either ‘important’ or ‘very important’, with experience sharing events like Wikiconference getting the highest community interest among all Wikimedia Ukraine projects.
- Program Objectives
- Invest in skills and leadership development for existing community members by holding training sessions for at least 40 participants.
- Facilitate experience sharing between editors by organizing 3 major events for community members (WikiConference, General Meeting, strategic session), as well as providing international scholarships (dependent on the pandemic).
- Raise the motivation of community members by awarding 50 active editors with “Wikizghushchivka”.
- Increase community awareness by preparing 12 issues of Wikimedia Ukraine newsletter and organizing 2 awareness events/presentations.
Planned activities
- Instruction for community members
- Training sessions for specific skills
- Hackathons / events for the development of technical skills
- Event organisation (WikiConference, General Meeting, Strategic Session etc.)
- Strategy facilitation
- Scholarships for international events
- Increasing the community's motivation and awareness
- Wikizghushchivka (Condensed milk)
- Wikigrants
- Communications with community, newsletters
- Awareness events, presentations etc
- Community survey
Why are we doing this?
Wikimedia Ukraine exists to serve the Ukrainian wiki community, and providing organizational support to his community is a crucial part of our work. As an organization, Wikimedia Ukraine is well suited to provide targeted support for the Wikimedia community in capacity building, including technical skills such as knowledge of Wikidata, and facilitation of experience sharing.
As well as other aspects of our work, this direction is informed by Wikimedia Ukraine’s 2020—2022 strategic plan. It also works towards implementing movement strategy recommendations, including increasing movement sustainability, as well as investing in skills and leadership development.
- Program metrics and targets
- Number of participants: 190
- Number of newly registered users: 5
- Number of content pages improved or created: 43
- Number of volunteers involved: 20
- Number of organizations engaged: 10
Awareness about Wikimedia and Free Knowledge
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are an essential part of today’s informational ecosystem, yet it is often poorly understood by the general public. We aim to explain Wikipedia to readers and the general public, promote Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and make sure information about Wikimedia Ukraine’s projects reaches an appropriate audience. Our members share this commitment by rating Awareness projects as ‘important’ or ‘very important’, and while they find them quite efficient, they frequently mention structuring communication processes as an area of potential improvement.
We also advocate for legal changes to help advance free knowledge — while 2020 saw some important steps in our attempts to achieve freedom of panorama in Ukraine, the parliament has not approved appropriate legislation yet.
In 2020, Wikimedia Ukraine managed to markedly improve our communication processes (for example, through hiring a dedicated communication manager and facilitating her work with the volunteer press secretary), but still have work to do (e.g. developing a comprehensive communication strategy). In terms of specific program changes, we want to highlight Wikipedia anniversary as a separate project as Wikipedia 20 is a good chance to tell Ukrainian readers more about Wikipedia.
- Program Objectives
- Improve awareness of Wikipedia and Wikimedia by sharing at least 100 stories about WMUA's projects and from volunteers on blogs and social media.
- Maintain visibility of Wikimedia Ukraine’s project in the organization’s blog (reaching at least 50,000 views from 30,000 unique users) and social media accounts (continuously supporting at least 10 general and project-specific social media channels).
- Improve Wikimedia Ukraine’s communication processes by developing a communication strategy.
- Develop information materials on wikiprojects by creating at least 10 online and offline materials.
- Encourage regulatory and legislative changes that will benefit Wikimedia projects, particularly advocating for freedom of panorama in Ukraine, in part by organizing at least 5 major media initiatives.
Planned activities
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- Media support and promotion of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects
- Wikipedia anniversary
- Working with social media and blogs
- Events, presentations, media relations
- Communication strategy development
- Working with readers and the general public to increase awareness
- Events/initiatives with partners (such as introductory sessions for journalists and other professional groups)
- Survey for readers and target audiences
- Developing information materials on wikiprojects
- Advocacy
- Advocacy events, presentations, media events etc
- Publications, video etc
Why are we doing this?
Telling the world about Wikimedia Ukraine’s work — and about Wikimedia projects in general — is an underlying foundation to the success of all our other projects. We want to promote Wikimedia projects in general, while also to draw the public’s attention to specific issues important for the development of free knowledge, such as freedom of panorama advocacy.
Similarly to other directions, this one stems from our organization’s 2020—2022 strategic plan. In terms of movement strategy, it is closely aligned to the work on increasing the sustainability of our movement by increasing awareness and advocating for the topics important to our development.
- Program metrics and targets
- Number of participants: 60
- Number of newly registered users: 0
- Number of content pages improved or created: 57
- Number of volunteers involved: 30
- Number of organizations engaged: 24
Grant Metrics Reporting[edit]
Required. Metrics, targets and results: grants metrics worksheet here.
Needs Request[edit]
No requests needed[edit]
- We have no specific requests at this point; we have sorted out all the questions we had with the program officer.
Midpoint report[edit]
This is a brief report on the grantee's progress during the midpoint reporting period: 1 January - 30 June 2021.
Program story[edit]
Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.
Progress[edit]
Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program progress. This should including reporting against each of the SMART objectives form your proposal.
Content Enrichment
Bridging text content gaps
In February-March, we held “Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month”, a content campaign with a goal to improve coverage of Ukrainian culture on Wikipedia and Wikidata. The project included an international campaign and an article challenge on Ukrainian Wikipedia; both ran through February 10th to March 10th.
The challenge was held in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute and supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, in continuation of the partnership established last year. Apart from general promotion, we worked closely with universities to involve students in the campaign.
As a result, over 800 Wikipedia articles were created and improved in 32 language editions, from English, Spanish and Japanese to Assamese, Galician and Korean (the number claimed by participants is notably higher, but we tried to exclude those out of thematic scope), as well as roughly 700 Wikidata items. Over 170 participants joined.
We held two webinars for participants during the challenge, in English and Ukrainian. Over 100 people joined in real time, and recordings have been viewed almost 700 times on YouTube.
The scope of сontributions to the international challenge notably exceeded our expectations (which actually caused some logistical challenges in delivering souvenirs for international participants). Importantly, the project helped establish a useful framework that can be used for similar campaigns in the future.
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In March, we joined WikiGap for the fourth time since 2018. The challenge was held on March 5-21 and helped attract 720 articles about women in Ukrainian on Wikipedia from more than 100 users.
We continue to benefit from the support of co-organizers — the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine, the UNFPA Office in Ukraine, and the National Democratic Institute in Ukraine. For the first time, Ukrainian Wikiquote joined WikiGap with a separate sister challenge, yielding over 170 articles from 18 participants.
We held a webinar for participants, with a presentation about Wikipedia and a motivational speech from a Swedish entrepreneur. 35 people joined in real time, and the recording has been available for further use, having gathered over 200 views to date.
We also traditionally helped promote global WikiGap Challenge within the Ukrainian community; four Ukrainian Wikipedia editors made it to the top 10.
(More results and insights about WikiGap 2021 in Ukraine are available in our Diff post).
- Visuals for WikiGap 2021 in Ukraine
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 Webinar for CEE Spring 2021, YouTube video |
Organized by Wikimedia Ukraine annually since 2015, CEE Spring is traditionally the largest article contest on Ukrainian Wikipedia.
Although the basic concept remained the same, this year we decided to introduce some major changes that would reflect more focus on the quality of content and of the project in general. Most notably, we shortened its duration from over two months to one month — both to make the contest itself more efficient and to free up resources for other important projects.
We also attracted two important partners (Polish Institute and Czech center in Ukraine) and held a webinar with each of them, organized an international push to write articles about Ukraine, introduced a nomination for best individual articles, and more. Apart from Wikipedia, Ukrainian-language Wikiquote and Wikivoyage joined the contest for the second time.
Throughout April, almost 80 participants created and improved 1606 articles on Wikipedia, 123 articles on Wikiquote, and 5 articles on Wikivoyage. Currently, we are in the process of jury evaluation for all articles; detailed results are expected to be announced in the fall.
- Thematic weeks and months
In 2021, we continue to use thematic weeks and months widely as a way to enrich Wikipedia on strategic topics, support small community initiatives, and develop important partnerships (see our 2020 Program Story for details on the latter part).
In the first six months, we organized and/or supported five thematic weeks, months and challenges in Ukrainian Wikipedia under this program:
- Wine Week, as support to a community initiative (16 participants joined, 106 articles created & improved)
- “Ukrainian Cultural Heritage”, held by the organizing team of Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine photo contest (11 participants joined, 31 articles created & improved)
- Karaites Week, as support to a community initiative (13 participants joined, 197 articles created & improved)
- “Week for Articles Popular in Ukraine”, as support to a community initiative (10 participants joined, 74 articles created & improved)
- History of Ukraine’s Independence Week, held in partnership with the the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (still running)
- Sister Wikiprojects initiatives
Our most notable sister wikiprojects initiative in the first half of 2021 has been “Bookcase” («Книжкова шафа») in Ukrainian Wikisource, a contest devoted to proofreading scans of original books. This contest is a good way to help enrich Wikisource with original texts.
This year, the contest focuses on the work of Ivan Franko, one of the most famous Ukrainian poets and writers. Held for the third time this year, the contest started on May 1st and will run throughout the summer. Results are expected in early fall.
We also held content campaigns on sister Wikiprojects within other projects mentioned above, WikiGap in Wikiquote and CEE Spring in Wikiquote & Wikivoyage.
Enhancing quality of content
In 2021, we are continuing to devote more resources to the quality of content produced as the results of our projects, as per Wikimedia Ukraine’s strategic direction.
One of the avenues is improving the design of our current projects:
- paying attention to categorization and Wikidata linking for articles and media files created with support of our programs;
- achieving creation of more quality content within contests by introducing new incentives:
- new nominations for best articles;
- more thorough checking of all articles submitted to provide feedback to participants — and avoid providing prizes / souvenirs to those who haven’t fixed serious issues in the content they created;
- additional prizes for articles recognized by the Wikipedia community as “good” or “featured” — which is now a common practice for our contests and challenges.
All of the improvements mentioned above are not new to 2021, but throughout the reporting period we worked to enhance them, whether by new visible changes (such as a new major nomination for CEE Spring mentioned above) or by improving internal processes.
This program also covers book grants for Wikipedians within our general microgrants program. As of the first six months of 2021, we have approved one big book grant (due to be implemented throughout 2021-2023).
We are also provided support to a community initiative countering vandalism and destructive edits on Ukrainian Wikipedia through systematic checking of all edits by anonymous users. 11 volunteers joined the initiative, having checked all anonymous edits for 81% days in the first half of 2021.
Attracting media content
In 2021, Wikimedia Ukraine is organizing the 9th edition of Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) — the largest international photo contest devoted to nature heritage. This year, 35 countries and territories are organizing their competitions, with the international team managed by Wikimedia Ukraine overseeing the international level and supporting local teams. The submission period won’t be over until July-August, but for now Wikimedia Commons received almost 60,000 images from over 4,000 uploaders thanks to the contest.
One of the international team’s most important tasks is setting a general direction of the contest. Although the competition’s design is largely unchanged, we implemented some new developments following analysis of the previous WLE edition & community feedback. International winners will, for the first time, be divided into two categories — landscapes and macro/close-up. The international jury will choose up to 20 winning photos, not more than 10 photos from each category.
Besides, the organizing team introduced a special nomination in collaboration with the WikiForHumanRights campaign supported by UNEP and UNHCR. Its goal is raising awareness of nature protection and human impacts on nature. The topics include global warming, biodiversity loss, destruction by extractive industries and pollution, disappearing landscapes, fragmentation of ecosystems, humans negatively impacted by the destruction of nature or advocating for protecting nature, and more. Photos from this special global nomination will help highlight the importance of nature protection and existing human impacts on our environment.
As always, the international team provides support to local teams, including help with the contest organization, promotion, evaluation (for example, setting up an online jury tool and helping find local jury members), and other tasks. Apart from personal communication with each team, we held presentations of WLE at several community events:
- WLE International Q&A on April 11th
- WLE International Q&A on April 17th
- East, Southeast Asia & the Pacific (ESEAP) Virtual Meeting on April 17th
The international team also works on contest promotion. Digital channels we’ve been using include WLE website, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages, mailing lists, Facebook groups etc. We prepared infographics on how to organize and take part in the contest and various other text and media materials, as well as worked with the WMF communications team to spread the word about WLE further. Social media following for WLE channels has been growing — for example, 308 new people followed the WLE page on Facebook since the start of this contest preparation; the post about the contest launch has been seen by 2k of people. We also used opportunities for external media coverage, such as participating in two podcasts.
Also, the international team is in charge of running the process of choosing international winners. Local organizing teams are choosing their national winners until the end of August-beginning of September. The international team is working on establishing an international jury; evaluation on the international round will start in the end September-beginning of October, and its results are planned to be announced in November.
For the ninth time, Wikimedia Ukraine is organizing the Ukrainian edition of Wiki Loves Earth. This year, it was held throughout June.
Compared to previous years, we implemented some changes, including:
- further incentivizing participants to focus on nature monuments not yet represented on Commons;
- introducing new special nominations focusing on nature protection (“Nature monuments protection” and “Best photo of wetlands”);
- holding two online presentations of the contest.
According to tentative results, we received over 11,100 photos from over 330 participants. It’s the second highest number among 35 participating countries; notably fewer than in the previous record edition but in line with the years before.
The evaluation process will run through July and August, and winners will be announced in the fall.
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Traditionally, most work for the Wiki Loves Monuments contest is being done in the second half of the year. In the first six months, we were mostly involved in preparation activities for the 2021 contest, including promotion.
Wiki Loves Monuments organizing team held a challenge in Ukrainian Wikipedia to improve media usage and help promote the project — “Ukrainian Cultural Heritage” (see the subsection devoted to thematic weeks above). We also did preparational work for organizing a Ukrainian challenge within the international Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021 campaign, which started on July 1st.
Besides, in January and February we finalized the results of Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine 2020, including holding a virtual award ceremony. One of our most popular online community events to date, it gathered around 80 people in real time; the recording received over 450 views.
- Wikiexpeditions and photography grants
Wikiexpeditions is our program to support Wikimedians’ trips to visit places and sites to improve their coverage on Wikimedia projects. As lockdowns were eased in 2021, we were able to support more expeditions, although with restrictions.
In the first part of 2021, we approved grants for three expeditions — to Central Region, former Trostianets Raion of Vinnytsia Oblast and National Nature Park “Oleshkivski Pisky”. Although the results for all of them are yet to be finalized, and the first one is still in progress, tentatively they’ve brought 1976 photos to Wikimedia Commons; 376 articles were expanded and/or illustrated on Wikipedia.
With the return of offline events, we were also able to provide two photography grants for people to take part in noteworthy high-profile events visited by notable people — to iForum, an IT conference in Kyiv, and Book Arsenal, a book festival in Kyiv. Although their results are yet to be finalized, tentatively the grants have yielded 289 photos and 25 illustrated articles.
- Photos taken at the Book Arsenal in Kyiv, supported by WMUA photogrant
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- GLAM
| Webinar for #1Lib1Ref in Ukrainian Wikipedia, YouTube video |
As planned, we increased resources allocated to development of the GLAM program thanks to hiring a dedicated GLAM & Wikipedia Education contractor (who started working in March, after an extensive recruitment process).
First, we are working on gathering, documenting, and systematizing past experiences of Ukrainian community members — and setting a strategy for GLAM development in consultation with the community. We are also paying more attention to creating new partnerships and developing existing ones, as well as participating in international GLAM events to be in touch with the global Wikimedia community.
For the first time, Wikimedia Ukraine organized a separate challenge within the worldwide initiative #1Lib1Ref. From May 15th to June 5th, we invited Ukrainian librarians and wiki community to join librarians across the world and add missing references to articles, helping make the encyclopedia more reliable and useful.
Apart from developing instruction materials, we held two webinars for #1Lib1Ref; 90 librarians participated live, and recordings received over 250 views on YouTube. 40 participants joined the initiative on Ukrainian Wikipedia, including 13 newbies; 34 of them made over 5 edits. 690 articles were improved as a result.
(For more about Wikimedia Ukraine’s involvement #1Lib1Ref, see our report for the GLAM newsletter).
In the first half of 2021, we also started organizing an article contest for librarians devoted to local content. It’s a continuation of our successful 2018 contest and due to be held in the fall of 2021. Along with partners, we formed an organizing team that has already developed lists of articles suggested for creation and improvement on Wikipedia.
We also provide support to community initiatives for cooperation with GLAM institutions. For example, a Wikimedia Ukraine’s volunteer held a training session for a local library in the Vinnytsia region (Central Ukraine) in May.
Traditionally, we cooperate with GLAM institutions, mostly libraries and museums, within our other projects, most notably Wikimarathon and some content campaigns.
Other content enrichment projects planned for 2021 but not mentioned above are planned to be implemented in the second half of the year.
Increasing Participation
Attracting new editors to Wikimedia projects
- Wikimarathon
| Webinar for Wikimarathon 2021, YouTube video |
Traditionally, Wikimedia Ukraine holds an annual Wikimarathon dedicated to Ukrainian Wikipedia’s birthday. In 2021, it ran from January 28th to January 31st. We organized an online marathon and supported offline events across Ukraine.
The mechanics of Wikimarathon 2021 were similar to Wikimarathons we had in previous years, including the one discussed in detail in our 2017 program story. However, as this Wikimarathon was the first one since the pandemic started, we obviously had to make some important changes, prioritizing the online part and restricting offline activities (we supported offline events but with strict restrictions — and didn’t seek them out proactively, rather relying on the existing network of local organizers).
On the positive side, this change helped us invest more time and energy in online webinars, providing more accessibility to Ukrainian-speaking editors across the world. However, participation in the Wikimarathon inevitably dropped with the drop in the number of offline events.
Overall, 812 articles were created as part of Wikimarathon; at least 271 users created an article, including 70 newbies. Wikimarathon offline reached 12 cities and villages in 10 regions of Ukraine. We held three webinars and four office hours / online consultations. They covered around 45 people live, and webinar recordings gathered over 500 views collectively.
We've also been working on boosting the quality of articles created within Wikimarathon, having organized a sub-project on patrolling and improving articles created by newbies (20 people participated, all 450 unpatrolled articles were checked — a record number since we started this initiative).
- Wikimarathon 2021 events
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- Wikipedia in Education
As well as with GLAM, we increased resources allocated to the WEP program thanks to hiring a dedicated GLAM & Wikipedia Education contractor.
Gathering, documenting, and systematizing the experience of Ukrainian community members, as well as setting a strategic direction for the program’s development, have also been a priority within this program. We are working with the community to gather feedback and set a plan on how to move forward.
We advanced significantly with creating new partnerships in the educational space. Since January, we’ve been working with a local deputy of the Kyiv Municipal Government on new ways to engage school teachers and students in Kyiv to use Wikipedia in the education process. It’s a long-term project, which is likely to yield visible results during the next academic year, but it already helped us establish some beneficial partnerships, such as with teachers from Kyiv Juniors Academy of Science who joined judging the article contest “Wikipedia for School” and with whom we have a tentative plan to organize a joint article contest during the coming academic year.
As well as with GLAM, we’ve been paying more attention to the international context — participating in international events and sharing our stories with the global community. We’ve been exploring ways to implement the “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” program in Ukraine, and we expect it to be among strategic priorities for WMUA’s educational work.
We keep working with our community of educators, providing them with technical & informational support in their events. Юрій Булка, a member of Wikimedia Ukraine, held webinars and guided, using Programs & Events Dashboard, 27 third-year culturology students of Ukrainian Catholic University. The students created or significantly improved almost 30 articles. The articles have received around 7,500 views so far.
Traditionally, we cooperate with educational institutions, within our other projects, most notably Wikimarathon, where some events have been held specifically for school or university students, as well as article contests and challenges, such as Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month.
- Wikipedia MOOC
We continue working on developing the Wikipedia MOOC. Although the work advanced significantly in the first half of 2021, it’s still in progress as we are finalizing the course’s content.
- “Wikipedia for School”
“Wikipedia for School” is our annual contest devoted to expanding Wikipedia on the topics of school curriculum and recruiting new educators to Wikipedia and helping them familiarize themselves with the process of editing. In the first half of 2021, we’ve been working on finalizing results of the last edition. We expect to publish them by late summer and start preparing a new edition at the start of the new school year.
- WikiScience Contest
In early 2021, we finalized and published the results of the 2020 Science Photo Competition. A new edition is tentatively planned for the fall of 2021.
Increasing diversity of the community of editors
| Webinar for the “Serbest Entsiklopediya” marathon on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia, YouTube video |
In 2021, our work to support projects in the languages of ethnic groups that have traditionally inhabited Ukraine has seen a major boost as we organized a content campaign on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia. Called “Serbest Entsiklopediya: Writing Crimean Tatar Wikipedia” (“serbest entsiklopediya” means “free encyclopedia” in Crimean Tatar), it’s a marathon devoted to bridging the most critical content gaps by creating and improving articles on basic topics.
The marathon ends on July 15th, and work on finalizing results and rewarding most active participants will take place throughout the summer. From what we see right now, we believe that the marathon has brought great results for the Crimean Tatar language edition both by yielding several hundreds of articles on basic topics and indirectly by developing CrTatWiki’s existing technical infrastructure to accommodate for the marathon. We’ll be able to share more results and insights about the project in the coming months.
- People articles about whom were created on CrTatWiki thanks to the marathon
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Regarding development of communities in sister projects, we finished the project for rewarding the most active users on six Ukrainian-language sister projects in 2019-2020. Its aim has been to draw attention to these wiki projects and boost participation.
We also organized diversity-themed events within our other programs, most notably WikiGap (see details in the Content Enrichment section).
Community Support and Development
Instruction for community members
- Training sessions for the community
One of Wikimedia Ukraine’s strategic goals is to invest in skills and leadership development for community members by organizing training and other learning events — both holding specific events for the community and providing scholarships for external opportunities.
In the first half of 2021, we held two major learning events for the community, both virtually, and provided one set of scholarships.
1. Training on NGO governance (March 27th)
Traditionally, we held a training session for Board and Audit Committee members after they’d been reelected by the General Assembly; some staff members were invited as well. 14 people participated, including 5 speakers.
The topics covered include general governance questions; role and responsibilities of the Board and Audit Committee; project management at WMUA; communications at WMUA; financial management.
2. Forum for UkWiki administrators (May 29th-30th)
In late May, Wikimedia Ukraine held a two-day online forum for administrators of Ukrainian Wikipedia and other Ukranian-language Wikimedia projects. Around 20 people took part in the forum in real time, with some more community members making use of the recording afterwards.
A first-ever event of its kind in the Ukrainian community, the event helped to both develop the community’s technical capacity and provide a platform for discussing how to better organize admins’ work.
For a detailed overview of the event, see our program story.
- Presentations for the forum for UkWiki administrators
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3. Five scholarships for an external course on journalism and social media
Wikimedia Ukraine provided a scholarship to five community members to attend an extended course on journalism and social media in February-April. It will help develop communications capacity for the community, beneficial for our organization’s communications and beyond.
- Hackathons / events for the development of technical skills
We haven’t held a hackathon in the first half of 2021, though we are exploring options for such an event to be held this year if the situation permits.
- Event organisation & Strategy facilitation
On February 28th, we held our Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Kyiv.
As usual, the General Meeting elected a new Board and Audit Committee, as well as reviewed the organization’s activity in the previous year and decided on some housekeeping questions. 49 Wikimedia Ukraine’s members participated.
The event was held online for the first time in history. Its move to online was much more challenging than for other events — because of general legal constraints and the need to find a secure online voting system. We managed to overcome the hurdles successfully, in part thanks to extensive support of the Trust & Safety team at the Wikimedia Foundation that enabled us to use SecurePoll.
(See a more detailed message on our AGM in English here).
We’ve also started the preparation process for the annual Wikiconference — setting up its format, deciding on the timeframe and gathering an organizing team. It’s planned to be held in September in a hybrid online-offline format.
Also, we organized two virtual award ceremonies for photo contests — Wiki Loves Monuments and WikiScience Contest. While they were also in fact events for the community, they are covered by their respective projects and programs. We also did an online event to celebrate Wikipedia's 20th anniversary, covered by another program.
- Scholarships for international events
We haven’t provided scholarships for international events in the first half of this year, but we’re planning to support Ukrainian community’s participation in Wikimania and Wikimedia CEE Online Meeting, probably by providing scholarships for online participation.
Increasing the community's motivation and awareness
As part of our strategic goal to support “community initiatives for distinguishing and motivating editors”, Wikimedia Ukraine runs Wikizghushchivka, the program of providing small physical gifts to the most active new & experienced Wikipedia contributors each month.
It’s a way to distinguish experienced users for their often-invisible work and nudge newbies to keep editing. The gift package includes a can of condensed milk (“zghushchivka” / “згущівка” in Ukrainian) and souvenirs. 36 users were awarded in the first half of 2021 (not counting June), including 22 newbies.
In terms of community awareness, we’ve been preparing monthly newsletters for the Ukrainian community and working to increase their reach by introducing new channels of distribution, such as the newly launched Telegram channel. We also paid more attention to delivering important international Wikimedian news to the Ukrainian community.
This program also covers wikigrants — small grants for members of the community for activities useful to the Wikimedia movement that are not covered by other programs. We haven’t received new applications for this program in the first half of 2021.
We plan to conduct a community survey in the second half of 2021.
Awareness about Wikimedia and Free Knowledge
Media support and promotion of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects
| Radio interview with Wikimedia Ukraine's program coordinator for Wikipedia birthday, YouTube video |
- Working with the media
Traditionally, media activities play an important role in the realization of our projects. During the first half of 2021, we have provided communication support to increase awareness and ensure visibility for the Wikimedia Ukraine projects with the following activities, among others:
- Distributing 11 press releases about projects and activities (thematic weeks and months, article and photo contests, important milestones, interesting facts about good and quality articles etc.) to a wide range of Ukrainian media outlets.
- Responding to media inquiries, providing deeper insights and comments from our speakers.
- Pitching topics to media outlets through personal contacts.
Dozens of media publications referring to Wikimedia Ukraine, its projects, news and speakers were generated due to our efforts. Among the projects which have received the widest reach and media attention so far are Wikipedia 20th birthday, WikiGap, and Ukrainian Wiki Loves Earth. The most popular individual press release is the rating of Ukrainian Wikipedia’s most popular articles in 2020 — it yielded over 25 media publications.
- Working with social media and blogs
As always, we widely use our blog and social media to cover and promote our projects.
Wikimedia Ukraine’s blog remains an important communication channel for publishing information about the Wikimedia movement, our news and projects in different formats, e. g. announcements, interviews, articles on a wide range of themes.
As for social media platforms, we develop them to reach a wider audience, promote our blog’s content, invite users to interact, and get feedback. We also try to use the opportunities social networks provide to experiment with presenting different types of content, manage it, set goals, and track results.
In January-June, we published 46 articles on the blog; it received 50,400 views from 34,968 unique users; the number of views increased by 49% year-over-year.
By July 15th, the number of our main Facebook page followers had increased by 19% since the beginning of the year (4,191 -> 5,002). All posts published from January 1st until June 30th received over 225,000 views. The average organic post reach for this period is 670 users.
On Facebook, we used paid promotions for most important opportunities, events, and blog posts. As well as last year, we experimented with targeting and received positive results we could never reach with organic promotion only. On our main page (i.e. not counting pages of photo contests), we launched eight ad campaigns in the first half of 2021.
We continue to develop Wikimedia Ukraine’s pages on Instagram and Twitter; the audience also showed slight growth. As of July 15th, we have 773 followers on Instagram and 1710 followers on Twitter. On Twitter, our tweets were viewed around 118,500 times in January—June, almost twice as many as during the same period last year.
We run Wikimedia Ukraine’s YouTube channel, using it mostly as a place to host webinars and video instructions; it currently has 280 subscribers. In 2021, we also launched a new communication channel on Telegram, a messaging app widely used as a media platform in Ukraine. The channel now has 170 subscribers.
Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Earth, and Wiki Science Photo Competition have separate social media channels. 2021 proved again that these channels are an important instrument to coordinate the competitions, and we put a lot of resources into growing them as well.
- Wikipedia anniversary
January 2021 saw two important milestones — 20th anniversary of Wikipedia and 17th birthday of the Ukrainian edition. We invested a lot of time in using this opportunity to tell the Ukrainian audience more about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community.
First, we prepared a set of materials for WMUA blog and social media — for example, an infographic with 20 facts and milestones about Wikipedia for its 20th birthday, as well as translations of international materials.
Second, we pitched the topic to media outlets and got about a dozen stories by nationwide news outlets, TV and radio channels. For Ukrainian Wikipedia’s anniversary and Wikimarathon, we held a press conference in Kyiv in a combined offline-online format.
For Wikipedia 20, we also held a celebratory virtual event for the community, which gathered around 40 participants. Organizers presented interesting facts about Wikipedia's history, and participants shared their Wikipedia stories.
- Communication strategy development
As planned, we are working on the process of communication strategy development, and we expect to finalize it in the second half of 2021.
Working with readers and the general public to increase awareness
In the first half of 2021, we focused on creating online informational materials about Wikipedia. For example, we prepared a piece on why it’s a bad idea to create a Wikipedia article about yourself or a note on the role of Wikipedia administrators. We also cooperate with partner media outlets, such as Detector.Media, a nationwide outlet focusing on media topics.
We also held over a dozen webinars and presentations on Wikipedia for a wide audience within our other projects; most of them are mentioned in the respective sections above.
Advocacy
The first half of 2021 has seen an increase in the legislative efforts directed at the reform of the copyright legislation in Ukraine, as well as our adjacent activities. We continue following the course established in previous years, but we were more engaged with the legislative matters than in the preceding half a year.
As previously, the activities conducted throughout this period of time can be divided into two categories: information campaign and engagement with the legislative process.
- Information campaign
Our information campaign was largely concerned with maintaining presence in the discourse both within our community and outside of it. We continue our cooperation with Detector.Media, which this time resulted in the publication of an article on how freedom of panorama is handled internationally.
We planned on organizing a round table dedicated to various issues within the domain of copyright regulation which are of particular interest to Wikipedia contributors, but this event will be moved to the second half of the year, to get more interested stakeholders. We successfully negotiated participation in the round table under the aegis of the Ukrainian National Bar Association on July 16. The event is dedicated to discussion of the draft legislation on copyright reform which was presented to the parliamentary committees in the beginning of June. We will elaborate on the issues of freedom of panorama and will compare the draft legislation from this perspective.
- Engagement with the legislative process
We continue to share information and coordinate our activities whenever we engage directly with those involved in the process of drafting copyright legislation. There are a few draft laws being prepared in the Parliament committees and Cabinet of Ministers. We are also keeping in touch with authors of some draft laws, to be able to present our suggestions on provisions on freedom of panorama prior to when the drafts were published.
Currently, we are working on an analytic article on the suggested draft legislation, and we also continually update our info materials. The most liberal draft law (regarding the freedom of panorama) is #5552-2. It allows for the reproduction of publicly available pieces of architecture, sculpture and works of art without mentioning the name of the author and without any restrictions with respect to commercial use. Depending on how the situation unfolds, we might get involved with advocacy efforts around this draft law.
We’ve been also working to develop new partnerships in the field, including with a representative of the Ukrainian National Cinematographers' Association.
Spending[edit]
Please report your organization's total spending during the reporting period, or link to a financial document showing your total spending.
- 33325.39 USD (detailed report can be found here)
- The weighted average exchange rate for the period January 1—June 30, 2021 was used
Final report[edit]
Program story[edit]
(Optional) Please tell or link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.
Learning story[edit]
(Optional) Please link to one learning story that shows how your organization documents lessons learned and adapts its programs accordingly.
Results[edit]
Metrics[edit]
| Metric | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
| 1. Number of participants | 6,003 / 5,959 | Target met. The numbers for photo contests were lower than we expected (2020 records didn't replicate, and the numbers were consistent with pre-pandemic levels), but we had a high number of online-focused content campaigns on Wikipedia, particularly with external partners. |
| 2. Number of of newly registered users | 3,941 / 3,467 | Target met. We saw fewer participants joining during Wikimarathon, one of our flagship Ukrainian editor-recruitment projects, because of the pandemic restrictions, but online-centered content campaigns, particularly diversity initiatives, showed stronger-than-expected results. |
| 3. Number of content pages | 111,284 / 108,290 | Target met. The dynamic was the same as for the number of participants: slightly-lower-than-expected numbers for large photo contests, as well as for the campaigns that rely on in-person events, but higher numbers for online-focused campaigns on Wikipedia. |
| 4. Number of volunteers involved | 220 / 150 | Target noticeably exceeded because of the higher volunteer involvement in the Content Enrichment projects, which was driven mainly by our large and diverse jury and organizing teams for article & photo contests. |
| 5. Number of organizations engaged | 144 / 115 | Target exceeded thanks to a high number of communication partners across our various programs, including GLAM. |
Content Enrichment
Bridging text content gaps
In February-March, we held “Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month”, a content campaign with a goal to improve coverage of Ukrainian culture on Wikipedia and Wikidata. The project included an international campaign and an article challenge on Ukrainian Wikipedia; both ran through February 10th to March 10th.
The challenge was held in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute and supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, in continuation of the partnership established the year before. Apart from general promotion, we worked closely with universities to involve students in the campaign.
As a result, over 800 Wikipedia articles were created and improved in 32 language editions, from English, Spanish and Japanese to Assamese, Galician and Korean (the number claimed by participants is notably higher, but we tried to exclude those out of thematic scope), as well as roughly 700 Wikidata items. Over 170 participants joined.
We held two webinars for participants during the challenge, in English and Ukrainian. Over 100 people joined in real time, and recordings have been viewed over 760 times on YouTube.
The project helped establish a useful framework that can be used for similar campaigns in the future, and we are doing the second round of Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month in 2022.
In March, we joined WikiGap for the fourth time since 2018. The challenge was held on March 5-21 and helped attract 720 articles about women in Ukrainian on Wikipedia from more than 100 users.
We continue to benefit from the support of co-organizers — the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine, the UNFPA Office in Ukraine, and the National Democratic Institute in Ukraine. For the first time, Ukrainian Wikiquote joined WikiGap with a separate sister challenge, yielding over 170 articles from 18 participants.
We held a webinar for participants, with a presentation about Wikipedia and a motivational speech from a Swedish entrepreneur. 35 people joined in real time, and the recording has been available for further use, having gathered over 250 views to date.
We also traditionally helped promote global WikiGap Challenge within the Ukrainian community; four Ukrainian Wikipedia editors made it to the top 10.
(More results and insights about WikiGap 2021 in Ukraine are available in our Diff post).
- Visuals for WikiGap 2021 in Ukraine
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| Webinar for CEE Spring 2021, YouTube video |
Organized by Wikimedia Ukraine annually since 2015, CEE Spring is traditionally the largest article contest on Ukrainian Wikipedia.
Although the basic concept remained the same, this year we decided to introduce some major changes that would reflect more focus on the quality of content and of the project in general. Most notably, we shortened its duration from over two months to one month — both to make the contest itself more efficient and to free up resources for other important projects.
We also attracted two important partners (Polish Institute and Czech center in Ukraine) and held a webinar with each of them, organized an international push to write articles about Ukraine, introduced a nomination for best individual articles, and more. Apart from Wikipedia, Ukrainian-language Wikiquote and Wikivoyage joined the contest for the second time.
Throughout April, almost 80 participants created and improved 1606 articles on Wikipedia, 123 articles on Wikiquote, and 5 articles on Wikivoyage. 7 contest articles were promoted to good articles by the community. In addition, almost 130 people wrote over 640 articles about Ukraine in other language editions.
After several months of jury evaluation and finalization of results, winners were announced in the fall. (See a detailed project report in Ukrainian).
- Thematic weeks and months
In 2021, we continued to use thematic weeks and months widely as a way to enrich Wikipedia on strategic topics, support small community initiatives, and develop important partnerships (see our 2020 Program Story for details on the latter part).
Throughout the year, we organized and/or supported 14 thematic weeks, months and challenges in Ukrainian Wikipedia and Wikisource under this program:
- Wine Week, as support to a community initiative (16 participants joined, 106 articles created & improved)
- “Ukrainian Cultural Heritage”, held by the organizing team of Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine photo contest (11 participants joined, 31 articles created & improved)
- Karaites Week, as support to a community initiative (13 participants joined, 197 articles created & improved)
- “Week for Articles Popular in Ukraine”, as support to a community initiative (10 participants joined, 74 articles created & improved)
- History of Ukraine’s Independence Week, held in partnership with the the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (14 participants joined, 156 articles created & improved)
- Illustrating Wikipedia Month, held as part of the international Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos campaign (32 participants joined, 1311 articles improved)
- “Movoznai” challenge devoted to proofreading Wikipedia articles, held in partnership with the office of the State Language Protection Commissioner (50 participants joined, 600 articles improved)
- Wiki-Olympics 2020, as support to a community initiative (15 participants joined, 761 articles created & improved)
- Fantastique Fall, as support to a community initiative (35 participants joined, 459 articles created & improved)
- Ukrainian language week, held in partnership with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine (17 participants joined, 43 articles created & improved)
- Maik Yohansen week on Ukrainian Wikisource, as support to a community initiative (9 participants joined, 1487 pages reviewed and proofread)
- Austrian Week, held in partnership the Austrian Cultural Forum in Kyiv and the Austrian Bureau of Cooperation in Lviv, with support of Wikimedia Austria (29 participants joined, 284 articles created & improved)
- “Memory Candle”, an annual campaign devoted to the Holodomor, as support to a community initiative (10 participants joined, 17 articles created & improved)
- Joseph Conrad week, held in partnership with the Polish Institute (10 participants joined, 52 articles created & improved)
- Sister Wikiprojects initiatives
Our most notable sister wikiprojects initiative in 2021 was “Bookcase” («Книжкова шафа») in Ukrainian Wikisource, a contest devoted to proofreading scans of original books. This contest is a good way to help enrich Wikisource with original texts.
In 2021, the contest focused on the work of Ivan Franko, one of the most famous Ukrainian poets and writers. Held for the third time this year, the contest ran for four month between May and August. As a result, 11 participants proofread and reviewed 5901 pages of Ivan Franko's work.
We also held content campaigns on sister Wikiprojects within other projects mentioned above and below – WikiGap in Wikiquote, CEE Spring in Wikiquote & Wikivoyage, and #SheSaid campaign in Wikiquote.
Enhancing quality of content
In 2021, we continued to devote more resources to the quality of content produced as the results of our projects, as per Wikimedia Ukraine’s strategic direction.
One of the avenues was improving the design of our current projects:
- paying attention to categorization and Wikidata linking for articles and media files created with support of our programs;
- achieving creation of more quality content within contests by introducing new incentives:
- new nominations for best articles;
- more thorough checking of all articles submitted to provide feedback to participants — and avoid providing prizes / souvenirs to those who haven’t fixed serious issues in the content they created;
- additional prizes for articles recognized by the Wikipedia community as “good” or “featured” — which is now a common practice for our contests and challenges.
All of the improvements mentioned above were not new to 2021, but throughout the reporting period we worked to enhance them, whether by new visible changes (such as a new major nomination for CEE Spring mentioned above) or by improving internal processes.
This program also covers book grants for Wikipedians within our general microgrants program. In 2021, we received and approved three book grant applications; they are expected to yield 500-800 articles to the Wikimedia projects over the course of the next two years. Around 200 articles were already created or improved in 2021 thanks to these grants.
We are also provided support to a community initiative countering vandalism and destructive edits on Ukrainian Wikipedia through systematic checking of all edits by anonymous users. 11 volunteers joined the initiative, having checked all anonymous edits for 81% days in the first half of 2021; the project became dormant in the second half of the year.
“Movoznai” challenge and “Week for Articles Popular in Ukraine”, which are mentioned above, were also de-facto dedicated to specifically improving the quality of content on Ukrainian Wikipedia.
Attracting media content
In 2021, Wikimedia Ukraine organized the 9th edition of Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) — the largest international photo contest devoted to nature heritage. This year, 34 countries and territories organized their competitions, with the international team managed by Wikimedia Ukraine overseeing the international level and supporting local teams. Throughout the contest, Wikimedia Commons received 63,742 images from over 4,350 uploaders. Notably, the vast majority of participants were newcomers — 77% registered after the contest start.
One of the international team’s most important tasks is setting a general direction of the contest. Although the competition’s design was largely unchanged, we implemented some new developments following analysis of the previous WLE edition & community feedback. International winners were, for the first time, divided into two categories — landscapes and macro/close-up.
Besides, the organizing team introduced a special nomination in collaboration with the WikiForHumanRights campaign supported by UNEP and UNHCR. Its goal is raising awareness of nature protection and human impacts on nature. The topics include global warming, biodiversity loss, destruction by extractive industries and pollution, disappearing landscapes, fragmentation of ecosystems, humans negatively impacted by the destruction of nature or advocating for protecting nature, and more. Photos from this special global nomination help highlight the importance of nature protection and existing human impacts on our environment. (Results of the special nomination are expected to be announced in late February).
As always, the international team provided support to local teams, including help with the contest organization, promotion, evaluation (for example, setting up an online jury tool and helping find local jury members), and other tasks. Apart from personal communication with each team, we held presentations of WLE at several community events:
- WLE International Q&A on April 11th
- WLE International Q&A on April 17th
- East, Southeast Asia & the Pacific (ESEAP) Virtual Meeting on April 17th
The international team also works on contest promotion. Digital channels we’ve been using include WLE website, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages, mailing lists, Facebook groups etc. We prepared infographics on how to organize and take part in the contest and various other text and media materials, as well as worked with the WMF communications team to spread the word about WLE further. Social media following for WLE channels has been growing — for example, almost 400 new people followed the WLE page on Facebook in 2021; the post about the contest launch has been seen by 2k of people. We also used opportunities for external media coverage, such as participating in two podcasts. For announcing winners, we worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to publish the winners on their platforms to increase the reach.
Also, the international team was in charge of running the process of choosing international winners. Local organizing teams chose their national winners until the end of August-beginning of September. The international team worked on establishing an international jury; evaluation on the international round ran in the late fall and early December, with winners announced in late December.
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Abano beach at sunset, Portugal, Wiki Loves Earth international winner in the Landscapes category -
Arianta arbustorum on the Taraxacum flower: macro shot taken in the Ropsha Forest, Russia, Wiki Loves Earth international winner in the Macro/close-up category
For the ninth time, Wikimedia Ukraine organized the Ukrainian edition of Wiki Loves Earth. This year, it was held throughout June.
Compared to previous years, we implemented some changes, including:
- further incentivizing participants to focus on nature monuments not yet represented on Commons;
- introducing new special nominations focusing on nature protection (“Nature monuments protection” and “Best photo of wetlands”);
- holding two online presentations of the contest.
Thanks to the contest, we received over 11,126 photos from 327 participants, including 180 newbies. It’s the second highest number among 34 participating countries; notably fewer than in the previous record edition but in line with the years before.
- Ukrainian Wiki Loves Earth top 3 winners
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Traditionally, Wiki Loves Monuments is our biggest national-level photo contest. It has evolved from being just a competition to a large-scale project devoted to preserving and popularizing Ukrainian cultural heritage monuments, with a broad community of volunteers behind it.
Thanks to these systematic efforts, as well as the improvements in communications, the 2021 edition brought high results as 335 participants (including 156 newbies) sumbitted 25,341 photos. The number of photos is the second highest among all the countries who participated in Wiki Loves Monuments 2021 on the international level. 2021 participants illustrated over 7600 cultural monuments; particularly, 1515 Ukrainian cultural monuments got their first photo on Wikimedia Commons thanks to the 2021 contest.
Wiki Loves Monuments organizing team also held a challenge in Ukrainian Wikipedia to improve media usage and help promote the project — “Ukrainian Cultural Heritage”, as well as the Ukrainian challenge within the international Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021 campaign (see the subsection devoted to thematic weeks above).
Besides, in January and February of 2021 we finalized the results of Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine 2020, including holding a virtual award ceremony. One of our most popular online community events to date, it gathered around 80 people in real time; the recording received over 450 views.
- Wikiexpeditions and photography grants
Wikiexpeditions is our program to support Wikimedians’ trips to visit places and sites to improve their coverage on Wikimedia projects. As lockdowns were eased in 2021, we were able to support more expeditions, although with restrictions.
In the 2021, we approved grants for three expeditions — to Central Region, former Trostianets Raion of Vinnytsia Oblast and National Nature Park “Oleshkivski Pisky”. Together, they brought 2992 photos to Wikimedia Commons; 699 articles were expanded and/or illustrated on Wikipedia.
With the return of offline events, we were also able to provide two photography grants for people to take part in noteworthy high-profile events visited by notable people — to iForum, an IT conference in Kyiv, and Book Arsenal, a book festival in Kyiv. The grants yielded 289 photos and 25 illustrated articles.
- Photos taken at the Book Arsenal in Kyiv, supported by WMUA photogrant
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- GLAM
| Webinar for #1Lib1Ref in Ukrainian Wikipedia, YouTube video |
As planned, we increased resources allocated to development of the GLAM program thanks to hiring a dedicated GLAM & Wikipedia Education contractor (who started working in March, after an extensive recruitment process).
For the first time, Wikimedia Ukraine organized a separate challenge within the worldwide initiative #1Lib1Ref. From May 15th to June 5th, we invited Ukrainian librarians and wiki community to join librarians across the world and add missing references to articles, helping make the encyclopedia more reliable and useful.
Apart from developing instruction materials, we held two webinars for #1Lib1Ref; 90 librarians participated live, and recordings received over 250 views on YouTube. 40 participants joined the initiative on Ukrainian Wikipedia, including 13 newbies; 34 of them made over 5 edits. 690 articles were improved as a result. (For more about Wikimedia Ukraine’s involvement in #1Lib1Ref, see our report for the GLAM newsletter). We set up a framework for #1Lib1Ref to become regular on Ukrainian Wikipedia, and we already ran a second edition in early 2022.
The largest Wikimedia Ukraine's GLAM project in 2021 was article contest “Local cultural heritage and prominent people”, which encourages librarians to improve coverage of these topics on Ukrainian Wikipedia. A continuation of our 2018 contest, this year it lasted a whole month from October, 5th to November, 5th.
While communicating the project with the help of our partners, charity fund “Live Library Ukraine”, and regional state administrations using television, internet resources and social media, we were able to reach over 5,000 librarians. Before the start and during the contest Wikimedia Ukraine organized and hosted three webinars and provided on-demand support for participants via email; 400 librarians engaged with the project in this way. By November 5th, over 100 participants from different Ukrainian libraries actively participated in the contest, having created or significantly improved about 800 articles. 12 wikipedians, wikimedians and outside experts are working on evaluating participants' work and presenting the list of the contest winners. We plan to announce results in February 2022.
We also provided support to community initiatives for cooperation with GLAM institutions. For example, a Wikimedia Ukraine’s volunteer held a training session for a local library in the Vinnytsia region (Central Ukraine) in May.
Traditionally, we cooperate with GLAM institutions, mostly libraries and museums, within our other projects, most notably Wikimarathon and some content campaigns.
Content Enrichment: Program objectives
- Work with volunteers to close specific text content gaps through creating or improving 5,400 articles on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
Met. Over 15,000 articles on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects were created or improved thanks to the campaigns supported by Wikimedia Ukraine (over 8500 articles when proofreading Wikisource pages is not counted).
- Organize contests to enrich Wikimedia Commons with media content, attracting 40,000 photos from Ukraine and additional 60,000 international photos.
- Mostly met. We organized two major photo contests in Ukraine and supported Wiki Loves Earth international edition. The number of photos submitted was lower across the board as compared to 2020; we attracted 36,467 photos from Ukraine within Wiki Loves Earth & Wiki Loves Monuments, as well as 52,616 photos from other countries within Wiki Loves Earth.
- Promote the use of mediafiles gathered thanks to photo contents on Wikimedia projects by making sure at least 10% of photos (10,000) are used.
- Mostly met. 9574 photos submitted to Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine and international Wiki Loves Earth are currently used in the wikis according to the Wiki Loves tool, which is 10.7% of the photos submitted.
- Support community initiatives around content enrichment by supporting at least 5 community-driven thematic weeks.
- Met. We supported 7 community-driven thematic weeks in 2021.
- Involve at least 30 GLAM institutions, with collaborations resulting in at least 400 new or improved content pages (media donations, text content improvement etc.)
- Mostly met. In 2021, we mostly focused on working with individual librarians rather than partnerships on the institutional level. Over 450 librarians participated in events held for our campaigns #1Lib1Ref and “Local cultural heritage and prominent people”, and over 60 of them actively contributed to Wikipedia, bringing around 1500 new or improved Wikipedia articles.
- Improve access to information (arrangement, structuring, and categorization) by requiring all Wikipedia articles created within content enrichment projects to be categorized and connected to Wikidata.
- Met. Categorization and linking to Wikidata has been a routine requirement for our contests and content campaigns.
Increasing Participation
Attracting new editors to Wikimedia projects
- Wikimarathon
| Webinar for Wikimarathon 2021, YouTube video |
Traditionally, Wikimedia Ukraine holds an annual Wikimarathon dedicated to Ukrainian Wikipedia’s birthday. In 2021, it ran from January 28th to January 31st. We organized an online marathon and supported offline events across Ukraine.
The mechanics of Wikimarathon 2021 were similar to Wikimarathons we had in previous years, including the one discussed in detail in our 2017 program story. However, as this Wikimarathon was the first one since the pandemic started, we obviously had to make some important changes, prioritizing the online part and restricting offline activities (we supported offline events but with strict restrictions — and didn’t seek them out proactively, rather relying on the existing network of local organizers).
On the positive side, this change helped us invest more time and energy in online webinars, providing more accessibility to Ukrainian-speaking editors across the world. However, participation in the Wikimarathon inevitably dropped with the drop in the number of offline events.
Overall, 812 articles were created as part of Wikimarathon; at least 271 users created an article, including 70 newbies. Wikimarathon offline reached 12 cities and villages in 10 regions of Ukraine. We held three webinars and four office hours / online consultations. They covered around 45 people live, and webinar recordings gathered over 800 views collectively.
We've also been working on boosting the quality of articles created within Wikimarathon, having organized a sub-project on patrolling and improving articles created by newbies (20 people participated, all 450 unpatrolled articles were checked — a record number since we started this initiative).
- Wikimarathon 2021 events
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- Wikipedia in Education
As well as with GLAM, we increased resources allocated to the WEP program thanks to hiring a dedicated GLAM & Wikipedia Education contractor.
We advanced significantly with creating new partnerships in the educational space. Since January, we’ve been working with a local deputy of the Kyiv Municipal Government on new ways to engage school teachers and students in Kyiv to use Wikipedia in the education process. It’s a long-term project, which is likely to yield visible results during the next academic year, but it already helped us establish some beneficial partnerships, such as with teachers from Kyiv Juniors Academy of Science who joined judging the article contest “Wikipedia for School” and with whom we have a tentative plan to organize a joint article contest during the 2021/22 academic year.
The Educational Program also serves as a hub for webinars and training sessions on Wikipedia in the educational environment, a function which has been extensively utilized by Ukrainians eager to work with Wikipedia. This year, we’ve reached several groups of teachers across Ukraine and students in a number of Ukraine’s universities.
We’ve been happy to see this program used by educators and students alike in a variety of areas, from the Junior Academy of Sciences in the capital in Kyiv to groups of school teachers in the eastern frontline city of Mariupol. The volume of training events we have seen is largely due to engagement with long-term volunteers of the Wikimedia community,
- Yurii Bulka held webinars and guided, using Programs & Events Dashboard, 27 third-year culturology students of Ukrainian Catholic University. The students created or significantly improved almost 30 articles. The articles have received around 7,500 views so far.
- Serhiy Lypko and Mariana Senkiv for students of Lviv Polytechnic National University (15 participants learned how to edit Wikivoyage),
- Liubov Suverniova and Halyna Kachurovska for teachers during EdCamp Mariupol (around 10 participants)
- Natalia Lastovets for educators of Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (also known as Minor Academy of Sciences), around 25 participants,
- Maryna Chala for teachers' NGO Teach for Ukraine (18 participants).
To attract new teachers to Education program and provide them with necessary resources, we:
- Published handbook for 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. This enables peer to peer exchange between educators and offers a leg up to newer members of the community while reinforcing the reach and positive influence that Wikipedia has. The handbook is uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and the printed version is available for the Ukrainian teachers for free.
- Created an Education program in Ukraine booklet which emphasizes the variety of the ways and reasons to use Wikipedia and wikiprojects in secondary schools and universities.
We've been paying more attention to the international context — participating in international events and sharing our stories in the Newsletter (August, September, November) with the global community.
In December, Wikimedia Ukraine’s Education & GLAM manager graduated from the training for trainers course for the “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” program, and we’ve been exploring ways to implement this course in Ukraine, forming mutually beneficial partnerships with online education platforms, learning about self-education priorities of Ukrainian teachers. We expect it to be among strategic priorities for WMUA’s educational work in 2022.
Traditionally, we cooperate with educational institutions, within our other projects, most notably Wikimarathon, where some events have been held specifically for school or university students, as well as article contests and challenges, such as Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month.
- Wikipedia MOOC
We continue working on developing the Wikipedia MOOC. Although the work advanced significantly in 2021, it’s still in progress, and we did not publish the course in 2021.
Wikimedia Ukraine's flagship educational project for the past three years has been the annual article contest for teachers “Wikipedia for School” which is devoted to topics included in Ukrainian secondary education curricula. In 2021, we worked to finalize the 2020-2021 contest edition (October 20th 2020 to January 24th 2021), as well as to jumpstart the 2021-2022 edition.
Over 200 people signed up for the contest in 2020-2021, and 60 people actively participated, having created or significantly improved 759 articles; more than twice as many as the last time. Out of the eleven subjects, the most popular ones are history, mathematics, and physics (we had decided which subjects to include based on the availability of volunteers willing to create high-quality lists of articles for creation/improvement). In August we held an online award ceremony, with 10 people participating.
The 2021-2022 edition of the contest runs from December 1st to February 28th. After listening to participants' and volunteers' feedback, we made considerable changes to the contest design, including a great focus on the quality of articles and on improving existing articles rather than creating new ones.
To reach the contest target audience we used various methods, which resulted in more than 50 articles about “Wikipedia for School” at various media platforms including websites of local municipalities all around Ukraine, school websites, local and national media. More than 200 educators subscribed to the contest news, 35 teachers participated in the first webinar dedicated to the contest in December, and most of them went on to sign up on Wikipedia. We expect to finalize the results and hold an award ceremony by May.
In 2020, we organized a competition devoted to scientific photography for the sixth time; it ran from November 15th until December 15th. 72 participants submitted 523 photos to the contest within five categories.
In late November, the organization team held a presentation of the contest, which gathered almost 200 views on YouTube. The award ceremony will be held in mid-February.
Increasing diversity of the community of editors
| Webinar for the “Serbest Entsiklopediya” marathon on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia, YouTube video |
In 2021, our work to support projects in the languages of ethnic groups that have traditionally inhabited Ukraine has seen a major boost as we organized a content campaign on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia. Called “Serbest Entsiklopediya: Writing Crimean Tatar Wikipedia” (“serbest entsiklopediya” means “free encyclopedia” in Crimean Tatar), it’s a marathon devoted to bridging the most critical content gaps by creating and improving articles on basic topics.
The marathon brought good results for the Crimean Tatar language edition both by bringing almost 300 new articles on basic topics and indirectly by developing CrTatWiki’s existing technical infrastructure to accommodate for the marathon. (See a blog post with results in Ukrainian).
- People articles about whom were created on CrTatWiki thanks to the marathon
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Regarding development of communities in sister projects, we instituted the program for rewarding most active yearly contributors to six most active Ukrainian-language sister projects – Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikivoyage and Wikibooks. We provide a small prize and a souvenir package to 1-5 most active contributors, dependent on the general level of activity; the aim of this program is to draw attention to sister wiki projects and boost participation. (See a blog post in Ukrainian with more detail).
We organized diversity initiatives related to content on Wikimedia projects. In November, along with partners (the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine, the UNFPA Office in Ukraine, and the National Democratic Institute in Ukraine), Wikimedia Ukraine for the third time held the “She Did It” challenge on Ukrainian Wikipedia devoted to improving existing articles about notable women. This year, over 30 participants improved over 250 articles; three articles received a “good article” status. Though the challenge was open to both men and women, the number of female participants there was much higher than on average in Wikimedia projects.
Wikimedia Ukraine also supported the #SheSaid campaign on Ukrainian Wikiquote. 17 participants took part in the campaign, having created and improved 224 articles about women. The marathon helped increase the percentage of articles about women on Ukrainian Wikiquote by 3.6%.
WikiGap was another diversity initiative, though it's covered by the Content Enrichment direction. We also ran gender equality training for the community, which is covered by the Community Support and Development direction.
Increasing Participation: Program objectives
- Organize training sessions within Wikimarathon and education projects, attracting 190 newcomers to Wikipedia.
Partly met. We did organize training sessions within Wikimarathon and education projects, but the number of newcomers they attracted to Wikipedia is at around 100; that's partly because the pandemic significantly limited Wikimarathon's reach as compared to previous years. (The number might end up being higher when we finalize the results of the latest “Wikipedia for School” edition, which runs until February 28th).
- Attract 80 newcomers to Wikimedia projects by running an online course (MOOC) about Wikipedia.
Not met. We did not run an online course about Wikipedia in 2021.
- Work on increasing editor retention by making sure at least 30 people stay on as long-term editors.
- Mostly not met. Since we recruited less editors than planned because of Wikimarathon's limited reach and lack of a Wikipedia MOOC, the number of people who stayed on as long-term editors thanks to these programs is considerably lower as well. It's at around 10 at the moment, though it will probably grow thanks to “Wikipedia for School”.
- Collaborate with educational institutions and other organizations to increase Wikimedia participation, engaging 40 organizations.
- Mostly met. We held multiple events for educators and educational institutions in 2021, engaging several dozens organizations.
- Promote diversity by organizing or supporting at least three diversity initiatives.
- Met. We supported multiple initiatives related to diversity, including content campaigns on Ukrainian Wikipedia and Wikiquote (WikiGap + “She Did It” challenge), “Serbest Entsiklopediya” challenge on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia, and gender equality training for the Wikimedia community.
Community Support and Development
Instruction for community members
- Training sessions for the community
One of Wikimedia Ukraine’s strategic goals is to invest in skills and leadership development for community members by organizing training and other learning events — both holding specific events for the community and providing scholarships for external opportunities.
In 2021, we held four training events for the community, all virtually, and granted six scholarships for external events.
1. Training on NGO governance (March 27th)
Traditionally, we held a training session for Board and Audit Committee members after they’d been elected by the General Assembly; some staff members were invited as well. 14 people participated, including 5 speakers.
The topics covered include general governance questions; role and responsibilities of the Board and Audit Committee; project management at WMUA; communications at WMUA; financial management.
2. Forum for UkWiki administrators (May 29th-30th)
In late May, Wikimedia Ukraine held a two-day online forum for administrators of Ukrainian Wikipedia and other Ukranian-language Wikimedia projects. Around 20 people took part in the forum in real time, with some more community members making use of the recording afterwards.
A first-ever event of its kind in the Ukrainian community, the event helped to both develop the community’s technical capacity and provide a platform for discussing how to better organize admins’ work.
For a detailed overview of the event, see our program story.
- Presentations for the forum for UkWiki administrators
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4. Fact-checking training (July 18th)
In July, Wikimedia Ukraine partnered with a leading Ukrainian fact-checking organization Vox Check to hold a virtual training session for the Ukrainian Wikipedia community. Around 15 people participated in real time, with a recording & written overview available after the event.
5. Gender equality training (December 21st)
In December, with Wikimedia Ukraine's long-term partner National Democratic Institute, we held a virtual training session devoted to gender equality. The topics covered include the definition of gender equality, its benefits, and the impact of gender inequality on both Wikipedia and people's everyday life. Around 35 people participated in real time, a recording is available privately to those who signed up for the training session (over 80 people). We plan for this training to be the first in a series of events on gender equality, with the second one planned for March 2022.
6. Scholarships for external courses
Wikimedia Ukraine provided a scholarship to five community members to attend an extended course on journalism and social media. We also approved one scholarship application to attend a course on literary editing. These scholarships helped improve the organization's communications capacity, as well as support long-term volunteers.
- Hackathons / events for the development of technical skills
In late 2021, we started preparing the hackathon that eventually took place in January of 2022. It was a two-day virtual event (with an in-person dinner for participants in Kyiv); over 20 people participated.
Its goals were to help Ukrainian community members acquire new technical skills (five lectures and demonstrations were held over the course of two days, recordings are available on YouTube) & to create a space for joint work on creating or improving technical tools. (See a more detailed report on Wikimedia Ukraine's blog, in Ukrainian).
- Event organisation: Annual General Meeting
On February 28th, we held our Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Kyiv.
As usual, the General Meeting elected a new Board and Audit Committee, as well as reviewed the organization’s activity in the previous year and decided on some housekeeping questions. 49 Wikimedia Ukraine’s members participated.
The event was held online for the first time in history. Its move to online was much more challenging than for other events — because of general legal constraints and the need to find a secure online voting system. We managed to overcome the hurdles successfully, in part thanks to extensive support of the Trust & Safety team at the Wikimedia Foundation that enabled us to use SecurePoll.
(See a more detailed message on our AGM in English).
- Event organisation: Wikipedia 20 Forum
On August 21st-22nd, we held an in-person forum called “20 years of Wikipedia: Successes and Prospects”. It was the first major in-person event for the Ukrainian wiki community since the pandemic started; the forum was a follow-up to the virtual Wikimania.
43 people participated in the event; at least 9 participants visited such an event for the first time. The forum consisted of eleven sessions devoted to Wikimania and major international news, as well as discussions on important issues like Wikipedia in Education and volunteer retention.
- Wikipedia 20 Forum
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- Event organisation: Wikiconference 2021
On October 2nd-3rd, Wikimedia Ukraine held its 11th annual Wikiconference for the Ukrainian community. The conference was for the first time held in a hybrid mode, both online and offline, and thus it was the most inclusive conference we ever held.
The first conference day was fully online (via Zoom, streamed to YouTube); the second day consisted of four separate mini-conferences in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and Turbiv.
72 people joined in-person in one of the four cities:
- Kyiv — 33 participants
- Kharkiv — 16 participants
- Lviv — 10 participants
- Turbiv — 13 participants
Over 50 people joined the conference online in real time. Overall, we received 95 registrations for the whole conference. Recordings of the online sessions gathered over 500 views.
(See a detailed report in Ukrainian).
Also, we organized seven award ceremonies for contests and campaigns — Wiki Loves Monuments, WikiScience Contest, Wiki Loves Earth, “Wikipedia for School” article contest, “Serbest Entsiklopediya” challenge on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia, History of Ukrainian independence month, and the “She Did It” challenge. While they were also in fact events for the community, they are covered by their respective projects and programs. We also did an online event to celebrate Wikipedia's 20th anniversary, covered by another program.
- Scholarships for international events
In 2021, we ran two scholarship programs for online events – Wikimania 2021 and Wikimedia CEE Online Meeting 2021. Overall, we granted nine scholarships to seven people. See our learning story for more detail about how we structed the programs and what we learned by providing scholarships to online events for the first time last year.
We also supported a local in-person meetup in Kharkiv during Wikimania on August 15th; 12 people participated.
Increasing the community's motivation and awareness
As part of our strategic goal to support “community initiatives for distinguishing and motivating editors”, Wikimedia Ukraine runs Wikizghushchivka, the program of providing virtual awards and physical gifts to most active new & experienced Wikipedia contributors each month.
It’s a way to distinguish experienced users for their often-invisible work and nudge newbies to keep editing. Apart from the virtual barnstar, gift package includes a can of condensed milk (“zghushchivka” / “згущівка” in Ukrainian) and souvenirs. 82 users received 94 awards in 2021, including 47 newbies. (See a more detailed report in Ukrainian).
In terms of community awareness, we’ve been preparing monthly newsletters for the Ukrainian community and working to increase their reach by introducing new channels of distribution, such as the newly launched Telegram channel. 12 digest issues were distributed in 2021; we distribute it on the mailing list, on subscribers’ Wikipedia talk pages, and on social media. Facebook is probably the biggest distribution channel; on average, a typical digest edition reached 1630 people on the platform (including paid reach).
We also worked to deliver important international Wikimedian news to the Ukrainian community, such as spreading the information about the WMF Board of Trustees election via multiple articles and posts spread on multiple channels.
This program also covers wikigrants — small grants for members of the community for activities useful to the Wikimedia movement that are not covered by other programs. We haven’t received such applications in 2021.
We didn't run a full community survey in 2021, having decided to postpone it to 2022, when we will be developing a new strategic direction.
Community Support and Development: Program objectives
- Invest in skills and leadership development for existing community members by holding training sessions for at least 40 participants.
- Met. Over 80 individuals participated in real time in the training sessions held by Wikimedia Ukraine for existing community members (training on NGO governance, forum for UkWiki administrators, training on fact-checking, training on gender equality), and 6 people made use of scholarships for external training courses.
- Facilitate experience sharing between editors by organizing 3 major events for community members (WikiConference, General Meeting, strategic session), as well as providing international scholarships (dependent on the pandemic).
- Met. We organized 3 major events (General Meeting, Wikipedia 20 forum, WikiConference) and provided scholarships for 2 international online events – Wikimania and CEE Meeting.
- Raise the motivation of community members by awarding 50 active editors with “Wikizghushchivka”.
- Met. We awarded 82 active editors with “Wikizghushchivka” in 2021.
- Increase community awareness by preparing 12 issues of Wikimedia Ukraine newsletter and organizing 2 awareness events/presentations.
- Met. We prepared 12 issues of the Wikimedia Ukraine newsletter and ran 3 promotional campaigns on social media aimed at increasing community awareness of Wikimedia Ukraine’s work.
Awareness about Wikimedia and Free Knowledge
Media support and promotion of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects
| Radio interview with Wikimedia Ukraine's program coordinator for Wikipedia birthday, YouTube video |
- Working with the media
Traditionally, media activities play an important role in the realization of our projects. We continue to actively cooperate with the media and work with our media base, which includes more than 350 media outlets of various types: news agencies, all-Ukrainian media, regional media, specialized media, TV channels and radio stations.
Throughout 2021, we provided communication support to increase awareness and ensure visibility for the Wikimedia Ukraine projects with the following activities, among others:
- Distributing over 20 press releases about projects and activities (thematic weeks and months, article and photo contests, important milestones etc.) to a wide range of Ukrainian national and regional media outlets.
- Responding to media inquiries, providing deeper insights and comments from our speakers.
- Pitching topics to media outlets through personal contacts.
Dozens of media publications referring to Wikimedia Ukraine, its projects, news and speakers were generated due to our efforts. Among the projects which have received the widest reach and media attention are Wikipedia 20th birthday, WikiGap, Ukrainian Wiki Loves Earth. and Wiki Loves Monuments.
Overall, around 200 publications in the media were published thanks to our press releases and personal pitches. The most popular individual press release was the rating of Ukrainian Wikipedia’s most popular articles in 2020 — it yielded over 25 media publications.
- Working with social media and blogs
In order to involve as many interested people as possible to Wikimedia Ukraine projects and campaigns, blogs and social networks were an important part of our communication in 2021.
In 2021, we published 112 stories on the organization's blog; it received 89,808 views from 62,938 unique users. The number of views was 17.3% higher than in 2020. The most popular post in 2021 was the announcement of the “Local cultural heritage and prominent people” contest.
Facebook has been our central social networking platform. The number of subscribers to our Facebook page has increased by 22% since the beginning of 2021 (4191 -> 5373).
On Facebook, we used paid targeting for the most important posts to increase audience reach and attract new people. As a result, we have achieved positive results that we could never achieve with organic promotion. According to the blog statistics, Facebook is the third largest source of traffic, after search engines and the Wordpress Android App.
We also continued to develop Wikimedia Ukraine's Instagram and Twitter pages. Their audience also grew slightly. Among the innovations of 2021, we created a channel on Telegram, which turned out to be a smaller (~170 subscribers), but very convenient channel of information for the wiki community. We also started posting Stories to Instagram more actively. Twitter remains a useful tool for communicating with the international Wikimedia community.
In 2021, the YouTube channel of Wikimedia Ukraine also grew. From January 1 to December 31, the number of subscribers increased from 189 to 350. The total number of views of our videos in 2021 was more than 8000.
Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Science Photo Competition have separate social media channels. 2021 has once again proved that these channels are an important tool for the contest promotion, as they focus on a specific target audience. We are also investing heavily in the development of these channels.
- Wikipedia anniversary
January 2021 saw two important milestones — 20th anniversary of Wikipedia and 17th birthday of the Ukrainian edition. We invested a lot of time in using this opportunity to tell the Ukrainian audience more about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community.
First, we prepared a set of materials for WMUA blog and social media — for example, an infographic with 20 facts and milestones about Wikipedia for its 20th birthday, as well as translations of international materials.
Second, we pitched the topic to media outlets and got about a dozen stories by nationwide news outlets, TV and radio channels. Particularly, we did a video project with Hromadske, a leading media outlet in Ukraine. For Ukrainian Wikipedia’s birthday and Wikimarathon, we held a press conference in Kyiv in a combined offline-online format.
For Wikipedia 20, we also held a celebratory virtual event for the community, which gathered around 40 participants. Organizers presented interesting facts about Wikipedia's history, and participants shared their Wikipedia stories.
- Wikimedia Ukraine's press conference for Ukrainian Wikipedia's birthday
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- Communication strategy development
We worked on communication strategy development throughout 2021. The process included a public discussion at the Wikiconference led by Wikimedia Ukraine's press secretary, as well as several meetings of the communications team. By the end of the year, we developed a draft of the strategy; we expect to finalize and approve the strategy in 2022.
Working with readers and the general public to increase awareness
In 2021, we created almost a dozen informational materials for the general public to increase awareness of Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and Wikimedia Ukraine.
Among the materials created are:
- A series of brief video demonstrations on the basics of editing Wikipedia
- Several blog posts and social media posts, such as a piece on why it’s a bad idea to create a Wikipedia article about yourself or a note on Wikipedia administrators
- Brochure about Wikimedia Ukraine
- Booklet about Wikimedia Ukraine's Education Program
We cooperate with partner media outlets, such as Detector.Media, a nationwide outlet focusing on media topics, to spread informational materials we create.
We also held over a dozen webinars and presentations on Wikipedia for a wide audience within our other projects; most of them are mentioned in the respective sections above.
Advocacy
Throughout 2021, we continued freedom of panorama (FoP) advocacy and focused on enhancing awareness of this topic and advocacy efforts regarding legislative initiatives directed at a broader copyright legislation reform.
We concentrated on two mutually complementing tasks this year:
- We participated in the legislative process in close contact with specialists directly engaged in the process of creating drafts of the relevant legislation.
- We directed our media campaign to increase awareness about the issue and legislative efforts both within and outside of our community.
- Participation in the legislative process
In the beginning of the year we negotiated with the representative of Ukrainian National Cinematographers' Association about coordination of our advocacy efforts.
We continue to share information and coordinate our activities whenever we engage directly with those involved in the process of drafting copyright legislation.
On June 9th, four draft laws on copyright reform were submitted to the Parliament (link) 3 of them contained provisions legalizing both commercial and non-commercial freedom of panorama.
On July 16th, our representative was invited to the panel discussion under the aegis of the Ukrainian National Bar Association. The panel comprised members of parliamentary committees, government representatives and jurists directly engaged in drafting the legislation.
The draft law 5552-4 by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine contains a provision on freedom of panorama transferred from the draft law published on March 10th by the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture of Ukraine. Wikimedia Ukraine was mentioned as a stakeholder that influenced the inclusion of the provision. Authors of draft law 5552-2 drafted the provision legalizing freedom of panorama in direct cooperation with the representatives of Wikimedia Ukraine. Respective provisions of draft laws 5552-1 and 5552-2 allow for both commercial and non-commercial freedom of panorama, as well as for photo and video reproduction of buildings without the obligation to mention the copyright holder.
At the moment we are tracking any possible changes in the legislative process. Currently, we can attest to the ongoing efforts to merge the aforementioned four draft laws into one.
- Increasing awareness of the issue
| Video about freedom of panorama published by Wikimedia Ukraine in 2021, YouTube |
In 2021, our efforts to increase awareness were partially connected to the ongoing legislative processes. We also created publications both for our community and general audiences.
We continue our cooperation with Detector.Media, which this time resulted in the publication of an article on how freedom of panorama is handled internationally, where we compare legislative practices of countries around the world and discuss challenges of harmonization of the legislation in this regard.
In October, Detector.Media published an educational video that we had commissioned previously as a part of our media campaign to bolster awareness about the freedom of panorama among broader audiences. Within this campaign, we published the video and adjacent written materials on our channels as well, including our blog and social media pages. We also promoted the video using an ad campaign on Facebook, which brought 9309 video views.
We also published materials for our community on Wikimedia Ukraine's blog; for example, the analysis of the proposed legislation and the debate surrounding it. We also created materials on the intersection of FoP advocacy and other major projects organized by Wikimedia Ukraine. For example, we created an article about freedom of panorama dedicated to the Wiki Loves Monuments contest.
Awareness about Wikimedia and Free Knowledge: Program objectives
- Improve awareness of Wikipedia and Wikimedia by sharing at least 100 stories about WMUA's projects and from volunteers on blogs and social media.
- Met. We published 112 stories on Wikimedia Ukraine’s blog alone, as well as dozens more on social media only.
- Maintain visibility of Wikimedia Ukraine’s project in the organization’s blog (reaching at least 50,000 views from 30,000 unique users) and social media accounts (continuously supporting at least 10 general and project-specific social media channels).
- Met. Wikimedia Ukraine’s blog received 89,808 views from 62,938 unique users. We consistently supported 14 social media accounts across five platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram), and we provided support to a few other, community-run social media pages.
- Improve Wikimedia Ukraine’s communication processes by developing a communication strategy.
- Partly met. We developed a draft communication strategy by the end of 2021; it’s yet to be finalized and approved. We continued to improve our internal communication processes, such as keeping a consistent content plan for all communications platforms
- Develop information materials on wikiprojects by creating at least 10 online and offline materials.
- Met. We developed at least 11 information materials on wikiprojects for the general audience: 4 video demonstrations (not counting recordings of webinars), 5 blog / social media posts, 1 brochure and 1 booklet.
- Encourage regulatory and legislative changes that will benefit Wikimedia projects, particularly advocating for freedom of panorama in Ukraine, in part by organizing at least 5 major media initiatives.
- Partly met. We did work advocate freedom of panorama in Ukraine, particularly by working with the media to raise awareness of the issue, though we ended up doing 3 media initiatives.
Spending[edit]
Please report your organization's total spending during the reporting period, or link to a financial document showing your total spending.
- 111,643.13 USD (report can be found on Wikimedia Ukraine's wiki; see also a copy in Google Sheets)
- The weighted average exchange rate for the period January 1—December 31, 2021 was used
Grant Metrics Reporting[edit]
Metrics, targets and results: general grants metrics worksheet here.