Over
15 million edits and 89 million page views in October mark the peak of
Ukraine’s Wikipedia growth. Articles on the nation’s 2014
parliamentary elections, Ukrainian
Insurgent Army and war in
the Donbas have been the most viewed in October.
Wikipedia
founder Jimmy Wales in August announced Igor
Kostenko, a sports journalist and EuroMaidan activist who
was killed on Feb. 20 during the revolution, the Wikipedian of 2014. He wrote
more than 280 articles and made over 1,600 edits.
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In
September, Wales
came to Kyiv to pay a tribute to Kostenko.
The
success of the local version of the popular online knowledge source is
primarily a group effort of more than 2,400 active Wikipedia users who write articles
daily without payment.
“If
some Wikipedians were paid, that would be unfair and no one would have motivation to write,” says Yuriy Perohanych, one of 73,000 Wikipedia editors and the founder of Wikimedia Ukraine, the web-based encyclopedia’s
local coordination center.
Perohanych
has been contributing to Wikipedia since 2009, making over 60,000 edits and writing
over 2,200 articles so far. He still writes on a daily basis. “It makes
you feel like you are making a big contribution to the informational
enlightenment of the society,” he says.
To
edit articles one does not have to be as experienced as Perohanych. Even
unregistered users can do so by clicking on the Edit button at the top of an article page.
However, protected articles cannot be edited by unregistered users. There are around 200 protected articles
in Ukrainian Wikipedia that many would like to edit according to their own bias, focusing on certain volatile issues – whether it’s politics or money. “The (Svoboda political party leader) Oleh
Tyahnybok article has been protected due to the numerous instances of editing by provocative critics,” Perohanych explains.
Most
of the articles are written by users who have their contributing rights confirmed
by the Wikipedia system automatically. These are those who register, make at
least 10 edits and have their account active for at least four days. Higher
user levels can be granted only upon request. The patrollers, administrators,
bureaucrats, stewards – these are the most significant user levels of Wikipedia.
Patrollers verify whether edits are correct or not, and extract spam and
provocative content. Administrators can do page deletion or protection, blocking
or unblocking users. Bureaucrats can grant the status of administrator and bureaucrat. Stewards are appointed by the global Wikimedia foundation, and they
have the rights of all lower user levels.
While
there are 35 Ukrainian administrators and three bureaucrats, there are no
Ukrainian stewards.
“Wikipedia
is like a social network. However, the communication here is not useless. It creates real encyclopedia content,” Perohanych says. When someone makes an edit
to an article, the user who originally created it and every next editor receives a notification in the system
which signals about the change. If the author of the article agrees with the
edit, it stays. However, if he does not think it’s correct, he may reverse all
the edits by clicking on the Reverse button on the article page.
Each
article also has a discussion page, where every user can comment, suggest new
edits and point out mistakes. A user who thinks his edit had a proper place,
but was reversed by the author, can argue about the relevance of his edit
directly on the discussion page.
“While
Ukrainian Wikipedians work hard to create high quality content, unfortunately,
Ukrainians still browse for the articles on Russian Wikipedia more,”
Perohanych says. On July 10, 2012, when Russian Wikipedia announced a black out
as a protest to amendments made to Russia’s Information Law that introduced full-scale censorship, the number of page views of Ukrainian Wikipedia grew
by five times.
Ukrainian
Wikipedia is the third biggest in the Slavic segment after the Russian and
Poland editions. It outweighs the Czech, gets more edits than the Russian,
hence the material is more likely to be correct, and has more back-up sources. However, Russian Wikipedia wins by number of articles as well as their length.
Currently, it has over 1.1 million articles, which is double the Ukrainian.
Poland’s Wikipedia has slightly over 1 million articles.
Hnat
Burma, a 30-year-old photographer from Kyiv and active Wikipedia reader,
says Ukrainian articles are too often nothing but shortened and translated
versions of those on English or Russian Wikipedias. “More photos, more schemes
are needed, because sometimes articles are published without them,” he
adds. “Quite rarely one may find a video he or she needs on Wikipedia.”
Perohanych,
a Ukrainian editor of the encyclopedia, says today Wikipedia serves as an
instrument in the information war between Russia and Ukraine. Articles related
to the Ukraine-Russia conflict exist in fundamentally different interpretations
in Ukrainian and Russian Wikipedias.
As
Perohanych explains, the problem is that all articles must be supported by official or trusted media sources, yet these can differ considerably in Ukraine and Russia.
An
experienced writer and editor, Perohanych says he’s concerned about how readers understand what Wikipedia reveals to them. “People need
Wikipedia, but they also need to analyze well what they read,” he
concludes.
The web-encyclopedia’s
34 million articles that the global community of internet users visits, whether to read
the biography of Mahatma Gandhi or check the number of goals David Beckham
scored for Manchester United, have turned Wikipedia into the world’s sixth most
popular website, according to Alexa, a California-based web traffic
measurer.
Editor’s Note: The story has been updated on Nov. 25 to include clarifications from Yuriy Perohanych.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be
reached at sheremeta@kyivpost.com. Kyiv Post’s information
technology reporting is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and
SoftServe.
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