"Wikipedia is a fence on which anyone can write anything": students-journalists passed wiki-training held by Wikimedia co-founder Yuriy Perohanych

Is Wikipedia an encyclopedia? Can I refer to Wikipedia in my term papers and theses? And who edits these materials at all? Maybe everyone can write something there, like on a fence? When we ask Google something today, the first thing we come across is an article from Wikipedia. And it is here that we learn what we wanted to know.

We decided to talk about this with the general director of the Association of information technology enterprises of Ukraine, co-founder of the public organization "Wikimedia Ukraine" Yuriy Perohanych within the framework of Circle "MediaTOP" at a meeting organized on February 17 by an instructor of the department of journalism and language communication Yaryna Skurativska.

Wikipedia consists of three parts. The first is the site itself. The second is a community of editors who edit content. And the third part is the World organization "Wikimedia". Every year and a half, all the hardware is completely changed. The office in the United States employs more than 500 people and costs 200 million dollars a year. This money is collected through donations for two weeks each year. This is a unique situation where an organization has as much money as it needs.

"If there is no Wikipedia article about you, then you have lived your life in vain", – Yuriy Perohanych.

The Wikimedia foundation has branches in different parts of the world. The Ukrainian branch was founded in 2009 by Yuriy Perohanych. The goal of Ukrainian Wikimedia is to support the site and develop a community of editors. There is no payment for editors. Everyone works for free. Community development is carried out through wikivishkoliv. Wiki-expeditions are also held – if you want to go somewhere, take a photo or write something, the organization will pay for this trip. Wikimedia Ukraine has a budget of about 120 thousand dollars a year.
Wikimedia also holds international contests:" Wiki loves monuments","Wiki loves the Earth". These are some of the most global photo contests in the world.
Ukrainian Wikipedia ranks 12th in the world in terms of article size. In other words, it shows the ability of Ukrainians to create highly intelligent Ukrainian-language content.
About 200 articles are created daily. That seven seconds someone edits Wikipedia. Registered users – more than 3 thousand editors.
Wikipedia even has its own patrol administrators. There are about 50 of them in the Ukrainian version. They can block articles or delete them.
"Wikipedia is a fence that anyone can write on."
The person who noticed errors and didn't correct them is responsible for them in Wikipedia. There is no concept of "true" or "false"in Wikipedia. There is only a "confirmed" or "unconfirmed" source.

Students Olha Tkach, Yehor Kasenyuk, Lyudmyla Smyk and others were actively interested in various nuances of Wikipedia's work. In particular, how articles about the war are created in the Ukrainian and Russian Wikipedia.

Anna Danko-Sliptsova,
associate professor of the department of journalism and language communication