The Ukrainian Wikipedia, the nation’s linguistic version of the global Internet encyclopedia, now has more than 200,000 articles. The milestone entry happened at 7:56 a.m., on April 7, when a Wikipedia user nicknamed Amakuha posted a Ukrainian language article titled: “List of countries by coal production.”
Andriy Makukha, the 23-year-old author of the story, timed his entry intentionally. Makukha, who got a degree in cybernetics from the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, even invented special software to help him become a footnote in Ukrainian Wikipedia history. “I prepared a dozen ‘list of…’ articles. My favorite one is a list of countries by age of first marriage,” Makukha said. For him, the entry was his 160th article since he started contributing to Wikipedia in 2005.
Makukha also performs duties as a fact-checker on Wikipedia. He watches newly created articles for quality control purposes. However, he is not allowed to delete stories, unlike administrator Kateryna Rudchenko of Donetsk, who leaves her job as a software tester and spends evenings working on Wikipedia. Like all contributors, the work is voluntary.
“I check newly posted articles for the validity of their subject, whether they violate copyright rules, have reliable sources and hyperlinks, correct design and grammar,” Rudchenko said. “The author of a bad quality article is given seven days to improve it. Otherwise we vote and delete it.”
Rudchenko has posted about 1,000 of her own articles, many involving her favorite topic: Greece and its culture. The urge to write is one of the keys to Wikipedia’s global success. “I thought I would write a couple of stories, but I couldn’t stop there,” she said.
The Ukrainian Wikipedia has 20 administrators and about 1,700 active contributors among 65,000 registered users. Currently, Ukraine’s Wikipedia is about 16 times leaner than the world’s biggest, in English, with its 3.25 million entries. Among Slavic-language Wikipedias, the Ukrainian one is in third place by volume, behind Polish (690,000 articles) and Russian (524,000). It also takes 16th place among all 270 Wikipedias in different languages.
The Ukrainian Wikipedia is, nonetheless, one of the fastest-growing versions, currently with seven page views per second.
It is the biggest and the fastest developing base of knowledge in the Ukrainian language. It is already four times bigger than the Ukrainian-language Soviet encyclopedia.
The first Ukrainian-language entry – about the atom – appeared on Wikipedia in January 2004.
Four years later, the 100,000th entry appeared.
“It is possible that in seven years, the nation’s Wikipedia will reach over 3 million [stories], and will be the same as English now,” said Yury Perohanych, executive director of Wikimedia Ukraine, the non-governmental organization founded last year to support the Ukrainian version of Wikipedia.
“Working on Wikipedia is not time wasted,” Perohanych said. “It allows everybody to consider themselves as encyclopedists. We won’t exist someday, but Wikipedia will, unless electricity is turned off on earth.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Faryna can be reached at [email protected]
Wikislang
Wiki – the short and sweet name for Wikipedia, the Web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project – derives from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick.”
Wikimeeting – a face-to-face gathering of wiki community members, local or international.
Wikiholic – a person who suffers from Wikipediholism, an obsession or addiction to Wikipedia or other wikis.
Wikivacation – a period when even a wikiholic must be parted from Wikipedia, though presumably only temporarily. Usually the information about the length of the Wikivacation is displayed on a user’s page.
WikiSloth is a user who makes contributions from time to time based solely on hedonistic intellectual enjoyment. A WikiSloth who is feeling particularly active long enough to do so may identify himself displaying a sloth at the top of the page next to the user’s name.
WikiDragon is comeone who usually contributes through dramatic, bold, and often grandiose edits. These enhancements and improvements are often based on their vast knowledge or on a long night of yahooing or googling for references.
WikiElf is a broad term used to describe a user who works behind the scenes at Wikipedia. Some WikiElves work on creating templates and making new articles. Others fix typos, correct poor grammar, and repair broken links.
WikiFairy is an editor who beautifies Wikipedia by improving style, adding color and graphics or organizing images for balance.
WikiTroll is a person who intentionally disrupts the usability of Wikipedia. The typical example of trolling is a deliberately inflammatory edit or post — saying something controversial specifically to cause a flame war.
Inclusionist Wikipedians are those editors who favor keeping and amending problematic articles over deleting them. Inclusionists are also generally less concerned with the question of notability, and instead focus on whether or not an article is factual.
Wikiquette is Wikipedia’s etiquette.
Sourse: Wikipedia
