You're reading: Wikipedia celebrates 10th year with mixed reviews

Almost a default research tool for everyone, Wikipedia celebrates its 10th birthday this year. In its egalitarian world of allowing pretty much anyone to edit entries, democracy often sides with anarchy. And the Ukrainian edition of Wikipedia is not an exception.

With more than 200,000 articles, the Ukrainian site is the 16th biggest in the world. Yet despite of being a mine of useful information, it’s often accused of bias and described as a virus of modern education, which leads many students astray.

Consider a Wikipedia story about Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the nationalist Svoboda party. A presidential candidate last year, Tyahnybok is known for his ultra-nationalist views on Ukraine’s statehood, allegedly racist remarks and support for membership in NATO and the European Union.

His English-language profile seems the closest to being balanced; the Russian entry shines with criticism and controversy; and the Ukrainian part is nothing more than dry biographical data. In 2009, the Russian Wikipedia added fuel to the fire: Someone edited the profile saying that Tyahnybok was gay.

“The Russian Wikipedia is often being used as the ideological weapon and [its story about] Tyahnybok is just another example,” said Tyahnybok’s spokesperson Yuriy Stratyuk.

Poland holds annual competitions for best articles in various fields and gives winners small cash awards. But we cannot do that.

– Yuriy Perohanych, the head of Wikimedia Ukraine.

The libelous remark was taken down by the Wikipedia editors on their request, said Stratyuk, noting that “there is still no mention” that a court in 2006 cleared Tyahnybok of charges of xenophobia and extremism.

Tyahnybok’s story is just a drop in the ocean of controversial political, historical and religious profiles. Sometimes just comparing titles of articles in different languages is enough to understand the slant.

“For example, an article in Ukrainian is called “Volyn tragedy” while its Russian supposed twin refers to the event as “Volyn massacre,” said Yuriy Perohanych, the head of Wikimedia Ukraine, the company that manages Wikipedia. “The Russian-Georgian War’ on Ukrainian Wiki-page became ‘The Ossetian Conflict’ in Russian and so on.”

Entries on communists, nationalists, and historical or current events connected with them are primary targets. To protect the online encyclopedia, its editors banned anonymous users from supplying or changing stories.

Every statement must come from a registered user and be linked to sources, according to Perohanych. If the entry’s missing a verifiable source, it gets deleted, he said. Yet these precautions don’t always stop malicious abuse because virtually anyone can register as a wiki-author and supply a story.

The Russian Wikipedia is often being used as the ideological weapon and [its story about] Tyahnybok is just another example.”

– Yuriy Stratyuk, Tyahnybok’s spokesperson.

High school and college students are also guilty of abusing Wikipedia information. “It’s a big temptation for them,” said lecturer of political science in the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Rostyslav Pavlenko. “Gone are the days when students were more avid users of Internet than their teachers. It’s easy to recognize a Wikipedia style in their papers now.”

The most covered subjects in Ukrainian Wikipedia are cities and towns, geography, biology, astronomy, music and cinema. Controversial stories on history and politics account only for 5 percent of the content, according to wiki-writers. Areas of Ukrainian culture and arts, technology and military are in tatters and need the most work.

With more than 4,300 authors, a typical Ukrainian Wikipedia author is a male professional or a student in his mid-20s, said Perohanych from Wikimedia. Women apparently make up less than 10 percent of writers.

Andriy Bondarenko from Kyiv is one of those few young authors supplying Wikipedia with things other than politics. He said that he’s written more than 4,000 articles mostly about music to both Ukrainian and Polish Wikipedia. A music college graduate, he teaches musical computer science in his full time job.

When he first visited the Ukrainian online encyclopedia, “it was very small and I did not believe it has any future,” he said. “It had little information on music and composers. [And then] I thought if I do not write about them, then probably nobody will.”

As the head of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, got $6 million in donations last year, Ukrainian Wikimedia managers say that they lack money to organize trainings for their writers and reward the most active ones. “For instance, Poland holds annual competitions for best articles in various fields and gives winners small cash awards. But we cannot do that,” said Perohanych.

Balancing out the job in the Association of Information Technology Enterprises and managing Wikimedia Ukraine, he is not an official Wikipedia employee and neither are any of his contributors. This once again confirms the free-spirited nature of the largest online encyclopedia, most of which stories should be taken with a grain of salt.

Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected]