In lieu of the typical monotonous college thesis project, some Ukrainian university students are being given the opportunity to author articles for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia Education Program rolled out two
years ago in the United States as part of the non-governmental organization
Wikimedia’s Public Policy Initiative. In May 2012, the program was adopted by
the Ukraine faction of the organization, which is responsible for monitoring
the project and assisting participating universities and students throughout
the country.
Sumy State University in Sumy Oblast was the first to
sign up for the project, which offers students the opportunity to author and
edit articles on the Ukrainian language Wikipedia website, in March 2012. But it was students at Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko National
University who first brought the idea to university and Wikipedia Ukraine
administrators. And it was the pilot project at Kharkov Polytechnic Institute
last fall that thrust the project into the spotlight.
The university’s test run of
the program in the 2012 fall semester, which ran from October to December,
produced nearly two dozen articles currently available on the Ukrainian
language Wikipedia website.
“Twenty-three new or
supplemented articles were written by 22 students (as part of the Kharkiv
Polytechnic Institute project),” said Serhiy
Petrov, one of the project’s coordinators and a Wikimedia Ukraine board member,
who added that he also was pleased with the quality of the articles.
The project has been welcomed by both students
and faculty as an alternative to thesis research, although not all universities
have tossed away thesis papers after joining the Wikipedia project.
For students, it’s an opportunity for their work to be published
worldwide, something that motivates them to do better work, said Andriy
Makukha, coordinator for the Wikipedia Education Program in Ukraine. What’s
more, he added, is every Wikipedia article is unique, meaning students produce
pages never done before, and by editing the online user-edited encyclopedia
students acquire skills that can be added to their resumes.
Aliona Lyasheva, a student at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv and one of those first students to take the project idea to administrators, has authored four articles for the Ukrainian Wikipedia and edited another 100 or so. She said another benefit of the project is seeing your work alongside respected Wikipedia administrators and being able to always go back and edit it if need be. Unlike a traditional thesis paper, “my work doesn’t go somewhere on the bookshelf – everyone can see it,” Lyasheva told the Kyiv Post. “And I can always edit it to make it better.”
Wikipedia administrators are excited about the students’ desire to contribute for another reason. While the number of editors and administrators for the English-language Wikipedia has been in decline, the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia site has seen a significant rise in the number of page editors as well as published articles, ultimately raising its relevance and providing information about the country’s culture, intellectuals and events.
Following the lead of Sumy State University and Kharkov Polytechnic Institute, Kyiv National University and Kyiv Polytechnic University, two of country’s highest ranking schools, penned official agreements with Wikimedia Ukraine to join the program. In total, seven universities, including Lviv National Academy of Music, Ninjinsky State University and Kharkiv National University, participate in the project.
The first article for Wikipedia Ukraine was
written on Jan. 30, 2004. A little more than a year later, in October of 2005,
the number of articles had jumped to 20,000. In September 2012, the online
public-edited Ukrainian-language encyclopedia was comprised of more than
400,000 articles. Some 5,348
new articles were written just last month, and
administrators expect to see that number increase in March and coming months, said
Yuri Perohanych, director of Wikimedia Ukraine
and one of the program’s coordinators.
Traffic to the Ukrainian
section, too, has increased. In April 2012 it cracked the top 20 most visited
national Wikipedia sites in the world, with 50.7 million page views, a 58
percent increase in traffic over April 2011 (32 million). The most page visits came in December 2012, when the site’s pages were viewed 76 million times. That
record could be beaten this month, said Perohanych, who told the Kyiv Post he expects some 86 million page views
in March. Currently the Ukrainian Wikipedia site is 16th in the
world in page views, behind The Netherlands.
While all these
increases are good signs for Wikipedia Ukraine, it still needs help expanding.
“We still need more students in mathematics and sciences departments (to
author articles), not just sociology students,” Lyasheva said. “We need
articles not only about Karl Marx, for example, but articles about computers
and technology also.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected].
