CEE/Newsletter/Newsroom/Ukrainian Wikipedia in 2023
- By: Perohanych
The year 2023, hopefully the most difficult for modern Ukraine, is over. Given the hybrid nature of modern warfare, and Wikipedia being one of the fronts of the information war, editors of the Ukrainian Wikipedia continued to contribute to it despite power outages, air raids, and the mobilization of many of the active editors to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
- Editors and editing
In 2023, 3,419 thousand edits were made on Ukrainian Wikipedia, which is 249 thousand less than in 2022 (-7%). In 2023, there were an average of 9,367 edits per day, 390 per hour, or 1 edit every 9.2 seconds.
The monthly average number of registered editors who made at least one edit is close to 3,500.
At the end of the year, 51 editors had administrator status. Their tasks include monitoring the positive atmosphere in the project, preventing and blocking vandals and ethics violators, removing articles that are not notable for encyclopedia, and hiding offensive language in discussions.
Patrollers (there are 567 of them in the Ukrainian Wikipedia, they mark individual edits and entire articles as verified) made 155 thousand patrol actions during the year, which is 4% more than in the previous year.
- Size
In 2023, 84,431 new articles were started compared to 88,809 in 2022 (-5%). On average, 231 articles were created daily. The total number of articles at the end of the year exceeded 1.3 million.
By the number of articles, Ukrainian Wikipedia ranks 14th in the world among all language versions of Wikipedia.
- Popularity
In 2023, the Ukrainian Wikipedia had 1188 million page views compared to 1060 million in 2022 (+12%, see the graph at the beginning of the article). The absolute annual growth is 128 million views. In seven years, the popularity of Ukrainian Wikipedia has increased by 124%, i.e. more than doubled!
Visits to articles on Ukrainian Wikipedia decrease in summer and increase during school and university exams. The peaks of views were recorded in March (116 million) and May (114 million).
83 million or 80% of the total number of views of Ukrainian Wikipedia were made in December from the territory of Ukraine.
In December 2023, the number of unique devices used to view the Ukrainian Wikipedia amounted to 16.5 million, which is 6% more than in December 2022.
You can read more about the Ukrainian Wikipedia indicators in the January issue of WikiHerald.
In the Ukrainian Wikipedia, or, to be more precise, the Ukrainian language version of the universal free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the greatest demand is for content related to Ukrainian geography, history, culture and art, architecture, museums, military, politics... According to an analysis of the list of the 2000 most popular articles of the past year, 80 of the 150 most popular articles relate to Ukraine, that is more than half.
Wikipedia is a field of information warfare, one of the important fronts of hybrid warfare. Therefore, we need a kind of mobilization of Ukrainian patriots into a community of volunteer editors of Wikipedia. Otherwise, to paraphrase Ivan Franko, "Pharisees who use international ideals to hide their struggle for the domination of one nation over another, or sick fantasists who use broad "universal" phrases to hide their spiritual alienation from their native nation", will win the war and promote narratives hostile to Ukrainians.
Yuri Perohanych, has been a Wikipedia editor since 2006, initiator and co-founder of the Wikimedia Ukraine.