Wikimedia CEE Spring

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Wikimedia CEE Spring is an international editing contest organized in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region that takes place on the respective language versions of Wikipedia of the CEE region. CEE Spring aims to support article creation and improvements in order to raise awareness about Central and Eastern Europe as well as parts of Southern Europe, its history, culture, traditions, and more. Although CEE Spring does not have any specific topic, the idea is to encourage CEE communities to create and edit articles on their home wiki about any other CEE community in the region (i.e. Hungarian editors to edit articles about Romania, Romanian Wikipedians to edit articles about Crimean Tatars, Bashkir Wikipedians to edit articles about Hungary, etc.).

The editing contest is organized as the name suggests at the beginning of the spring in the Northern Hemisphere (and thereby in the CEE region) from 21st of March until 31st of May. The first edition of the contest took place in 2015.

Organization of the CEE Spring is run by an International team, volunteers from various countries, and local coordinators/organizers per community. Local coordinators prepare an editing contest on their home wikis, which can run during the above mentioned time frame (21.03.-31.05.). The duration of the contest is not strictly defined; thus local contests can last shorter, like for example one month.

Background

The idea of Wikimedia CEE Spring is to join local forces of free knowledge to accumulate and distribute information about history, culture, traditions and people in every corner of the CEE region to support mutual acknowledgement and understanding, and to increase the quantity and quality of free knowledge available about the CEE region globally.

In contemporary times, the CEE region has experienced several unfortunate spring seasons that have resulted in misunderstandings, conflicts and disappointment (exempli gratia the replacement of Dubček in April of 1969 to reverse the Prague Spring, escalating conflicts in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the Spring of 1988, intensification of Transnistrian conflict in March of 1992, the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo in April of 1992 and most recently the Spring of 2014, which marks the beginning of the War in Donbass), the revolution in Armenia in the spring of 2018, as well as the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. Wikimedians of the region, on the other hand, defined a contrary goal – to have a Spring that unites them all.

Editions

141 days to Wikimedia CEE Spring 2025
Update

Remarks: In the parenthesis is written the number of contests organised by individuals and/or communities in the CEE Region, as well as guest communities.

Objective

The main objective of CEE Spring is to increase the number of articles written about other countries in the CEE region, but at the same time to improve the quality of existing articles.

Tasks

Participants

Guide for participants

During the editing contest, participants are expected to:

create new articles and improve existing ones; as inspiration for writing new articles, article lists exist for every CEE community that mostly have English Wikipedia entries that can be used as a template
add credible external links to articles; and
add images to articles to make them more vivid.

Local coordinators

Guide for local coordinators

Prior to the editing contest, local coordinators have to prepare the following:

create separate project pages for CEE Spring and their separate editing contest on their home wiki;
discuss the rules of the contest with their community and afterwards publish this on the main page for CEE Spring (Rules);
define a list of around 100 articles about their country, region or language, which can be distributed in ten per possible categories (such as Geography, History, Economics, Agriculture, Science, Society, etc.). Article lists can be provided directly from the local coordinator or through a discussion page on the respective home wikis with the help from the respective communities, especially when the content of the article list is disputed;
inform the community and active editors about upcoming CEE Spring on their home wiki; and
Optional: organize a jury from other volunteers in the movement, who will not take part in the contest. Examples for various rules for local contests can be found here (Rules).

During the editing contest, local coordinators are asked to:

make sure that all participating articles on their own wiki have the CEE Spring template (Template:CEE Spring 2024) with parameters for username, topic and country, which is needed to acquire proper statistics about the local contest; and
promote the contest and give additional information about the contest through sitenotice, social media, blogs, or other ways.

Example site notice

Below you can find example of the site notice, that you can use on your home wiki. Additionally, you can find other examples for site notice.

From 21 March until 31 May join the Central and Eastern European Communities and participate in CEE Spring 2024
Write articles and win prizes!

Prizes

As local coordinators create separate editing contests on their home wiki, they usually determine the prize funds for most active participants. Every CEE community receives prize money, including in their annual plans, or through general CEE Spring grant. Participants are then given prizes, depending on their achievements both in quality and quantity of articles, determined by a jury of volunteer community members.