Wikimedia CEE Spring 2017/Press
The world’s biggest encyclopedia Wikipedia still lacks a lot of information on countries and regions in Central and Eastern Europe. In order to change that, Wikipedians from 27 communities are joining forces in order to write new articles about the region. Including [YOUR COUNTRY]
Most active editors to receive awards.
[Date, Place]
Wikipedia editors from Central and Eastern Europe are joining forces to enrich Wikipedia's content relating to their region. Between March 21 and May 31 we will witness the article-writing competition "CEE Spring", one of the largest article-writing contests in Wikipedia's 16 year history. Hundreds of volunteer editors from different language versions of "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" will create and improve entries related to the culture, history, geography, sports and politics of their neighbours. By the end of the contest, local versions of Wikipedia will feature thousands of new articles.
The aim of the contest is to gather information on the history, culture, traditions, and people from every corner of Central and Eastern Europe. This will promote mutual awareness and understanding by increasing the quantity and quality of free knowledge available about the CEE region. And that is an important task, since Wikipedia, the largest single source of knowledge on the Internet, still lacks detailed CEE-related information.
On many of the Wikipedias in the region there is more information about larger countries than about our own region. On Bulgarian Wikipedia, for instance, there are 92 articles about cities in Belarus and 216 about cities in England, which has half the area of Belarus. Same goes for politics, history, art, culture, etc. - said Nikola Kalchev, one of the international coordinators of CEE Spring 2017.
The contest is being organized for the third time. Last year it engaged more than 400 participants and brought Wikimedia more than 9000 new articles in 30 languages. [citation from Nikola or Vira about how good the last year contest was ]
Also this year the organizers anticipate that the contest would bring thousands of new articles relating to the history, culture, politics, and geography of the region. The contestants will choose the topics on their own but they will be provided with lists of the 100 most important, inspiring and interesting places, people and other topics from every country or region, created by local Wikipedia editors. This way contest participants will be able to go surpass the stereotypes and the most renowned and be able to tell the world about the the things that are really important.
Participants who register the largest and with highest quality content contributions will receive prizes. The contest is open to anybody, including those with no prior experience of editing Wikipedia.
Rules of the contest
[Add some brief information about your local rules and prizes]
More information
your local page
International page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2017
Twitter https://twitter.com/CEE_Spring
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WCEESpring/
Contact information
[add your local coordinator and/or your organisation here]