Interview: Vira Motorko, 2024 Functionary of the Year, about Wikipedia in her life and her contribution

At Wikimania 2024, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced the winners of the annual international Wikimedians of the Year award. Among them is Vira Motorko, a Ukrainian Wikimedian and administrator of the Ukrainian Wikipedia, who was recognized as Functionary of the Year for her work in maintaining Wikipedia behind the scenes.

Wikimedia Ukraine’s communications manager Iryna Boiko spoke to Vira about her contributions to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, how she got involved, and what motivates her to continue volunteering.

What Vira does on Wikipedia and what contribution she is proud of

“One of the things I do and am proud of is Tech News. Every week, technical information from developers is compiled in simple language: new tools, what needs to change, where there were problems, and how they were solved, etc. This project has been operating since 2013. I have been translating them into Ukrainian since then, practically every week.”

“I create articles on Wikipedia when I find something interesting on the Internet. Sometimes I translate articles from English into Ukrainian. For example, in 2018, I created an article on the Ukrainian Wikipedia about JD Vance (an American politician and vice presidential candidate in the 2024 election). Recently, after Trump nominated Vance as his vice presidential candidate, one user wrote to me and congratulated me on the fact that I hit the nail on the head with this article.”

“I have a bot account, I use AutoWikiBrowser. It allows me to pretend I know how to code without actually doing it. There are standard things that I do. For example, I remove the tokens that Facebook adds to links. For Facebook, it’s a way to track where people are coming from. It’s invisible to the readers, but from Wikipedia’s point of view, it’s garbage in the code that needs to be cleaned up.”

“In terms of Wikipedia stuff that is not directly related to articles, I am pleased by the fact that Growth features appeared very early on Ukrainian Wikipedia. This is the newbie’s home page, the mentor’s panel, and the whole mentoring process: the newbie is automatically assigned an experienced user from the list of people who signed up to answer questions. On their home page, a person who has just joined Wikipedia can get simple tasks that they can complete.

I remember that I learned about it quite early. There were 3-4 pilot wikis that the developers were working with. The work was still in the initial stages, but it was possible to translate the interface into Ukrainian, so I did it. At Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm, one of the developers approached me and said that they would like Ukrainian Wikipedia to be included in the next package. He started explaining to me what kind of tools they have, and I said that I already knew, and the entire interface had already been translated into Ukrainian. He was sincerely surprised. It was one of the most pleasant things that I remember because I always wanted and still want the Ukrainian Wikipedia to have all the best there can be in a Wikipedia movement. Communication with newcomers has always been a problem in Ukrainian Wikipedia, and here we get an extension that can help solve it, and it’s great.

The developers did include Ukrainian Wikipedia in the next round of expansion. I brought the Growth experiment to the Ukrainian Wikipedia, advertised it, people agreed, signed up as mentors, and so it went. There are those who feel that this may not be a good way to attract newbies because they sometimes go overboard with diligence, but I still think it was a good move, especially compared to unsuccessful initial contributions that we had before. This feature is enabled by default, and it’s good that it exists.”

How Vira joined Wikipedia and her first contribution

“I joined Wikipedia on Friday the 13th [of February] 2009. I was a freshman in college and discovered that you can buy books in English in Kyiv. In the book market, there was a small shop with fiction in English, and there I bought a book by Dan Brown. Just before that, ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was released, and we went to the cinema to watch it. And here I found ‘Angels and Demons’. I took some of my scholarship money, bought myself a book, and read it. At that time, I still lived in a dormitory, and there was no Internet, but the university had a computer room where you could go and search for something. I went and read what Dan Brown writes about: in particular, about the Illuminati.

So I opened the article about the Illuminati on Ukrainian Wikipedia, which had already existed for about 5 years at that time, and I saw that there was only one sad little paragraph about who they were. You switch to the Russian version  – and there is way more text. I didn’t like it at all, so I translated the article from English. Looking back, I am proud of the fact that I was conscious then [editor’s note: about not translating from Russian Wikipedia].

As a result, I translated several large paragraphs into Ukrainian. Typically for a beginner — without notes, references, or everything that needs to be added to articles on Wikipedia, because few people think about it when creating their first article. Then I created several pages about Latin phrases that appeared in the text of the book.”

“After that, I created articles in parallel with my tasks at the university. Over time, I developed broader interests that are not limited to one article. Sometime in 2013, I developed a hobby: I created articles about the coats of arms and flags of the regions of Ukraine. This is a great topic, no one has dealt with it, and no one has bothered me. Coats of arms of districts are not as interesting as, say, coats of arms of countries. That’s why I could work on them in peace. So, gradually, I began to edit Wikipedia more actively. I got excited about it, and saw that it is possible to create not only one article, but to take a whole topic, as it turned out with coats of arms, do some digging into it, and not receive any complaints from anyone.

However, I am not a historian, I majored in geography. I have articles on geographical topics in my initial contribution. The one about economic and geographical location, for example, is one of my articles that consistently has the most views, because every year students need to learn what it is.

However, I quickly noticed that it is difficult for me to write on a topic in which I am proficient because I feel the pressure of all my knowledge about this field. What I can do now is not the best version of what I could do in theory. This is perfectionism, which does not bother me in a topic where I am just in the process of learning something… That is why it became clear to me from the very beginning that I will not write about geographical topics, but rather will focus on the other ones.”

“I realized it a long time ago, and if I tell someone about Wikipedia, I always say this: you need to start with something that is interesting enough for you to create an article about it on Wikipedia, but not too close to your heart, so that it doesn’t hurt you too much if you make a mistake and your text is shredded and rewritten. During the time that you are editing something that is of secondary interest to you, there is an opportunity to get some experience, learn how everything works, and make mistakes without harming you and your favorite topic, towards which you’re headed.”

When and how Vira became an administrator

“I became an administrator on my second attempt. I had my first nomination, which was unsuccessful because I didn’t take it seriously… And after that, I didn’t want to be an administrator for a lot of years, afraid of the responsibilities and expectations. There are certain administrative responsibilities that I don’t want to take on, and I was worried that I would be pressured to do something like that.

And last year, this feeling just disappeared – I stopped worrying and thought that it would be good if there were more administrators than there are now. In particular, so that if something happens to the currently active administrators, there will be someone who can pick up the torch and carry it on.”

“Today I basically do what earlier I would have asked administrators to do, but now I can do it myself. For example, I cleaned up a lot of pages in the template space: outdated pages, duplicates etc. In the template space, it’s hard to spot if a newbie creates something by mistake unless you’re looking for it directly. This garbage that often goes unnoticed — I found and removed it.”

“We have a million different types of work here” – what helps not to burn out on Wikipedia

“Being a Wikimedian is convenient because we have a million different types of work here. If you don’t like or get bored with one, you can switch to something completely different. For example, there are users who are tired of Wikipedia, and they go to Wikisource: there is almost a completely different community because this project has a different look and focus; even the things you need to know about wiki markup will be different because Wikisource has their own methods. I don’t see any problem here.

If I get bored with creating articles, I can go dig through the templates. If I’m bored with the templates, I can go translate something on the Meta about who’s doing something interesting now, or find some essay that needs to be translated. I can go to Commons to categorize photos or something. And so on.”

How a contribution to Wikipedia impacts the media landscape

“There have been several times that I’ve created Wikipedia articles just to have that name or surname on Wikipedia in the correct spelling because I know that Wikipedia will be looked at by other sources, including the media.

For example, I created an article in Ukrainian about Greta Thunberg. I remember creating it because I noticed that some publications were spelling her name incorrectly in Ukrainian, as if it had been transcribed using an American pronunciation. I realized that this wasn’t correct, and I understood that if I didn’t create the article immediately, her name would continue to be presented that way in the Ukrainian information space

But there is also a flip side to this. For example, there is an article about the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR. It was important to me for the article to be titled correctly, because there would be many attempts to translate it into Ukrainian in the media, and a wrong translation could be adopted (which would be unfortunate because Wikipedia looks at the spelling of terms in the information sources it uses). Sometimes you have to act ahead. I then supplemented the already existing article with a new text and named it with the word “resolution” in the title – and later found out that I was wrong, and the official translation was different. It turned out that because of me, this document was called “resolution” instead of “regulation” in some publications before the title of the Wikipedia article changed again. So it wasn’t always sunshine and roses.”

“Wikipedia helped me a lot when the war began” — Wikipedia in Vira’s life

“I have many friends and acquaintances from Wikipedia. Including the people I like the most and who help me the most in life. Participating in the Wikimedia movement means a high threshold of shared values, and you understand that a person who is engaged in such volunteering will clearly be closer to you than the average person. It is easier to become friends with a Wikipedian. So even during times when I’m not editing, I still talk to people I met through Wikipedia.

In 2022, Wikipedia helped me a lot. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, I just sat and held on to the only stable thing that didn’t go anywhere, that I knew how it worked, what to do with it, and where I could do something. I sat and just threw myself into editing Wikipedia.

There were times when I could edit the stamp lists until three in the morning. There was a time when Wikipedia was my whole life, both work and leisure. Times have changed, not least because I’m not so young anymore. I looked at the volume of my contribution, and so far 2024 is the laziest and most boring year of my wikilife because there is very little contribution.

But it’s a quiet haven that I keep coming back to.”

• This article was originally published in Wikimedia Ukraine’s blog in Ukrainian. The author is Iryna Boiko, with editing by Anton Protsiuk.