A cohort of new Wikipedia editors emerge from a 55+ training course in Kyiv

How does one transition from a Wikipedia reader to a Wikipedia contributor? Since 2024, Wikimedia Ukraine has been working on “Wikipedia for 55+”, a program for engaging senior citizens with Wikipedia inspired by similar projects in the Czech Republic and other countries. After a successful offline course in the city of Poltava last autumn, we launched a similar one in Kyiv.

In the capital city, we partnered with “Let’s help”, a national charity dedicated to senior citizens, which runs a University of the Third Age. Our partners connected us with engaged participants who regularly attend their events and took care of venues for our offline events.

In early February, we held an introductory meeting for the students, attended by 22 people. After the introduction, we split the students into two offline groups, each led by a trainer – Ukrainian Wikipedia editor Natalia Lastovets and Wikimedia Ukraine’s programs coordinator Anton Protsiuk. The groups met for six weekly lessons.

14 participants finished the course. They created Wikipedia accounts, learned how to edit existing articles and upload images – and created a new article of their own.

Let’s look back at the course from the perspective of one of its most active participants, Natalia Huhlenko. 

“Ever since I was in school, teachers noted my innate literacy. When I read any text, grammatical errors immediately catch my eye. When I first encountered Wikipedia (first in Russian, and then in Ukrainian), I was struck by the errors in articles, especially those translated from other languages. This was shocking! After all, this is an ENCYCLOPEDIA! And everything in it should be with encyclopedic accuracy.

When I heard about the ‘Wikipedia for 55+’ course, I realized that this was my chance to contribute to an important cause: properly written and edited articles of the world-famous online encyclopedia. And also to satisfy my inner editor.

Natalia’s enthusiastic speech at the introductory lecture made me want to study even more. She is incredibly passionate about Wikipedia, despite all life circumstances. In addition to the course, I listened to several webinars held by Wikimedia Ukraine at the same time. I was most impressed by the webinar on writing a good article on Wikipedia. The webinar host, Viacheslav Mamon, spends a whole month searching for sources and actually writing an article! I’m not ready for such a feat yet. But translating articles from other languages is for me. It’s really interesting and enlightening.

During the course, I even took part in an article contest about women artists organized by Wikimedia Ukraine.

While working on these articles, I had a lot of questions that I asked my instructor Anton Protsiuk even at 3 am (what can you do? age, insomnia). I always received specific answers with links to training videos. During offline classes, Anton very patiently and thoroughly explained all the technical aspects of using the tools available on Wikipedia.

Thanks to everyone involved for the opportunity to join such a significant project”.

• More info about the course (in Ukrainian)