Motivating, training and networking – Wikimedia Ukraine’s plan to support Wikipedia admins and patrollers

On Ukrainian Wikipedia, there are about 50 administrators and over 600 patrollers – experienced volunteers who are central to keeping Wikipedia useful and reliable.

The volunteer community is, of course, self-governed, but there’s a lot a Wikimedia affiliate can do to support users with extended rights by offering training, facilitating networking and boosting motivation.

The life of experienced Wikipedia volunteers isn’t getting any easier – there are both worldwide problems like issues with admin recruitment and retention and Ukraine-specific ones like the ongoing Russia’s invasion harming community capacity. So, last year Wikimedia Ukraine decided to make it one of our strategic goals to offer more and more systematic support to Ukrainian Wikipedia administrators and patrollers. 

From May to August, we surveyed 76 administrators and patrollers and conducted 10 individual interviews to understand the challenges they face and how Wikimedia Ukraine can help. We also reviewed best practices from other countries like Poland and Germany.

Note: we’re focusing on admins and patrollers of Ukrainian Wikipedia as the largest groups, but this work will also benefit users with other extended rights on both Wikipedia & other Wikimedia projects in Ukrainian.

As a result, we created a detailed plan for supporting Wikipedia admins and patrollers in 2025-2026. You can read the full analysis and plan in Ukrainian on our website; key highlights are below.

Key elements of our plan on supporting Wikipedia admins and patrollers in the next two years:

• Training for those who are already admins/patrollers or want to gain these rights. For example, in June we held an online session on technical lifehacks – and we’re planning many more.
• Motivation – recognizing and rewarding the most active admins and patrollers. We already send the “wiki condensed milk” award to the most active patrollers and admins, and we plan to introduce a separate award for standout anti-vandalism work and support thematic campaigns to patrol important articles.
• Networking for admins and patrollers – both regular online meetups and, potentially, a large offline gathering next year.
• Helping bring in new volunteers to ease the load on the current community. For instance, in August we held a webinar on how to bring an article up to patrolled status.

A few personal observations from our survey and interviews: 

• Only a third of survey respondents know what Wikimedia Ukraine can support them with. It’s not that others don’t need support – it’s that we need to be proactive with what we offer and not just wait for requests to come in.
• Training and facilitation of networking is the most popular type of support volunteers expect from Wikimedia Ukraine. The second most popular one is developing tech tools for admin and patrolling work. (In the short term, we as an affiliate are better placed to offer the former; the latter has traditionally been done by the Wikimedia and individual volunteers, not the affiliate. Though for the longer term future it would be useful to reflect how we can get more involved with developing tech tools).
• Around 60% of survey respondents are interested in joining synchronous events (the rest prefers asynchronous communication). Short online events are by far the most convenient option. 
• Among the problems noted by interviewees three stand out the most: 1) lack of systematic onboarding for new admins and patrollers; 2) lack of positive feedback within the community; 3) Ukrainian Wikipedia lacks some important policies or the policies are too vague. We’re best placed to help resolve problem #1 and partly problem #2. For #3, we as an affiliate can’t really get involved in writing Wikipedia policies, but perhaps we can be helpful indirectly e.g. by organizing some kind of a “policy writing hackathon” at some point in the future. 

We’re open to feedback and other ideas! Contact us at info@wikimedia.org.ua