Wikipedia is a popular encyclopedia – but also a fascinating research subject. This year, Wikimedia Ukraine is working on developing the community of Wikimedia researchers in Ukraine, culminating in a major conference that gathered over 80 people in-person and online on November 15th.
The conference’s goal was to bring together Wikimedia researchers from Ukraine, introduce them to international Wikimedia research, and also bring them in the same room – both physically and metaphorically – with the volunteer Wikimedia community.
The conference gathered 43 people in-person and close to 40 online. The program was packed – 30 presentations of research on Wikipedia and related subjects in one day.
Topics ranged from the gender gap on Ukrainian Wikipedia to the usage of AI to fight vandalism, from the research on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia to analysis of information narratives about Wikipedia on social media.
A large segment of sessions was dedicated to researchers analyzing the coverage of their topical areas or even specific topics on Wikipedia, such as music, math, and pedagogy.
We also had a wide diversity of participants, from established researchers leading departments at some of the biggest universities in Ukraine, to PhD students, to Wikipedians who don’t conduct research themselves but can provide a valuable volunteer perspective.
Most presentations were in Ukrainian, but we had four sessions in English from international speakers, including a presentation from the Wikimedia Foundation’s research team.
Ukraine continues to battle Russia’s full-scale invasion, and the war has informed all aspects of the conference – from topics the speakers studied to the fact that the organizing team had to ensure the offline venue had reliable power generators as Ukraine’s energy infrastructure continues to suffer from regular Russian strikes.
We’ll publish full conference proceedings in early 2026. In the meantime, the conference was livestreamed on YouTube, and the full recording is already available. (You can also see the full program: Ukrainian original & its machine-translated English version).
As part of the larger project, we’re also building out a network of Wikimedia researchers through regular online events and other activities. The project is organized by Wikimedia Ukraine thanks to grant support from the Wikimedia Foundation through the Wikimedia Research Fund. We held the conference in partnership with two Ukrainian universities, Kyiv Aviation Institute and Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics.
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