“The Great Leap” on Uzbek Wikipedia: How We Are Expanding Our Community with Youth in Uzbekistan

Young people make up nearly 60 percent of Uzbekistan’s population. In the Kashkadarya Region, this figure is about half. You might wonder why I’m highlighting these statistics. Let me explain my perspective.

I first discovered Wikipedia when I was 13. I was searching for a historical topic related to Uzbekistan on Google and found articles only in Russian, English, and German. There was nothing on Uzbek Wikipedia. This made me wonder: why shouldn’t we enhance our local wiki? Why shouldn’t we spread reliable information in our native language for our compatriots?

In 2022, the Youth Affairs Agency of Uzbekistan and the Wikimedians of Uzbek Language User Group launched the WikiStipendiya marathon to improve the quality and quantity of articles on Uzbek Wikipedia. I watched the video lessons from the marathon and learned how to create articles. Later, I attended several wiki camps in the Tashkent Region.

This April, I attended the Central Asian Wiki Con in Tashkent. The panel sessions and roundtable discussions provided me with valuable information on how to organize successful wiki projects. Inspired by this, I proposed the “Youth Workshop of Kashkadarya” to the CEE Hub Microgrants Program. I had identified a gap: there were no high-importance articles about youth and children’s rights on Uzbek Wikipedia.

We welcomed 20 of my peers from the region to a youth center in Karshi city. Together, we created more than 50 articles about youth rights and uploaded 100 media files of historic sites in Karshi. The participants were genuinely interested and fully engaged in contributing to the movement. I used a “peer-to-peer” strategy during the workshop: I taught them how to contribute, recruited young volunteers, and had my peers coordinate all event-related matters. This approach worked very well.

The success of the “peer-to-peer” strategy is perfectly illustrated by Sardor Ablokulov, a young Wikimedian from the Karshi district. He registered for our workshop and participated actively, creating over 50 articles on Uzbek Wikipedia. He started his journey in the movement with our Youth Workshop and has since conducted his first wiki event at his specialized school, encouraging his classmates to become Wikimedians.

More recently, we successfully organized the Kashkadarya Regional Program. Four months ago, I researched the information available about the neighborhoods of the Kashkadarya Region. I was surprised to find that articles existed for only 6% of all neighborhoods and villages. With nearly 1,000 neighborhoods and villages—many of them historic and well-documented—this was a significant gap. The region is rich with historic sites; both Karshi and Shakhrisabz are 2,700-year-old cities. Yet, if you search for tourism information about Shakhrisabz, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, search engines often show low-quality photos.

I proposed a project to the Wikimedia Rapid Fund to address this. After discussing the idea with the Wikimedians of Uzbek Language User Group, who agreed with my plan, I began collaborating with the Central Library of Kashkadarya, the Department of School Education, and the Youth Affairs Agency for references and participants. We announced the project on social media and received over 300 applications from across the region in just one week.

We held the project from November 21-23. During the first two days, we ran panel sessions and training on how to create Wikipedia articles, the basics of wiki editing, and how to contribute to the movement as an editor. Participants created nearly 200 articles about the region’s neighborhoods.

On the final day, we conducted a photo tour of the historic city of Shakhrisabz. Participants took numerous photos and uploaded over 400 media files to Wikimedia Commons, including images of the Aksaray complex, Ko‘kgumbaz mosque, Dorussaodat, Dorut-tilovat, Chorsu complex, and other historic sites. We also visited Miraki village, which is surrounded by mountains near the “Hisorak” water reservoir and has been developed by the government as a tourism village. The photos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons play a vital role in increasing the amount of information and data on the internet.

Our mission on Wikimedia projects is always the same: to spread free, reliable, and objective information. And we are expanding this mission by engaging more and more young people.