Wikimedia Ukraine in 2025 – 10 biggest projects & 5 new initiatives

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In 2025, 265 participants submitted over 38,000 photos to Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine. 1150 Ukrainian educators passed an online course about Wikipedia in the classroom. 150+ volunteers wrote about Ukrainian culture in 70 languages.

Those are just a few numbers that illustrate Wikimedia Ukraine’s work in the past year. Our goal is to develop the culture of free knowledge in Ukraine, primarily by helping advance Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects – platforms that make knowledge available to everyone for free and without advertising or monetization of user data.

As Ukraine continues to battle Russia’s full-scale invasion for its fourth year, our work on supporting our diverse volunteer community, documenting Ukraine’s heritage for the world, and helping the world discover Ukraine is especially relevant. 

In this post, we’ll offer a glimpse into our activities. For those who are already familiar with what we do, we’ll start with something new and exciting – five initiatives that we launched in 2025 for the first time. Then we’ll recount ten of our biggest established projects.

There’s much more to what we do than what follows here – we’ll publish a detailed annual report in February.

Wikimarathon 2025 in a shelter in Kharkiv (photo: Kharkivian, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Five new 2025 initiatives

1. Ukraine’s first Wikimedia research conference – 80 people in Kyiv & online

Wikipedia is a popular encyclopedia – but also a fascinating research subject. In 2025, we started a project to develop 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 program was packed – 30 presentations of research on Wikipedia and related subjects in one day, on everything from the gender gap on Ukrainian Wikipedia to the use of AI to fight vandalism, from the research on Crimean Tatar Wikipedia to analysis of information narratives about Wikipedia on social media.

In 2026, we’ll keep developing this project and nurturing the research community that the conference helped gather. 

Researcher Iryna Yehorchenko presents her analysis on the state of mathematics articles on Ukrainian Wikipedia (photo: Mariana Senkiv, CC BY-SA 4.0)

2. Support for Ukrainian Wikipedia functionaries – admins & patrollers

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 Russian invasion harming community capacity. So, we made it one of our strategic goals to offer more and more systematic support to Ukrainian Wikipedia administrators and patrollers. 

In 2025, we organized a mass survey and needs analysis, developed a plan, and started holding events for training and networking – for example, a webinar on tech life hacks and an informal “fail fest”. Much more to come in 2026!

3. New massive open online course on Wikipedia for beginners

Our first Ukrainian-language massive open online course about Wikipedia had been years in the making. No more! In 2025 we launched a pilot version on WikiLearn. The course combines text tutorials, 20+ short video instructions developed by Wikimedia Ukraine, and tests. Learners who’ve passed the course get a certificate from Wikimedia Ukraine.

We’ll be iterating the course and sharing more learnings in the coming months. So far, over 120 people signed up for the course and over 70 completed it. 

4. Course on technical skills for women

We regularly hold courses for various target audiences as part of our strategy to engage underrepresented groups. In April 2025, we launched the first-ever wikicourse on technical skills for women. While everyone can benefit from course materials, which are available on demand, we’ve decided to focus on women as live participants as they are heavily underrepresented in the wiki tech community.

We developed a curriculum of six classes (one online meeting per week + homework after each meeting) that helped participants acquire basic and advanced technical knowledge for editing and improving content on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, such as working with templates, categories and Wikidata. 30 participants joined the course synchronously. 

5. “Open GLAM in Ukraine” – laying the groundwork for a large-scale GLAM collaboration

In late 2024, a consortium of partners that includes Wikimedia Ukraine, Wikimedia Sweden and the National Archives of Sweden received a grant from the Swedish Institute to support a pilot project that would help bring Ukraine’s cultural heritage from GLAM institutions to the Wikimedia platforms.

The main goal of the pilot project was to conduct research and analysis of the state of GLAM institutions’ needs and interests. The most important activity was a large-scale survey of institutions. We’ve managed to get over 550 institutions to respond – much more than we’d hoped for! – and received a lot of interesting results.

You can review highlights from the survey in the presentation, which was delivered during a working meeting of project partners in Stockholm last year. For more context about the meeting and the project, also read our article on Diff.

Based on the pilot, we received funding for a larger project that would support large-scale training for GLAM professionals (both leaders and staff members). More on that later this year!

Ten biggest projects of 2025

1. Wiki Loves Monuments – 38,000+ photos of Ukraine’s cultural heritage

As Ukraine’s cultural heritage is constantly at risk during Russia’s invasion, we are working to help document it under a free license on Wikimedia projects. Last year’s Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine contest was massive – 265 participants submitted over 38,000 photos, putting Ukraine in first place among all 50+ participating countries.

Apart from main nominations, we organized 11 special categories to showcase the impact of the war, highlight heritage of specific ethnic minorities, and help document cultural monuments that do not have a formal status. 

Archival photo of the the historical center of Nova Kakhovka, a city in the Kherson region that’s been under Russian occupation since early 2022. This image, by Oleg Marchuk / CC BY-SA 4.0, was named the best image of the Kherson region in Wiki Loves Monuments 2025.

2. Wikimarathon – 40 events in 10 days

Our annual January tradition around Wikipedia’s birthday – annual Wikimarathon, a large-scale campaign to attract as many new volunteers as possible to contribute to the Ukrainian Wikipedia.

In 2025, the marathon took place from January 25 to February 2. Participants created 905 new articles. A total of 309 people joined the initiative, including 52 newcomers. In addition to online editing, we supported over three dozen wiki-meetups across Ukraine and beyond.

3. Annual Wikiconference – 130+ participants

Our flagship annual gathering for the Wikimedia community this year consisted of an online conference, an in-person conference in Kyiv, and two smaller meetups in Kharkiv and Poltava. A record 130+ participants joined Wikiconference to exchange experiences, network, and have a bit of fun.

As usual, we aimed to make online participation no less inclusive and interesting than in-person, and that’s why we kept the good traditions of organizing a separate online conference for volunteers who cannot travel because of the war, as well as providing high-quality streaming of offline events.

Сollage of the conference’s group photos in 2025 (image by multiple authors in public domain)

4. Wikipedia Education Program – learning resources & events for the educator community

Bridging Wikipedia and schools & universities is a big part of what we do. A few highlights of the past year:

5. Article contests and campaigns – advancing knowledge in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar

We regularly hold contests and campaigns on Wikipedia and sister projects to bridge gaps on particularly important and underrepresented topics.

Some of the biggest directions include:

  • Regular campaigns about women to help bridge the gender gap on Wikipedia (and Wikiquote)
  • Campaigns to bridge geographical gaps and collaborate with the international community – CEE Spring and Wikipedia Asian Month
  • #1Lib1Ref and several other campaigns designed for GLAM professionals
  • Supporting community initiatives for short “thematic weeks” on Wikipedia, with topics ranging from Ukrainian cuisine to modern cinema

Crimean Tatar Wikipedia holds a special place in our hearts. It’s the language of an ethnic minority in Ukraine that has been persecuted for generations, and helping preserve it through Wikipedia is something that we’re trying to do as well.

6. Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month – Ukrainian culture in 70 languages

Apart from advancing knowledge in Ukrainian, we are also helping boost coverage of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture. The flagship project is our annual “Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month”, a writing challenge for the international Wikimedia community that took place for the fifth time in 2025 and resulted in 1600+ new or improved articles in a record 70 languages.

From the history of Kharkiv to the art of Kateryna Bilokur, from the literary legacy of Volodymyr Sosiura to modern initiatives like United24 and Suspilne Kultura — contributors from around the world helped bring Ukraine’s rich cultural mosaic to millions of readers.

Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month 2025 in Malaysia (photo: Dody Ismoyom, CC BY-SA 4.0)

7. Promoting high-quality content through campaigns & awards

We think hard not only about the number of articles created thanks to our campaigns but also about their quality – and try to incentivize improvement of high-profile articles on Wikipedia.

In the summer of 2025, we organized a thematic campaign devoted to improving the most important articles on Ukrainian Wikipedia, such as most popular entries. 25 participants expanded over 110 articles. (Read more in Ukrainian).

We’ve also made it an annual tradition to award the most productive authors of featured articles on Wikipedia. In 2025, Ukrainian Wikipedia had perhaps the best year in its history for featured articles; 186 articles by 49 authors were distinguished, while quality standards have also been rising. (Read more in Ukrainian).

8. Wiki Loves Earth – documenting Ukraine’s nature heritage & helping other countries do it

Wiki Loves Earth is one of the largest campaigns in the Wikimedia movement, helping document natural heritage across the world. The contest originated in Ukraine, and we still support it on the international level for 50+ countries.

Wikimedia Ukraine also organizes the competition in Ukraine – in 2025, it brought around 7,500 photos from 124 participants, putting Ukraine in third place among all participating countries and showcasing both Ukraine’s natural beauty and the dangers it faces.

9. Trainings for the community and beyond, on everything from AI to networking 

As part of building community capacity, we regularly hold training events for volunteers on both wiki-specific skills and wider topics. The most popular topic in 2025 was, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence – ~90 people joined our webinar on AI last February.

Some other training topics include writing original (i.e. non-translated) articles on Wikipedia, digital safety, networking at international events, maps in Wikimedia projects, and more.

We even held a training session in English for the international community – on using Wikipedia offline.

10. Building out Ukrainian Wikisource

Ukrainian Wikisource has a vibrant community that’s building out this free library of texts in the Ukrainian language. To motivate them, in 2025 we supported seven thematic campaigns devoted to proofreading scans of books by prominent Ukrainian authors, as well as important documents like those on Ukraine’s cultural heritage for Wiki Loves Monuments. 

Read also 

Parts of this article were previously published on Wikimedia Ukraine’s blog and in the CEE newsletter.

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