Two weekends in June: Wikimedia Ukraine’s forum for administrators and patrollers

On 20 and 27 June 2026, Wikimedia Ukraine held a forum for Ukrainian Wikipedia’s administrators and patrollers – one day online, one day in-person in Kyiv. Around 30 people took part across the two weekends: about 20 joined the online day, 18 came to Kyiv, and a few did both.

It was our second such event after an online forum in 2021 – and the first one since we’ve launched a full-fledged program of support for users with extended rights. Here’s a brief look at how the forum came about and how it looked like.

Why we’re doing this

Ukrainian Wikipedia has around 50 administrators and around 600 patrollers – the volunteers who review incoming edits, revert vandalism, close deletion discussions and generally keep the encyclopedia reliable. Their job has not been getting easier, partly because of pressures the whole movement shares and partly because of ones specific to Ukraine under Russia’s military invasion.

The community is, of course, self-governed, and an affiliate does not tell it how to run itself. But there is quite a lot a chapter can do still: training, materials, awards, and simply getting people into the same room. Wikimedia Ukraine had done this occasionally for years – an admin forum, an award, training sessions – and in 2024 we decided to make support for users with extended rights (UWERs) a strategic priority for 2025–2026.

Before designing anything, we spent some time working out what was actually needed –  a community survey, 1:1 interviews, and analysis of international experience. This work helped design our program of support for admins and patrollers, and the forum was a part of it.

The online day

The online day on 20 June had eight sessions. It opened with networking and introductions, then moved to a discussion of Ukrainian Wikipedia’s most pressing problems, such as AI and undisclosed paid editing. 

A separate session dealt with the Arbitration Committee – its current problems and needs, and the fact that new ArbCom members get no onboarding materials or training at all when they take the job on.

The rest of the day was practical:

• Media skills, run by Wikimedia Ukraine’s press secretary. Administrators and patrollers regularly end up acting as “Wikipedia spokespersons” whether or not they signed up for it, so the session covered how to talk about wiki projects on social media and to journalists, and what the chapter can offer to people who want to build a public profile.
• How edit filters work – a walkthrough of the mechanics for people who deal with their output daily.
• A demo of a mass patrolling tool.
• How to “torment” new users in the right way training to discuss ways of communicating with the new users to find a balance of creating a safe space for them to make mistakes and learn, but also knowing when to stop investing in them

We also ran a blitz award for standout anti-vandalism work. It went to Mykola7, an Ukrainian Wikipedia administrator (and a global steward).

The offline day in Kyiv

On 27 June we gathered everyone who could travel in Kyiv, at the Ukrainian-Danish Youth House, which hosted the event.

Because a good part of the group had only ever met each other through talk pages, we started with a teambuilding activity led by Ukrainian Wikipedia editor Maryna Lebid, built around reading and reflecting on short literary texts.

The first substantive session was a general exchange of technical lifehacks: participants shared their own tips for patrolling, dealing with vandals and performing admin actions.

After that, Asaf Bartov of the Wikimedia Foundation ran a training on making hard decisions. This was developed at the request from the community in the past, as users with extended rights “are often expected to make difficult decisions under uncertainty: when evidence is incomplete, emotions are high, policies are imperfect, and inaction can itself cause harm”, and the session was not focusing on specific on-wiki rules, but on “exploring how to distinguish good decisions from lucky outcomes, how to act responsibly without becoming overconfident or isolated, how to make uncertainty explicit, and how to recognize when an individual case points to a deeper governance or policy problem”

The rest of the day went to a separate discussion of undisclosed paid editing, a long-running problem with few easy solutions.

What participants told us afterwards

In the post-event surveys, participants rated the forum highly and agreed that something like it should happen regularly – roughly once a year. The clearest point for improvement was raising attendance, especially in-person. Getting people to travel is genuinely difficult during Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, but we think there is still room to do better next year.

Where the forum sits in the larger program

The forum is the most visible part of a broader program of support for users with extended rights. It runs along four strands:

• Training events and materials. Short online and hybrid events on topics like technical lifehacks and advanced copyright questions, plus asynchronous materials – text and video – for onboarding new patrollers and administrators.
• Motivation. We have long sent a “wiki condensed milk” award to the most active patrollers and administrators, and we now have a separate award for standout anti-vandalism work. Besides, thematic campaigns give people something to work on together.
• Networking. Short informal online events (such as a failfest), and now the larger hybrid forum.
• Bringing in new volunteers. Training in shorter and longer formats, and general promotion of the idea that community members can and should take on patrolling and adminship.

Next, we plan to keep the regular online events going, keep developing the asynchronous materials, and try to make the forum annual. 

Materials from the forum are available at https://w.wiki/Rwfz (in Ukrainian). If your affiliate runs something similar, or is considering it, we would be glad to share our experience and learn from yours.