Ukrainian Wikipedia among Top 15 by number of articles

KYIV, January 31 /UKRINFORM/. Ukrainian Wikipedia, founded nine years ago - January 30, 2004, ranks 14th in the world by the number of encyclopedia articles.

This was emphasized at a press conference Wednesday by the executive director of the nongovernmental organization Wikimedia Ukraine, Yuriy Perohanych.

"Ukrainian Wikipedia is the largest in human history encyclopedia in the Ukrainian language - now it contains over 426,900 encyclopedia articles and by their number is the 14th in the world. Every second it has 29 views, which is 2.5 million daily and 75 million per month, or the 19th place in the world," Yuriy Perohanych said.

He informed that in January this year, 140 new items were created daily; in all over the month, 2,200 users were registered, each of whom carried out at least one edit.

Generally, the Ukrainian Wikipedia has 26 volunteer administrators who have the right to remove articles, and about 200 editors who are authorized to provide the “checked” status to edits. "It is important to emphasize that Wikipedia can be edited by any literate person who has access to the Internet and can create new articles," the Wikimedia Ukraine executive director said.

Perohanych also said that to date, the Ukrainian Wikipedia has 1.3 million pages, and 11.8 million edits were made - an average of nine edits per one page.

One of the important factors in the development of Wikipedia, according to him, is the fact that NGO Wikimedia has been functioning for three years now to develop the community of editors. "Ukrainian Wikipedia is an example of sacrifice, because people not getting paid spend a lot of their time on its creation," he said.

Among the main challenges and problems Perohanych called public policies aimed at narrowing the sphere of the Ukrainian language use, the lack of "interest charity" in the legislation, insufficient use of the Wikipedia opportunities in education, lack of the Internet penetration, legislative prohibition of Free Panorama - the right to freely take and publish pictures of the works of architecture and sculpture placed in public places, without the consent of the author or rights owner in his lifetime and 70 years after his death. "This hinders not only the development of Wikipedia, but also the tourism potential of Ukraine, and damages the economy," he said.

He also said that a new project is planned in the Wikipedia frames - WikiVoyage, created on the same principles as Wikipedia itself, but focused on tourism. It will contain information on hotels, monuments, tour agencies, etc.