Team milestones

Active development of the Wikipedian Unit, first partnership project, reorganization of the remaining team units.

Completed

The main achievements during this period were made by the members of the Wikipedian Unit. Despite the unit being completely disbanded in July and only recently re-established, its members have already accomplished a lot in the final quarter of 2023 and even co-authored a new record for Ukrainian Wikipedia:

• Clear structuring was implemented and chaotic work on articles was replaced with a project-based approach.
• Six articles obtained Good Article status, and one article became a Featured List.
• Three of these articles obtained status within one week.
• Never before in Ukrainian Wikipedia had three articles on the same topic simultaneously achieved Good Article status.
• At one point, eight high-quality articles were nominated for various statuses, six of which were authored by our team. This was the first precedent in the 20-year history of Ukrainian Wikipedia.
• Additionally, two articles written by our team were featured on Wikipedia's main page.
• For the first time, all three status articles on the Main Page – a Good Article, a Featured List, and a Featured Article (authored by another contributor) – were on the same topic: astronomy.

In addition to these achievements, the Wikipedian and Communications Units, in collaboration with the NGO "Wikimedia Ukraine," organized our first partnership project called "Reviewer School". Its goal is to improve the quality of articles on Wikipedia by increasing the number of reviewers – an intermediate link between ordinary users and administrators. We helped Ukrainian Wikipedia recruit five new reviewers and four autoreviewers.

The activities of most other units were focused on addressing internal issues and "filling the gaps". Noteworthy results include the development of a brand book by the Unit of Communications and the creation of a basic version of the Splitter program for analyzing photometric observations of variable stars by the members of the Scientific Unit.

Incomplete

Despite the listed achievements, October 2023 was the worst month in our team's history. Even the question of closing the organization was raised several times. The productivity of all units fell to almost zero. As a result, the consistency of efforts was completely disrupted, leading to the cancellation of another very important partnership project. Overall, six important large and medium projects were lost over four months.

In November and December, the team's activity was partially restored, but still remained extremely unstable. There was a lack of people in key positions; newcomers critically lacked the necessary knowledge and skills. Some team members "went silent" – they stopped responding to messages and ceased all activities in the team without any warning, and after several months of waiting, they were excluded from the team.

A common occurrence was the collapse of the management system – when a manager could not temporarily perform their tasks (for example, due to illness or exams), the unit's activities were completely paralyzed for the entire duration of the manager's absence.

Сonclusions

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