Wikipedia-500

A project to provide the Ukrainian Wikipedia with high-quality astronomical content!

January – June 2023

Project figures

Project components

FAQs

Why do you edit Wikipedia in the first place?

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of information for both school pupils and university students. We want it to remain a place where people can find accurate, verified, and clearly presented facts. 

Why have you created so many articles? Does anyone actually need them?

There are still a lot of gaps in astronomical topics on the Ukrainian Wikipedia. What we have done amounts to less than 3% of the astronomical articles that should ideally exist there. The relevance of our work is confirmed by over 70,000 page views.

Can you trust information from Wikipedia?

If an article is based on academic papers published in peer-reviewed journals, you can! Our team created all our content following this principle.

How many team members were new to Wikipedia?

Everyone except Oleksii Holubov, who at the time was a reviewer with approximately 10,000 edits and soon afterwards became a Wikipedia administrator.

Who on the team made the greatest contribution to this project?

Once again, Oleksii Holubov, the first head of the Wikipedia Unit. According to various metrics, between 66% and 92% of the team’s results were directly connected to his work.

Did you use ChatGPT to write the text of the articles?

No, ChatGPT and all other AI systems  performed poorly as assistants to Wikipedia editors. The main problem was the selection of dubious or even blatantly false sources for writing the text. However, we subsequently developed other methods of partial automation.

Results

• Over 500 articles on astronomical objects, laws, phenomena, and scientists have been created on the Ukrainian Wikipedia.
• Several hundred more articles have been improved.
• Six articles, including “Hertzsprung–Russell diagram”, “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”, “Potentially hazardous object”, “Type Iax supernovae”, and “Pale Blue Dot”, were awarded Good status.
• One article (“4 Vesta”) also achieved Featured status.
• Cooperation began with the NGO “Wikimedia Ukraine“, which subsequently developed into several partnership projects.
• A concept for higher-quality training of new Wikipedians was developed.

Conclusions:

Despite the project’s successes, over time, the team began to lose interest in working on Wikipedia. As most participants ceased to be active, the Wikipedia Unit was officially disbanded on 30 June 2023.

But that wasn’t the end of the story: just a few months later, two of the most active members of the “old team“ revived the unit alongside newcomers – this time with new principles and approaches to their work.

You too can join our Clear Skies Foundation team, where together we will help shape the history of the Ukrainian Wikipedia.