Education/Newsletter/October 2014/Education Program Extension enabled on Ukrainian Wikipedia
By Yuriy Bulka (Wikimedia Ukraine)
Snippet: Ukrainian Wikipedia becomes the 12th Wikipedia to enable the Education Program MediaWiki extension.
In May 2014, Ukrainian Wikipedia joined the Education Program Extension-enabled wikis after having an on-wiki discussion resulting in a request to enable the extension, which was already fully translated into Ukrainian by a dedicated Wikipedian prior to the request. The Education Program Extension was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation to assist educators and Wikimedians in their joint efforts to support classes of students editing articles on Wikipedia. It is currently enabled on 15 Wikimedia projects: 13 language versions of Wikipedia and on 2 other Wikimedia projects, including English Wikinews and German Wikiversity.
Currently, the extension is not yet actively used by educators in Ukraine as Ukrainian Wikipedia community prepares documentation and on-wiki infrastructure, however, with the start of the semester several introductory wiki-trainings have been held in Lviv and Kyiv, and more are planned. In the past, Wikimedia Ukraine has signed agreements with several Ukrainian universities (including Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute and others), however Wikimedians in Ukraine were struggling in maintaining the growth of the program. Recently, new contacts were established and the idea of the Wikipedia Education Program in Ukraine is met with enthusiasm among educators very often. Thus, the WEP community in Ukraine hopes to use the Education Program Extension to boost the program in Ukraine in the following years.
Read more about the educational Wikimedia projects in Ukraine here.