Annual Report 2022/Story: Support for Ukraine

Tillgång

2022

In this story, we focus on the targeted efforts Wikimedia Sverige has made in order to contribute to the work our sibling organization in Ukraine is doing, as well as to highlight Ukraine's cultural heritage in other ways.

A November 2022 presentation about the impact of the war on the work of Wikimedia Ukraine.

For several years, Wikimedia Sverige has had a great collaboration with the local Wikimedia organization in Ukraine, Wikimedia Ukraine. We have partnered up around international activities such as WikiGap and Wiki Loves Earth. As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, we contacted Wikimedia Ukraine with an offer of support, hoping we could in some ways make their work easier in this very turbulent period. The brave Ukrainian team kept fighting; during a whole year of war and destruction, they kept working with spreading free knowledge, both in Ukraine and internationally.

During the year, we continuously looked for opportunities to support Wikimedia Ukraine and to highlight, among other things, the country's cultural heritage that was actively destroyed in the war. We worked on making photo material from Ukraine more searchable by adding structured data to media files on Wikimedia Commons. We processed over 300 000 files (see also Story: Improving search and useability – Continuous data uploads and improvements). In addition, we focused on Ukraine-related material in our collaborations with international organizations (see also Story: Working with international bodies outside the UN). We have also researched various financing options. We identified the Swedish Institute as a likely sponsor of targeted projects aimed at digital preservation and documentation of cultural heritage in Ukraine and its neighboring countries, and we're planning to develop an application in 2023.