CEE/Newsletter/October 2017/Contents/Turkey report

Turkey report: 300.000 articles in Turkish Wikipedia, despite the ban

By Başak

Turkish wiki community members are happy to announce that Turkish Wikipedia, the 30th largest Wikipedia edition, has reached 300.000 articles. As most of you might know, the online access to Turkish Wikipedia has been blocked in Turkey since April 29th. However, members of Turkish community have not stop their contributions.

We have community members who are internet-savvy enough to reach the platform by using appropriate methods. At the beginning of the ban, the editors decided to focus on pending changes. We had thousands of articles awaiting review due to inadequate number of active patrollers. Now, since the number of changes were minimized as a result of the ban, the active editors could focus on reviewing the pending changes. In August, seeing "zero pending changes" in the watchlist was the first victory of Turkish community for the last months. Later, editors who would find their way to reach Wikipedia, continued their work as usual without bothering from the drop in the number of readers. Knowing that the ban on the access to Wikipedia will be removed sooner or later, volunteers have continued editing non-stop. By the way, the fierce discussions and quarrels have never stopped as well!

On the night of October 13th, the user group members were aware that Turkish Wikipedia was very close to reach its 300.000-th article. A logo and sitenotice banner were ready. A small group was waiting to place the 300.000-th logo and banner while chatting online. Of course, in the meantime, everybody was also busy creating new articles, hoping that his/her article will be 300.000-th. User:Ugurkent created the article about 2017 Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkey and got ready to happily announce that he is the author of the 300.000-th article of Turkish Wikipedia. However, we saw that it was 299.999-th article. The 300.000-th article came from an anonymous user. It is the article about Fokker 100, a jet airliner!

We hope we'll get on the wings of it and reach to next thousandth article very soon...

During CEE Spring, the number of articles written about Turkey dramatically increased after the news of the ban on the access to Turkish Wikipedia. About 4 times more articles were written in the rest CEE languages, as a response to the ban.