Wikimedia CEE Spring 2025
Wikimedia CEE Spring 2025 continues as an annual event organised by Wikimedians and Wikipedians who joined the Central and Eastern Europe collaboration with an aim to support article creation about every country in the region on every Wikipedia.
Wikimedia CEE Spring aims to join local forces of free knowledge to accumulate and distribute information about history, culture, traditions and people in every corner of the region to support mutual acknowledgement and understanding and to increase the quantity and quality of free knowledge available about the CEE region globally.
Context and Contest
[edit]In contemporary times the CEE region has experienced several unfortunate spring seasons that have resulted in misunderstandings, conflicts and disappointment (exempli gratia the replacement of Alexander Dubček in April of 1969 to reverse the Prague Spring, escalating conflicts in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the Spring of 1988, intensification of Transnistrian conflict in March of 1992, the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo in April of 1992, the Spring of 2014 that marked the beginning of the war in Donbass, the revolution in Armenia in the spring of 2018, as well as the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022.
The event itself takes place traditionally from the 21 March until 31 May, but local contests can be shorter depending on the plans of the local organisers. During this time period there will be an individual article competition on hopefully all Wikipedias in the region and many outside of it, concentrating on creating and significantly improving articles in different categories like history, culture and notable people of each and every participating country or region. For more information about article topics, please consult the pages on the article lists.
Local competitions are organised by local teams and in every community the competition will be slightly different in order to take local context into account. Contact data of the local coordinators can be found on the contacts page. Local teams present lists of articles on their country or region which they would like to see in every possible language and editors from all other countries create and significantly edit those articles, whereby participants can write about any topic, connected with the other participating countries in the region.
The more participants, the merrier! If new communities from Central and Eastern Europe join during the spring, local organisers should work on the list of tasks — and have fun!
Tasks
[edit]Participants
[edit]During the editing contest, participants are expected to:
- create new articles and improve existing ones; as inspiration for writing new articles, article lists exist for every CEE community that mostly have English Wikipedia entries that can be used as a template
- add credible external links to articles; and
- add images to articles to make them more vivid.
Sub-contests
[edit]You can take a part on a different sub-contests that usually are held during the CEE Spring anytime besides your community take a part into the contest. To do so, you need to add your user name and contributions on the separate Meta pages. In 2025, there are three separate sub-contests:
Local coordinators
[edit]Prior to the editing contest, local coordinators have to prepare the following:
- create separate project pages for CEE Spring and their separate editing contest on their home wiki;
- discuss the rules of the contest with their community and afterwards publish this on the main page for CEE Spring (Rules);
- define a list of around 100 articles about their country, region or language, which can be distributed in ten per possible categories (such as Geography, History, Economics, Agriculture, Science, Society, etc.). Article lists can be provided directly from the local coordinator or through a discussion page on the respective home wikis with the help from the respective communities, especially when the content of the article list is disputed;
- inform the community and active editors about upcoming CEE Spring on their home wiki; and
- Optional: organize a jury from other volunteers in the movement, who will not take part in the contest. Examples for various rules for local contests can be found here (Rules).
During the editing contest, local coordinators are asked to:
- make sure that all participating articles on their own wiki have the CEE Spring template (Template:CEE Spring 2025) with parameters for username, topic and country, which is needed to acquire proper statistics about the local contest; and
- promote the contest and give additional information about the contest through sitenotice, social media, blogs, or other ways.
International organisers (not complete yet)
[edit]If you are interested in joining the international team, please contact one of the volunteers below! We're always happy to welcome new volunteers to the team! :-)
| Name | Username | Country | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kiril Simeonovski | Kiril Simeonovski | Macedonia | Shared Knowledge |
| Mārtiņš Bruņenieks | Papuass | Latvia | Wikimedians of Latvia User Group |
| Philip Kopetzky | Philip Kopetzky | Austria | Wikimedia CEE Hub |
| Masti | Masti | Poland | Wikimedia Polska |
| Nikos Likomitros | NikosLikomitros | Greece | Wikimedia Community User Group Greece, CEE Youth Group |
| Vjollca Merdani | Vyolltsa | Albania | Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group |
| Eldar Azimov | Eldarado | Azerbaijan | Azerbaijani Wikimedians User Group |
Support staff
[edit]Staff members of affiliates or projects that are supporting the international project team in managing the project this year:
- Grant handling and prize funds
- Project planning and communication