On September 15–17, Mariana Senkiv, Associate Professor at the Department of Tourism, Viacheslav Chornovil Institute of Sustainable Development (ISD), took part in the international conference «Wikimedia. Central and Eastern Europe 2023». This is the annual conference of Wikipedians (Wikimedians) of Central and Eastern Europe to discuss the future of the Wikimedia movement and its development.
This time, the conference was organized by Wikimedia Georgia, a non-profit organization representing a group of Wikimedia Foundation users living in Georgia. Its purpose is to help and encourage people to collect, develop, and distribute knowledge and other educational, cultural, and historical content in the public domain or under other licenses that allow everyone to use the knowledge freely.
For several years Mariana Senkiv, together with Wikimedia Ukraine, has been organizing wiki trainings for students of the Department of Tourism. Recently, there was the first Summer Wiki School for high school students at Lviv Polytechnic. Also Mariana Senkiv wrote an article for the CEE newsletter about Wikicommunities (section Updates from communities).
Mariana Senkiv took part in the conference under a Wikimedia Ukraine scholarship as part of a seven-person delegation. Thanks to this participation, she managed to meet a considerable number of representatives of the Wiki community from various countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular from Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Armenia, Moldova, Romania and others.
Mariana Senkiv joined the speeches and participated in discussions dedicated to the introduction of the Wikipedia educational program into the educational process, as well as specific ideas for future cooperation: the organization of an international wiki school for high school students and an interstate student article competition in Wikivoyage, a sister project of Wikipedia.
The conference program also included an excursion, in particular a trip to the city of Mtskheta, a famous pilgrimage center that is included into the UNESCO World Heritage List. Also they visited a monument of Taras Shevchenko in Tbilisi.
