The Encyclopedia War: Ukraine’s Volunteer Army “Rewriting” the Internet
How Wikipedians, mapmakers, and fact-checkers are fighting Russia one edit at a time On the night of September 18, 2020, Ukraine’s FM posted a short, almost bureaucratic announcement: Wikipedia had changed the spelling of the country’s capital from “Kiev” to “Kyiv.” It reads like a footnote. It was, in fact, the end of a seventeen-year war. Editors had been moving the English-language article…
Wikipedia and online volunteers are battling Russia on a daily basis in the ongoing conflict. A few years ago, the site changed the spelling of Ukraine's capital from "Kiev" to "Kyiv" after a formal request was made. This was just the beginning of a much larger struggle.
In 2018, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry and the Strategic Communications Office launched the KyivNotKiev campaign, urging English-language media and institutions to use the Ukrainian version of the name. This was part of a larger CorrectUA campaign that sought to change the spellings of numerous Ukrainian cities and regions from their Russian-derived versions to the Ukrainian ones.
The scale of this effort is vast, with Ukrainian Wikipedia now containing around 1.4 million articles, the fourteenth-largest language edition on the site. It is maintained by approximately 20,000 contributors, with about 3,000 active monthly. The community is coordinated both on and off the platform, with Wikimedia Ukraine serving as the primary organizing hub.
Despite the challenges posed by the war, the volunteer base has remained resilient, with many contributors now serving in the military. The annual Wikimarafon, held around January 30 to mark the 2004 founding of Ukrainian Wikipedia, saw the largest-ever turnout of 365 participants in 2024, including 108 new contributors who produced 1,200 articles.
The fight extends beyond spelling, however. Articles on the invasion, occupied territories, and alleged war crimes often carry strict editing restrictions, including extended-confirmed protection. Despite this, Wikipedians defend these measures as necessary to prevent coordinated disruption from Russian state outlets and other sources.
The battle also extends to maps, with Ukraine's decommunization drive renaming over 51,000 streets and nearly a thousand settlements by 2021. Ukrainian mappers on OpenStreetMap have spent over a decade encoding these changes, but Google Maps remains a difficult target, as a single corporate decision can undo years of work overnight. This highlights the contested nature of digital naming and sovereignty online, which is never permanently secured but maintained edit by edit.
Written by urgent.news from UATV English's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
