Planting a sunflower seed: the Ukrainian Book Festival in Milan

Language diversity is an important topic to me, as both an active Wikimedian in the Italian chapter and a sysop of Lombard Wikipedia, a regional language of Italy lacking any recognition by the government, so that’s something I always keep in mind when I do my wiki-stuff.

I synthesize my approach as “Wikipedia in Italian is not Wikipedia Italy and Wikimedia Italia is not Wikimedia in Italian”: while it’s normal to give many attentions to the majority language and even support actions for Italian culture in other countries, we should always keep in mind the existing communities , both the historic minorities and the immigrants bringing their traditions, customs and languages here.

The Wiki-Team (photo by Nataliya Nonyak)

We were already collaborating with Ucraina Più Milano , a local association of Ukrainians in the Milan area, as we organised with them an edit-a-thon on the Executed Renaissance in February, and when they asked us to organise another one at their Ukrainian Book Festival in Milan on the 31 of May, I was delighted and took the opportunity… and thought right away at my Wiki-Friends from the Youth Conference in Prague!

So, we invited Olesia and Daryna to come to Milan to help us engage the Ukrainian community in the city and manage the Ukrainian part of the edit-a-thon: this event was the first edit-a-thon in the Ukrainian language in Italy and a milestone in building a Ukrainian Wikimedian community in our country.

Home-made tiramisu for our friends!

I can’t express how grateful and thankful to them I am: they made a really long trip to join us, and we thanked them by our best Italian hospitality, and in the meantime the Italian Wikipedia started a “double-writing week” about Ukraine, that will end on the 13th of June, when we are opening the WLM/WLE/WLF exhibithion “Wounded yet resilient: Ukraine in photos” in Milan, with the collaboration of Ucraina Più Milano and Wikimedia Ukraine.

As for most introduction edit-a-thon, the output in terms of articles was not our main metric: some experienced users wrote on Wikipedia, while others were explaining the inner workings of Wikipedia and Wikimedia to the interested newcomers, and some even tried doing some small edits! But the most important thing , in my opinion, wasn’t having a big, productive edit-a-thon with lots of articles written by people already expert with the encyclopedia – for that we have the double writing week – but to show we are there, that there are Wikimedia projects in Ukrainian and that they could thrive even outside Ukraine, favouring the cultural exchange between countries too!

That knowledge in the Ukrainian community in Italy is really important too: the majority of them came to Italy before 2022 and speak Russian commonly, and we know well how the various Russian aggressions against Ukraine shifted the language perspectives in the country, influencing which Wikipedia edition Ukrainians read and contribute too. It’s well possible people don’t really know there’s a Ukrainian Wikipedia or, even if they know, they don’t see it as a viable or useful project, and it’s important to us to give dignity to a language that was often mistreated, minoritised and hated in its history, often by the same enemies.

People chatting about Wikipedia (photo by me)

With lots of Ukrainians fleeing from an unjust war, leaving the Ukrainian nation scattered in many countries, online spaces are extremely important to keep that nation, her tradition, customs, culture, cuisine and specialty alive, in the face of the assimilation attempts they’re experiencing.

And in the end, I wanted to have an event that wasn’t just “we write about Ukraine”: the Ukrainian community in Italy is well known for being one of the best examples of integration and positive cultural, economic and social contribution to the country they chose to live in, and saying to them “your culture and language are valued and they deserve to be kept and used even here” is important and just.

The good thing about Wikimedia is that as we don’t have fixed rules, we don’t have fixed times either: I’m pretty sure that building a Ukrainian-speaking Wikimedia community in Italy will take time, but this is the first seed of a sunflower (as the logo we chose for the edit-a-thon, a sunflower opening as a book) that, we all hope, will grow strong in our fields.