I joined Wikipedia on July 12, 2013. Initially my motivation was to increase the presense of Ukrainian language on the internet, since there are not so many online resources in Ukrainian that are able to provide a Ukrainian reader with the information he/she needs (I, personally, mostly use English to search for information). But the time passed by and one day I felt as if the work I'm doing here is a part of something bigger, greater, something more important than anything else I've been doing before. I realized that we're creating the largest knowledge resource in human history. And I felt like I'm a citizen of the World. Hence, the humanity progress, the evolution of mind now determine my motivation to keep working here.
To sum it up, here is my favorite quote by the former (2017) vice chair of Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Christophe Henner:
“
Why am I involved in our movement? Because I believe we have the power to have an everlasting impact on mankind.
”
Nevertheless I'm still working mostly on translations into Ukrainian – simply because this is the best I can do, and I don't want to waste my time and efforts on doing something I'm not good at.
Here are the links to Wikimedia sites I am currently active on:
Ukrainian Wikipedia — this is my homewiki. I spend here most of my time translating articles, working upon some templates, technical and community-related problems and other stuff.
Meta-Wiki — I help with translating some newsletters into Ukrainian, localize templates, and generally try to translate as many pages as I can – just to make them understandable for average Ukrainians. But I work here as a WikiOgre, since I can be inactive for months and then suddenly start doing large edits (usually for a rather short period of time though).
Mediawiki.org — I assist other Ukrainian translators in translating the documentation of MediaWiki and its extensions.
Wikidata — the same as above – once in a while I do some translation work here.
Translatewiki.net — I help other translators to localize Wikimedia sites' interface messages.
Phabricator — I gained some experience in discussing certain issues here, filed a few bug reports and feature requests.
Commons — in December 2016 I decided to translate all the remaining pages marked for translation via the Translate system. There were up to 7000 untranslated messages for Ukrainian. After the first 3000 messages or so, I stopped and, seeing around 4000 more messages to translate, felt discouraged and wanted to resign from my initial idea. But somehow I forced myself to continue.
It took me 2 months in total to translate all ~7000 messages. I cannot express, how satisfying it was to see Special:LanguageStats empty for the first time. I've proven myself that it is possible to do this amount of work even for a single person. That even a single person can make a difference. And you can do the same. You can translate thousands, even tens of thousands of messages on your own. I know this because Tyler knows this I did it myself. Just start and don't stop. That's all.
