In July 2022, the article about the city of Odesa in the English-language Wikipedia was renamed from “Odessa” to “Odesa” – now the name of the article is based on the Ukrainian transliteration of the city. The article about Odessa in the English Wikipedia was started 20 years ago, in June 2002, but for a long time it had the name “Odessa” because this version dominated the English-language sources on which Wikipedia relies.
Since then, the situation has changed, many more sources began to use the “Odesa” variant, so in July 2022, based on the results of the discussion, the volunteer editors of the English Wikipedia decided to rename the article.
“The decision of the Wikipedia community to rename the article about Odesa is significant because the English-language Wikipedia is one of the most popular web resources in the world. Only since the beginning of 2022, the article about Odesa has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. Many sources of information, such as the media or other knowledge bases, also rely on Wikipedia.
So this is an important step in the decolonization of Ukrainian toponyms in the English Wikipedia — after the article about Kyiv, after decades of efforts by members of the Ukrainian community, was renamed the year before last.
Such changes are a manifestation of the fact that the perception of Ukraine by the societies and media of English-speaking countries is beginning to change because without this, the English Wikipedia community would not have decided to take such a step.
However, it is too early to relax: there are still many such names with imperial roots in the English Wikipedia. And not only in English,” – comments Anton Obozhyn, editor of Ukrainian Wikipedia and member of the Board of the NGO “Wikimedia Ukraine”.
The discussion, as a result of which the article was renamed, began on July 11, 2022.
“[The discussion was compelling] evidence that—after the city of Odessa, Texas, was dropped from the analysis—the one-s spelling dominates the authoritative sources,” – wrote Wikipedia contributor Red Slash, summarizing the discussion.
In total, about 20 people took part in the discussion.
English Wikipedia is the largest and most popular of the more than 300 language sections of Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, which is created by volunteers. The English-language section contains more than 6.5 million articles; in 2021, it was viewed about 75 billion times.
