Інтегровані комунікації (Sep 2016)
Using the Ukrainian Wikipedia in public relations
Abstract
In the second decade of the XXI century the electronic format began dominating in the world encyclopedic business. The paper version of Encyclopеdia Britannicа has completed its 244-year history with the 32-volume edition of 2010, and since then its management has focused entirely on producing the electronic information resources. However, Britannica's digital editions are way below to Wikipedia encyclopedia (Wikipedia) in popularity in Ukraine. Moreover, in the beginning of 2010 “Wikipedia’ was ahead of almost all other Internet resources in the struggle for the attention of Ukrainian users. According to the authoritative study of Gemius Audience, the wiki-encyclopedia (wikipedia.org) in January 2013 was the 6th in terms of reaching the audience in Uanet (Ukrainian-language segment of the Internet), at the level of 37.1%. For comparison: the search engine Google (google.com) with the value of this indicator at 69% became the leader of the rating. Considering such popularity among Internet users, Wikipedia in Ukraine is an extremely attractive platform for publication of promotional content. The article deals with possibilities of using the electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia, and in particular, the Ukrainian Wikipedia as a PR tool of commercial organizations. It analyzes the literature and resources related to this issue; it outlines the theoretical and practical possibilities of direct impact of PR-specialists on the content of “Wikipedia”; it studies the history and current contacts between the leadership of Wikipedia and the PR-industry representatives. It studies the level of information representation in relation to the big Polish companies in the Polish language edition of Wikipedia, as well as the big Ukrainian companies in the Ukrainian and Russian editions of Wikipedia. It is concluded that the PR representation of the Poland and Ukrainian big business companies differ in quantitative proportion only insignificantly. The methodology of further scientific and practical research of the Ukrainian Wikipedia for the tasks of PR industry and encyclopedia studies are researched; the strong potential of such an activity is marked.
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