Russian Wikipedia

Updated on Oct 21, 2023

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Available in Russian Owner Wikimedia Foundation Commercial Charitable		Headquarters Miami, Florida Website ru.wikipedia.org

Type of site Internet encyclopedia project

The Russian Wikipedia (Russian: Ру́сская Википе́дия) is the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. As of March, 2017, it has 1,382,792 articles. It was started on 11 May 2001. In October 2015 it became the sixth-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles. It has the fifth-largest number of edits (96.8 million).

It is the largest Wikipedia written in any Slavic language, surpassing its nearest rival, the Polish Wikipedia, eightfold by the parameter of depth. In addition, the Russian Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia written in Cyrillic or in a script other than Latin script. In April 2016, the project had 3,377 active editors who made at least five edits in that month, ranking third behind the English and Spanish versions.

Policies

Difficult issues are resolved through the Arbitration Committee, which handles content disputes, blocks users or prohibits certain users from editing articles on certain topics.

Administrators (currently 86) are elected through a vote; a minimal quorum of 30 voters and 66% of support votes are required if the request is to be considered successful. Administrators who have become inactive (i.e. have not used administrative tools, such as "delete" or "block" buttons, at least 25 times in six months) may lose their privileges by an Arbitration Committee decision.

History

The Russian Wikipedia was created on 20 May 2001 in the first wave of non-English Wikipedias, along with editions in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, German, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

The first edit of the Russian Wikipedia was on 24 May 2001, and consisted of the line "Россия – великая страна" ("Russia is a great nation"). The following edit changed it to the joke: "Россия — родина слонов (ушастых, повышенной проходимости — см. мамонт)" ("Russia is the motherland of elephants (big-eared, improved cross-country capability, see Mammoth.")

For a long time development was slow (especially after some participants left for WikiZnanie), but in the 12-month period between February 2005 and February 2006 it surpassed nine editions in other languages – the Catalan, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Finnish, Norwegian, Chinese, Esperanto and Danish Wikipedias. In 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010 the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised by the Russian government agency FAPMC.

Content

As of 1 June 2012, some of the biggest categories (which contain more than 5,000 articles) in the Russian Wikipedia are:

176,411 biographical articles. Although the Western name order (given name(s) followed by family name) is generally used in Russian, the Russian Wikipedia uses lexical order (last name, comma, given name(s) and also the patronymic for most people from ex-Soviet countries) for all articles on non-fictional persons. This order has been traditionally used in major Russian language encyclopedias, like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

144,322 human settlements articles.

28,187 river articles

19,302 film articles

16,925 animal articles

16,517 scientific articles

16,133 surname articles

13,936 footballers' articles

11,247 Musicians' articles

10,755 Writers' articles

9,243 album articles

9,237 articles on recipients of the Order of Lenin

7,307 Company's articles

6,734 plant articles

6,574 street articles

6,265 NGC astronomical articles

6,157 actors articles

5,719 artist articles

5,580 music group articles

5,292 Hero of the Soviet Union articles

10,340 articles contain material from the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.

More than 11,000 articles were translated from the English Wikipedia.

Namespaces

In addition to common Wikipedia namespaces, the Russian Wikipedia has three custom ones – "Incubator" (# 102–103) – which is used as a training camp for new users and their first articles, "Project" (# 104–105) – for Wikipedia projects and "Arbitration" (# 106–107) – for arbitration requests.

Criticism

In 2015, Roman Leibov, a professor at University of Tartu, in an interview opined that articles related to humanities in Russian Wikipedia are of considerably inferior quality compared to English Wikipedia, and some articles even deteriorate with time. He suggested that this effect is due to overzealous policing of intellectual property rights by the community and bemoaned poor editing skills of some Wikipedians.

Timeline

The main page was created on 7 November 2002.

On 30 December 2004, the 10,000th article was created.

On 23 December 2005, the 50,000th article was created.

On 16 August 2006, the 100,000th article was created.

On 29 November 2006, Russian Wikipedia received National Runet Award on Educational section.

On 10 March 2007, the 150,000th article was created.

On 4 September 2007, the 200,000th article was created.

On 27 November 2007, Russian Wikipedia received National Runet Award on Educational section.

On 17 March 2008, the 250,000th article was created.

On 18 July 2008, the 300,000th article was created.

On 22 January 2009, the 350,000th article was created.

On 16 June 2009, the 400,000th article was created.

On 25 November 2009, Russian Wikipedia received National Runet Award on Science and Education section.

On 25 February 2010, the 500,000th article was created.

On 8 October 2010, the 600,000th article was created.

On 12 April 2011, the 700,000th article was created.

On 10 December 2011, the 800,000th article was created.

On 8 September 2012, the 900,000th article was created.

On 11 May 2013, the 1,000,000th article was created.

On 27 March 2014, the 1,100,000th article was created.

On 19 March 2015, the 1,200,000th article was created.

On 29 March 2016, the 1,300,000th article was created.

Blackout

On 10 July 2012 Russian Wikipedia closed access to its contents for 24 hours in protest against proposed amendments to Russia's Information Act (Bill No. 89417-6) regulating the accessibility of Internet-based information to children. Among other things, the bill stipulates the creation and country-wide enforcement of blacklists, which would block access to forbidden sites on the territory of Russia. Several aspects of this amendment drew criticism from various civil rights activists and Internet providers. In particular, the blacklist inclusion criteria were characterized as "too vague" and "paving the way for Internet censorship".

Supporters of the amendment stated that it is aimed only at widely prohibited content such as child pornography and similar information, but the Russian Wikimedia chapter has declared that conditions for determining the content falling under this law will create a thing like the "great Chinese firewall". They further claimed that existing Russian legal practice demonstrates a high likelihood of a worst-case scenario, resulting in a country-wide ban of Wikipedia. The second and the third readings of the law were held in the State Duma on 11 July; no essential corrections were introduced. The law will come into force after three readings in the State Duma, one reading in the Federation Council and presidential approval.

On 10 July, Nikolai Nikiforov, Russian Minister for Telecommunications and Mass Media announced in his Twitter account, that the organization of the List of the prohibited websites (that was sited on the Law Project No. 89417-6) will be suspended until 1 November 2012. On the same day Yelena Mizulina, a Duma deputy and the head of the subcommittee which sponsored the law, said that the blackout is an attempt to blackmail the Duma and was sponsored by the "pedophile lobby".