Russian Wikipedia

Russian Wikipedia
URL ru.wikipedia.org
Commercial? Charitable
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
Registration Optional
Available language(s) Russian
Content license Creative Commons ShareAlike License 3.0
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Launched 20 May 2001

The Russian Wikipedia (Russian: Ру́сская Википе́дия) is the Russian language edition of Wikipedia. It has over 808,000 articles. It was founded on 20 May 2001. By May 2008 it became the 10th largest Wikipedia by size and in February 2011 it ranked 8th. It surpassed 750,000 articles in August 2011. On 20 September 2011 Russian Wikipedia surpassed Japanese Wikipedia by the number of articles and ranked 7th before being surpassed by the Dutch Wikipedia on 21 October 2011.

It is the second largest Wikipedia written in a Slavic language after the Polish Wikipedia, although the Russian Wikipedia surpasses it eightfold by the parameter of depth.[1] In addition, the Russian Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia written in Cyrillic.[2]

Contents

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.[3]

Administrators 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.[4]

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)"."[5]

For a long time development was slow (especially after some participants left for WikiZnanie), but in a year from February 2005 to 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[6] the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised by the Russian government agency FAPMC.[7]

Controversy

The Russian edition of PC Magazine has been in conflict with Russian Wikipedia since mid-2009. Several articles criticizing the "bureaucratization", "sysop tyranny" and "low quality" of articles in RuWiki were published in the magazine.[8][9][10] The conflict ended up in PC Magazine/RE forbidding citation of its materials in the Russian Wikipedia and not allowing to access pages on Magazine/RE's site using a direct link from Wikipedia.

Content

As of 8 August 2011, some of the biggest categories (which contain more than 5,000 articles) in the Russian Wikipedia are[11]:

11,252 articles contain material from the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.

8,156 articles were translated from the English Wikipedia.

Timeline


References

  1. ^ All Wikipedias ordered by number of articles
  2. ^ List of Wikipedias given in decadic logarithm
  3. ^ (Russian) ru:WP:Arbitration Committee
  4. ^ (Russian) ru:WP:Administrators (rus)
  5. ^ "В русской Википедии появилась 200-тысячная статья" (in Russian). Lenta.ru. 4 September 2007. http://www.lenta.ru/news2/2007/09/04/wikipedia/index.htm. Retrieved 16 March 2010. 
  6. ^ "Номинанты и Лауреаты 2010 года". Премии Рунета. http://www.premiaruneta.ru/laureates/2010/. Retrieved 2010-11-25. 
  7. ^ "Главная премия российского интернета стала государственной" (in Russian). Lenta.ru. 29 August 2005. http://lenta.ru/news/2005/08/29/premia/_Printed.htm. Retrieved 15 March 2010. 
  8. ^ "Runet 2008: Failures of the year: ru.wikipedia.org" (in Russian). PC Magazine/RE. 3 November 2008. http://www.pcmag.ru/internet/detail.php?ID=31625. Retrieved 15 March 2010. 
  9. ^ Ryabtsev, Alexandr (7 November 2009). ""Википедия": Платон или истина?" (in Russian). PC Magazine/RE. http://pcmag.ru/columns/detail.php?ID=37479. Retrieved 15 March 2010. 
  10. ^ "Статистика: информативность русской "Википедии" в среднем в 3,1 раза хуже, чем английской" (in Russian). PC Magazine/RE. 17 June 2009. http://pcmag.ru/club/user/119/blog/271/. Retrieved 15 March 2010. 
  11. ^ Most linked categories
  12. ^ First currently-kept Main Page of 7 November 2002
  13. ^ Номинанты Премии Рунета — 2009. Интернет-проекты (in Russian)

External links