Russian Wikipedia

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Russian Wikipedia

Screenshot The homepage of the 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 1,004,000 articles. It was founded on 20 May 2001. By May 2008 it had become the 10th largest Wikipedia by size and in December 2012 it ranks 6th.

It is the largest Wikipedia written in any Slavic language surpassing its nearest rival, the Polish Wikipedia, eightfold by the parameter of depth.^[1] In addition, the Russian Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia written in Cyrillic^[2] or in a script other than Latin script.

1 Policies
2 History
3 Content
- 3.1 Namespaces
4 Timeline
5 Blackout
6 Russian Wikipedia Blacklisted
7 References
8 External links

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

Celebration logo for 500.000 articles plays a pun as "half a lemon" means "half a million" in Russian jargon.

Awards of RuWiki. "Golden site" prize (2007) and four Runet Prizes (2006, 2007, 2009, 2010)

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 countries in which the Russian Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in blue. Other countries are shown in yellow.^[5]

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)"."^[6]

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^[7] the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised by the Russian government agency FAPMC.^[8]

Content

As of 1 June 2012, some of the biggest categories (which contain more than 5,000 articles) in the Russian Wikipedia are:^[9]

176,411 biographical articles
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 recipients' for Order of Lenin articles
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.

Timeline

Number of Russian Wikipedia articles in 2005-2010 (thousands).

Russian Wikipedia logo on 11 May 2013

The main page was created on 7 November 2002^[10]
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 18 April 2009, the 380,000th 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.^[11]
On 25 February 2010, the 500,000th article was created.
On 18 June 2010, the 550,000th article was created.
On 8 October 2010, the 600,000th article was created.
On 16 January 2011, the 650,000th article was created.
On 12 April 2011, the 700,000th article was created.
On 7 August 2011, the 750,000th article was created.
On 10 December 2011, the 800,000th article was created.
On 3 May 2012, the 850,000th article was created.
On 8 September 2012, the 900,000th article was created.^[12]
On 7 January 2013, the 950,000th article was created.
On 11 May 2013, the 1,000,000th article was created.^[12]

Blackout

Russian Wikipedia Main Page during the July 10, 2012 blackout.

On July 10, 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".^[13]

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.^[14]^[15] 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.^[16]

On July 10, Nikolai Nikiforov, Russian Minister for Telecommunications ans 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 November 1, 2012.^[16]^[17] 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".^[18]