Russian Wikipedia

Favicon of Wikipedia Russian Wikipedia
The logo of Russian Wikipedia celebrating 2,000,000 articles.
Screenshot
Main Page of the Russian Wikipedia in April 2013.
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia project
Available inRussian
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
URLru.wikipedia.org
CommercialCharitable
RegistrationOptional
Launched20 May 2001; 23 years ago (2001-05-20)
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0

The Russian Wikipedia (Russian: Русская Википедия, romanized: Russkaya Vikipediya) is the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. As of November 2024, it has 2,010,568 articles. It was started on 11 May 2001.[1] In October 2015, it became the sixth-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles. It has the sixth-largest number of edits (141 million). In June 2020, it was the world's sixth most visited language Wikipedia (after the English, the Japanese, the Spanish, the German and the French Wikipedias).[2] As of September 2024, it is the third most viewed Wikipedia, after the English and Japanese editions.[3]

It is the largest Wikipedia written in any Slavic language, surpassing its nearest rival, the Polish Wikipedia, by 20% in terms of the number of articles and fivefold by the parameter of depth.[4] In addition, the Russian Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia written in Cyrillic[5] or in a script other than the Latin script. In April 2016, the project had 3,377 active editors who made at least five contributions in that month, ranking third behind the English and Spanish versions. As of 2024, it is the most popular Wikipedia in many post-Soviet states, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, and the second most popular in others.[citation needed]

Since the early 2010s, the Russian Wikipedia and its contributing editors have experienced numerous and increasing threats of nationwide blocks and country-wide enforcement of blacklisting by the Russian government, as well as several attempts at Internet censorship, propaganda, and disinformation,[6][7][8][9][10] more recently during the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas region[11][12][13][14] and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[15]

  1. ^ Richey, Jason (11 May 2001). "[Wikipedia-l] new language wikis". Archived from the original on 6 January 2016. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
  2. ^ Monthly overview, Wikimedia Statistics, 11 July 2020.
  3. ^ "Vital Signs: Pageviews". Wikimedia. Retrieved 20 September 2024.
  4. ^ All Wikipedias ordered by number of articles
  5. ^ List of Wikipedias given in decadic logarithm
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference ru.wikimedia.org was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference bbctechnology-18781869 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Euronews10072012 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference www.nytimes.com was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference rbth.ru was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Stukal, Denis; Sanovich, Sergey; Bonneau, Richard; Tucker, Joshua A. (February 2022). "Why Botter: How Pro-Government Bots Fight Opposition in Russia" (PDF). American Political Science Review. 116 (1). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association: 843–857. doi:10.1017/S0003055421001507. ISSN 1537-5943. LCCN 08009025. OCLC 805068983. S2CID 247038589. Retrieved 10 March 2022.
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference gizmodo.com was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ Cite error: The named reference putins_office was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference Zeveleva 2014 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Cole, Samantha (1 March 2022). "Russia Threatens to Block Wikipedia for Stating Facts About Its War Casualties, Editors Say". VICE. New York City: VICE Media. ISSN 1077-6788. OCLC 30856250. Archived from the original on 2 March 2022. Retrieved 2 March 2022.