Russian Wikipedia reaches a quarter million articles

March 18, 2008 The Russian Language edition of Wikipedia reached the milestone of 250,000 articles on Monday, March 17. The collective of editors on the project issued a press release on that, according to which the jubilee article was determined to be “Гендерная лингвистика” (Gender linguistics) created by ru-wiki user Koryakov Yuri.

In the extent of 7 years of its life, the Russian Wikipedia has become the largest Russian Language encyclopedia of all time, as well as the largest in the Runet (Russian-spoken Internet). The closest printed rival is the Terra (“Терра”) encyclopedia published in 2006 which features 160 000 articles in 62 volumes. It is followed by 1906 Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary which has 121 240 articles in 31 volumes.

Russian Wikipedians estimate that around 30 thousand people participated in one or another way in the ru-wiki so far. Russian Wikipedia is now a major source of information for Russian-speaking people: a poll indicated it recently to be 12th most visited site within the Runet, another poll of about 1000 people found out 32% of them were considering Wikipedia a crucial informational tool. During last February (2008) there were over 4.8 million hits to ru-wiki's main page registered (about 165 thousand per day).

Russian language Wikipedia is the 11th in quantity amongst other language ones, 13th in the number of participants and the 5th in “depth” parameter in 100 000+ category, says the press release.