Russian Wikipedia reaches half a million articles

February 26, 2010

The Russian Language Wikipedia surpassed 500,000 articles at 10:02 UTC on February 25, 2010, after "Ys", an article about a Joanna Newsom album, was created by Nurse fiction, a newcomer to the Wikipedia.

The Russian language Wikipedia is the tenth largest language edition of Wikipedia, boasting over three hundred and fifty "Featured Articles" and 930 "Good Articles", shown to be the best in the freely-editable encyclopaedia. Russian Wikipedia is also one of the few languages to adopt the Flagged Revisions system.

Wikipedia is a multilingual encyclopaedia that can be edited by almost anyone with an internet connection, meaning that the Russian Wikipedia has 437,862 registered users with 12,929 making at least 1 edit within the last month. The youngest known user is 10 years old, and the oldest is 80.

Last year, the Russian chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, started active work supporting Wikipedia editions in the numerous languages used in Russia — such as Tatar, Chuvash, Ossetian and Yakut.