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Submissions/From Russia with love and squalor: an overview of Russian Wikipedia

From Wikimania 2010 • Gdańsk, Poland • July 9-11, 2010


Information

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.


Title of the submission

From Russia with love and squalor: an overview of Russian Wikipedia

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Vicki Doronina

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

mstislavl1@googlemail.com

Country of origin

Belarus

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

-

Personal homepage or blog

User:Mstislavl

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

The Russian Wikipedia (ruwiki) is a project in the exponential stage of growth as opposed to stationary phase of English Wikipedia. At the moment ruwiki has more than 530 thousand articles. At the same time ruwiki is in the leading positions by the information quality of its’ pages. I will analyse statistics and trends in Russian Wikipedia, its' model being intermediate between "restrictive" of German and "permissive" of English language Wikipedia. Russian is a language of a former empire and, more recently, of a totalitarian state. The community consists not only of the native speakers from the Russian Federation but users from former Soviet Union including the Baltic States, Ukraine; diasporas in Germany, Israel and USA. Correspondingly, ruwiki became a place for fierce cultural, national and political content disputes. The main conflicts are between users from Armenia and Azerbaijan, about the Civil War in Russia, Eastern Slavonic.

I will describe features of ruwiki, which may be of interest to the other communities:

  • Arbitration committee — a group of experienced users elected for a certain period to solve disputes, which was impossible to resolve by any other methods. AC is elected every half a year, consists from 5 main and two additional arbiters who consider around 60 claims for personal sanction against (often groups of) disruptive users and/or rules interpretation. Post-decision publication of discussions allowed better transparency of the process.
  • "Flagged Revs" (quality control) were switched on 5.08.2008, now we have 685 patrollers (100 edits in main space plus discussion) and 726 autopatrollers. At the moment all categories and templates and 80% of articles are checked for the absence of vandalism and compliance with appearance guidelines (primary patrolling). One of the most important features of the FR interface is a possibility to “stabilize” articles showing readers only patrolled versions, at the moment all good and featured articles are stabilized.
  • "Incubator" — а separate namespace for short articles, usually nominated for speedy deletion. The main aim is to attract new contributors functioning resulted in a hundred articles being written and transferred to the main space.
  • SUU “summing up users”, an attempt to help with shortage of administrators. They can summarise nominations for articles deletion and delete them via a bot.
  • ”Notification about mistakes” a script adapted from the Polish Wikipedia allows users unfamiliar with Wikipedia interface to send a report about mistakes in the articles to a page where volunteers consider and correct them.


Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)

People and Community, preferably general session, rather than Eastern and Western Europe workshop

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Definitely

Slides or further information (optional)


Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

  1. --Shijualex 08:16, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Polimerek 12:38, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  3. guillom 21:32, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Headbomb 05:16, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  5. CaptainSwing 21:37, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  6. El Ágora 05:18, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Drbug 13:59, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  8. --Blacklake 20:24, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  9. LA2 11:05, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Incnis Mrsi (probably, not certainly) 20:59, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Ilya Voyager 20:59, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  12. --WikedKentaur 18:59, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Solstag 06:37, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Pietro Roveri 13:09, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  15. --DR 07:18, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Ijon 11:34, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  17. SimsimTee 12:16, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  18. --Elya 18:56, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Psychology 22:30, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  20. Kocio 11:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  21. F3RaN 17:40, 9 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  22. VasilievVV 18:19, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  23. GlimmerPhoenix 18:33, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  24. Yarl 20:59, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  25. Amir E. Aharoni 06:29, 22 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  26. Natbrown 12:49, 29 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  27. Zack 03:18, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  28. Perohanych 18:51, 4 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]