Russian Wikipedia

Russian Wikipedia
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 (2001-05-20)
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike
4.0
(most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies

The Russian Wikipedia (Russian: Русская Википедия, romanized: Russkaya Vikipediya) is the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. As of June 2025, it has 2,050,644 articles. It was started on 11 May 2001. In October 2015, it became the sixth-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles. It has the sixth-largest number of edits (145 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). As of November 2024, it is the third most viewed Wikipedia, after the English and Japanese editions.

It is the largest Wikipedia written in any Slavic language, surpassing the Polish Wikipedia by 20% in terms of the number of articles and fivefold by the parameter of depth. In addition, the Russian Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia written in Cyrillic 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.

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, more recently during the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas region and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.