Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-07-04/In focus

The Russian Wikipedia (ruwiki) historically has fewer administrators per active user or per article than many other large Wikipedias; the number of active users is ten times smaller than the English Wikipedia, and 2 times smaller than the German or French. Currently there are 63 administrators on ruwiki (not counting adminbots), and many of them are not very active; at the same time, ruwiki is in the top three most-visited Wikipedias (after English, and sometimes after Japanese or Spanish^[1]). Voters in ruwiki's RfAs tend to be very critical of candidates — which makes it impossible for many experienced, active and well-known users to be elected.

In recent years, the Russo–Ukrainian war and political repression in Russia have made it more dangerous to be a member of the wiki community, and even more so to be an admin there; in the last two years (since summer 2022) only two have been elected. Since the start of the war, more than ten administrators (about 15% of the corps) either lost their status through inactivity, abandoned it due to fears for their own safety, or joined one of the pro-Kremlin forks; one was killed in action in the Ukrainian army, and one was designated a "foreign agent" by the Russian government.

In the face of this long-standing severe shortage, the ruwiki community has developed a few mechanisms to spread some of the burden of project maintenance: automation with bots (including some that use machine learning), and unbundling.