Letopisi.ru

» see letopisi.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkey never had one of these, and if something like it was ever tried I did not hear about it. A national wiki where schoolchildren and their teachers document the place they actually live, funded by a chip company and a railway telecom operator, running on MediaWiki for nineteen years. That is a strange and specific thing for a country to build, and Russia built it and then kept it running for most of my adult life.

Letopisi.ru went up on 27 January 2006 and launched officially on 2 February, started by Yaroslav Bykhovsky and Evgeny Patarakin with Lyudmila Fyodorova, and backed by Intel and the telecom arm of the Russian railways. The brief was a guidebook rather than an encyclopedia. Pupils wrote up their own towns and villages, the school itself, local events, and the people around them who mattered to how the place was taught.

The project said outright that writing academic articles was not the goal. The goal was building an educational environment, in which the students and the teachers together picked up the Web 2.0 tooling of the period alongside the habits that go with editing in public: collaborating on a page, reading a source critically, tolerating somebody else's edit to your paragraph. That is a teacher-training program wearing a wiki as a costume, and it is a better idea than most of what was tried with school computers in those years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the children actually wrote ~

The numbers are unusually well documented for a project this quiet. On 4 January 2012 the site held 49,534 registered participants who had produced 44,135 full articles, across 192,791 total pages and 935,747 edits. By 5 August 2021 the article count had reached 59,973. Nine years to add fifteen thousand articles tells you where the curve had gone by the end, and the size of the earlier number tells you how real the first wave was.

In January 2008 the site hosted a project called 3000 Articles for Wikipedia. Russian schoolchildren wrote the articles, and Wikipedia editors came over to review them and give advice. That is the most sensible version of an idea plenty of places have had badly: not turning children loose on Wikipedia itself, but giving them a sandbox with adults in it who knew the rules and were willing to explain them.

~ the day the pictures went ~

On 25 June 2008 the site had a technical failure and lost a large share of its uploaded media. Photographs, illustrations, charts and video, all gone at once, from a project whose entire value was schoolchildren documenting things nobody else was documenting. The text survived. What went were the pictures of the school building, the local monument, the street.

Seventeen years later the whole thing went the same way, and the 2008 failure reads in hindsight as the smaller rehearsal.

~ nineteen years ~

Letopisi.ru outlived almost every platform it was contemporary with. It was born the same year as the Siberian Wikipedia and buried it by eighteen years. It was still running when Wikispaces closed, when the Web 2.0 vocabulary it was written in had become a period detail, and when the schoolchildren who wrote its first articles had children of their own in school.

Its real inheritance is not the article count. Regional education institutes across Russia copied the model directly and stood up their own wikis off the back of it, in Pskov, in Khabarovsk, in Saratov, at the pedagogical university in Nizhny Novgorod. Several of those are still up. The parent closed on 15 July 2025 with no announcement anybody has found, which for a project about writing down what happened in your town is a particular kind of ending.

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