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While putting together a list of non-english Stack Exchange communities, I noticed an odd inconsistency in the URL styles.

At first I wasn't sure why the URL for Russian Language was truncated. After some experimentation, I discovered that there were actually two different Russian Language Stack Exchange communities.

It seems odd to have more than one site dedicated to learning Russian. From what I can tell, the only other SE community available in multiple languages is Stack Overflow.

  • Why are there two different Russian Language communities?
  • Are there any major differences apart from the site-language?
  • What other multi-language communities are there?
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  • Not completely sure, but I have a hunch that it's like ELU and ELL - one for native speakers, the other for learners of the language. We can have full language communities like that since we have community managers who are fluent in Russian - the exact reason why we only have Russian, Japanese and Spanish SOs. – Zizouz212 Jul 31 '17 at 17:55
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The Russian Language [in Russian] site was imported from another community at the same time that Stack Overflow in Russian was imported. The sites were seeded from HashCode because they already had a good base of Russian programmers.

Aside from it being entirely in Russian, I couldn't tell you if there's any other major differences because, well... it's in Russian.

However, merging the two communities just wasn't a great idea. There are plenty of Russian-only members there that wouldn't be able to participate on our normal Russian Language site where all of the UI is still in English and some questions are asked in English. Rus.SE is a truly Russian-only environment with an entirely different community, most of whom do not participate elsewhere on the network.

No other communities are available in other languages. This was a special case as a part of Stack Overflow in Russian's launch.

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  • Interesting. Is there a list of sites which were imported from different communities? – Stevoisiak Jul 31 '17 at 17:57
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    @StevenVascellaro I'm not sure there are any others, but I may be wrong. I know of one site (can't remember the name) that had been imported but got closed down. We generally refuse to import data from other sources. – animuson♦ Jul 31 '17 at 18:00
  • @StevenVascellaro The list of extant sites that were imported from elsewhere can be found here. With the exception of ru.SO and rus.SE, they were all SE 1.0 sites, meaning they were operated independently for a while although using the SE-supplied software. – user315433 Jul 31 '17 at 19:00

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