Wikipedia:Stress marks in East Slavic words
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 | This is an essay on East Slavic (Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian) orthography and romanization. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Editors generally agree to omit stress marks, consistent with guidelines such as WP:COMMONNAME and MOS:DIACRITICS. Stress marks in Cyrillic should only be used when high-quality English language sources commonly accept their use. |
Stress marks are used in Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian-language elementary-school primers, readers, and in headwords of dictionaries and encyclopedias, to indicate syllabic stress. They also appear in references on Old East Slavic and Ruthenian languages. They are only used in such special types of literature and are only exceptionally added to other types of modern texts.
The stress marks have made their way, to some extent, into the Russian Wikipedia (despite a lack of express consensus to use them). Consequently, copying text from the Russian Wikipedia into the English Wikipedia in particular, but also from the aforementioned types of works which include them, has caused the stress marks to be found in the English Wikipedia as well.
While native readers don't have any issues with understanding text that includes them, English Wikipedia users can be mislead: The words are not spelled this way in everyday practice or in normal prose found in reliable sources.
For this reason, on this language version of Wikipedia, which is read primarily by non-native readers of Belarussian, Russian and Ukrainian, there is an agreement among editors to generally omit these stress marks. When it comes to normal, general-audience prose (such as encyclopedic prose) they are about as exceptional in these languages as they would be in English and should not be included unless necessary. Stress marks should not be added unless they are present in the majority of high-quality English language sources. They should especially not be used in romanized (Latin-alphabet) Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian words.
The International Phonetic Alphabet, already present in most articles that need it, is the correct way to represent pronunciation, including stresses (a stress mark goes just before the stressed syllable). The tools to implement this include the {{IPA}} template and the {{lang-rus}} template with its |p= parameter. Still, this does not imply that all Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian terms and names should include the IPA spelling. Even in its absence, presenting a spelling without the stress marks is preferable.