The results of the digital dictation, 10 Years of .РФ: Internet in Russian that took place on May 12-31 at https://digitaldictation.ru/ are now available. It was organized by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ with support from ROCIT.
There were 671 participants who answered all the questions. Users aged 25-34 (157) and 35-44 (137) were the most involved, while users 7-13 (6) and 60+ (20) were the least interested.
The average number of points based on the number of correct answers was 7.35 out of 13, with 33 participants earning the most points. It is noteworthy that 11 of them were aged 14-17.
The most involved regions included Moscow (99 participants), the Kaliningrad and Samara regions (64 and 53), St. Petersburg (37), and Sverdlovsk and Nizhny Novgorod regions (18 each). Users from the Samara Region had the best result (8.49 points).
The digital dictation was divided into two themed blocs. The first was on internationalized domain names (IDN) and email address internationalization (EAI) as well as Cyrillic domains from Russia and its neighbors. The second bloc was on the. РФ domain: its history, rules of domain name registration when Russian alphabet symbols are used and the specifics of its use.
The question on .SU proved to be the most difficult for users: only 28 percent know that domain names with unique symbols from the alphabets of Russian ethnic groups can be registered (for example, Bashkir, Ossetian, Udmurtian, Khanty, Chuvash, Yakutian and others).
The misconception that the letters Р and Ф were only chosen for .РФ because it stands for the Russian Federation was common among the dictation participants: only one in three knew that, according to the rules on creating a top-level IDN, the IDN must contain at least one unique symbol that is not used in the Latin alphabet (Ф in this case).
Users also demonstrated a gap in knowledge of top-level IDNs in terms of where a Cyrillic domain name can be registered. In particular, only 43 percent knew about .ОНЛАЙН, .САЙТ, .КОМ, .ОРГ, .БЕЛ, .ҚАЗ and .УКР.
The dictation not only tested how well Runet users knew domains that use non-Latin characters, in particular Russian letters, but it also shared knowledge of TLD .РФ, and ways to register and use Cyrillic domain names and email addresses. Another goal of the dictation is to develop an effective way to inform users about IDNs, EAI, Russian Cyrillic domains and the .РФ domain.
Find out about mistakes in the digital dictation and about the Russian-language internet address space:
Learn more about the history of .РФ and support of Cyrillic domains and emails at http://10.кц.рф/ and http://поддерживаю.рф/.
