In the year of the 10th anniversary of the Russian Cyrillic top-level domain .РФ, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ has started publishing a series of articles on the universal acceptance of internationalized domain names and email addresses. The guides will be available on the website of the Russian educational campaign on digital literacy, Digital Dictation, in the I Want to Know Everything section.
The article IDNs: Why They Are Important and How They Work opens the Center's series of articles. It describes in detail the history of domains in national languages and the technical and infrastructure features of the implementation and functioning of such domains. The article provides detailed explanations of the terminology and technical aspects of IDN operation, describes the domain name system (DNS) and provides amazing facts from the "life" of domains.
“The .РФ domain was created so that people who speak and write in Russian could use the internet in their native language. And Universal Acceptance is the very tool, the implementation of which will provide Russian-speaking users with new and convenient online services. For technical specialists, we have created the Поддерживаю.РФ project, dedicated to work with IDN and EAI, and we conduct online training sessions and also publish technical documentation in Russian. And our new educational guides for the I Want to Know Everything section will be interesting and clear to everyone – the articles are written in simple language but provide explanations on various technical nuances. I hope that this will help a wider range of interested parties and, above all, internet users to understand how Cyrillic domain names and email work today,” said Maria Kolesnikova, chief analyst at the Coordination Center.
This year, two questions about .РФ were included in the Digital Dictation, and they both were among the most difficult for participants. For example, 80 percent of adolescents and 68 percent of adults do not know that only letters of the Russian alphabet can be used in .РФ. According to ROCIT Director Sergei Grebennikov, who conceived the Digital Dictation project, the release of educational guides by the Coordination Center will allow participants to improve their knowledge in a difficult area for them and increase their level of digital literacy.
“According to the results of the Digital Dictation, many users today pay very little attention to their knowledge of domain names and need additional education on this topic. The main difficulties relate specifically to Cyrillic domains. For example, almost every other user does not know in which TLD IDNs it is possible to register a Cyrillic domain name. I’m sure that the simple and visual guides created by the Coordination Center and posted on цифровойдиктант.рф will help Runet users to close these knowledge gaps and show the best results in digital literacy next year,” noted Sergei Grebennikov.
