Wikipedia:Stress marks in East Slavic words

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. Because they are used in comparable printed reference works, the stress marks have made their way into the Russian Wikipedia, primarily in the headwords. Consequently, imitating the style of—and copying text from—the Russian Wikipedia and the aforementioned types of works has caused them to enter the English Wikipedia as well.

While native readers are used to occasionally seeing them in specific contexts, readers of the English Wikipedia at large, who overwhelmingly do not know what these marks indicate, can be mislead: The words are not spelled this way in everyday practice or in found in reliable sources. As Wikipedia is not a dictionary, nor is it an East Slavic-language primer, these marks do not aid understanding for readers and do not serve their intended purpose here.

For these reasons, in English Wikipedia there is an agreement among editors to these stress marks. When it comes to, they are about as exceptional in native languages as they would be in English and should not be included unless necessary. They should especially not be used in romanized Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian words.

The native stress marks should only be used, per a 2021 RfC.