Wikipedia:Stress marks in East Slavic words
 | This is an essay on the Russian spelling. 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: stress marks don't belong in any Russian word and should be removed at sight |
Stress marks in Russian words originate in the first grade of Russian elementary school, along with the syllabification, and almost never occur in real life, except for very special cases. However, they were routinely used in Russian dictionaries and encyclopedias of the 20th century. Thus they made their way into the modern Russian Wikipedia (that has a series of similar technical cargo cults, such as reverse name notation [Surname, Name] in article names, as if there's no DEFAULTSORT, and so on). Even ruwiki itself never had a consensus to put these stress marks, and that's no wonder since ruwiki seldom has any consensus at all. While a native Russian reader can at least sort this out, in English Wikipedia they are utterly misleading: that's not how the words are really spelled, and definitely not how they are spelled in the reliable sources.
So we have a lot of Russian terms imported from ruwiki with these stréss márks. Our goal is to eliminate the latter, they belong there no more than they do in English, and should be removed at sight.
The correct way to show the pronunciation in any language, including the stresses, is International Phonetic Alphabet which is already present in most of the articles that need it. (A stress mark goes just before the stressed syllable.) The tools to implement this include the IPA family of templates, most relevantly {{IPA-ru}}, and the {{lang-rus}} template with its |p= parameter.
This is not to say that all Russian terms and names should have the IPA. Even if there's none, it's still preferable to show a clean and correct spelling first.