The paper concerns the manifestations of the most extensive philological practices in the Russian language community, such as the reforms of the Russian orthography and the “Total Dictation”, the latter being an annual event involving a large Russian-speaking audience all over the world. The reforms of the Russian orthography are the most similar to the Total dictation in the scale of the Russian language community involvement. The comparison of the Total dictation with the reforms of the Russian orthography shows that the functions of the Russian language community members are different in each practice. The Total dictation presents the new roles for the members of the language community in the philological practice: the role of the dictation author, who combines the feature-publicist content with the set language forms, and the role of a philological manager. The Total dictation demonstrates the mass participation of the “silent majority” (A.Ia. Gurevich) of the Russian language community.