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Regions in Ukraine
Dear colleagues, I received the following request:
We must make english version of uk:Категорія:Райони України, but what as name we make? Is there any portal pages about Ukraine? (confused english) --Sheynhertzגעשׁ״ך 23:19, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Do we have such a category here? Cheers. ←Humus sapiens←ну? 09:40, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
Actually that category is for districts of Ukraine (districts are administrative subdivisions of oblast), not regions in the geographical sense. Also, I always thought regions to be appropriate translations of Ukrainian oblast. In either case, I doubt that the English wiki is detailed enough to have articles on Ukrainian districts (raions) to need a category for that. --Berkut 10:11, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
BTW, the category mentioned by Michael is I think unnecessary and duplicating both the Category:Subdivisions of Ukraine and Category:Ukrainian historical regions. Shouldn't we remove it in order to clean-up the Wikiservers? Ukrained 21:35, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
Is anybody interested with this? Ukrained 21:35, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
Great! I am all for consistency! And, btw, for the sake of consistency and common sense my next proposal. ==Irpen 22:34, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
Institutes of higher education in Ukraine
Dear all, I have thought to bring this up for a while and only now got to it. Ukraine has several established institutions of higher education and their coverage is pitiful. We should standartize that and I suggest to start with names. Putting the Kiv/Kyiv-Mogila/Mohyla-Academy aside for now (can we do that please), I suggest that we have the school articles named by the name the institutions were and are best known. There were lots of renaming activity not just in WP but also in Ukraine. At certain point Pedagogical, Kharch-Prom institutes, etc. and even some tekhnikums restyled themselves "universities". OTOH, some very well-known and respected schools also renamed itself, like Kiev or Odessa Polytechnic. Also, Kiev University was known as St. Vladimir's in RU epire, KGU in Soviet times (along with the Krasonyarsk one) and "National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv" now. These all names are varieties of one name under which the institution was known as Kiev University which never changed.
Similarly the famous "Kiev Polytechnic Institute" may have been restyled to National Technical University "Kyiv Polytechnic Institute" but it still is known as Kiev Polytechnic Insitute and so should the article be called. Other respected Polytechnics such as Odessa, Lviv, Kharkiv might have also changed to "Universities" (I know for a fact that some did). Let's just call them Polytechnics. Similarly Kharkiv Institue of Radio Electronics, renamed itself into some University.
What do you people think about it?. --Irpen 22:34, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
In line with the proposal above and with the lack of feedback, I created the article on Chernivtsi University under a simplified title rather than "Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University". Since no one is disagreeing, may I take it that we can move the article? My proposed moves are:
Same rule will be applied to the future articles. Please note that this proposal only concerns the titles of the articles. We sill still introduce the official and historic names in the first line. Any thoughts? --Irpen 05:22, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for taking on this thankless task, and good work. Sensible organization and naming helps everyone find the right articles and know when they are talking about the same thing. I've completed the move to Kiev University, which required deleting a redirect page with insignificant history. Cheers. —MichaelZ. 2006-01-19 05:22 Z
This is incorrect move. There are more then one university in all Kiev, Lviv and Odessa (and others). The way current articles are named - this can create confusion. The best way is to create disambiguation page on 'City University' that will list all universities (including defunct) in city with most commonly used one (often oldest) listed first and in bold. --TAG 18:55, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Do you mean that someone saying Odessa University may actually mean one of several institutions? I know that this is not the case for Kiev. One saying Kiev University is always referring to Kiev National T. Shevchenko University and not KMA, Polytech or any other institution. --Irpen 19:30, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes. While most-often it's Mechnikov university - it's easy to get tricked by Odessa State Medical University, Odessa State Polytechnic University, Odessa State Environmental University, Odessa State Economical University and others. Things actually even worse - as there are Odessa National Maritime University. Dispute people from Kiev get used refer to Shevchenko university by this shortcut - it's common that non-Kiev people ask clarifying questions on that specific university is actually referred. Sometimes actual university can be based on person specialization and city name is simply location there person was studying. --TAG 20:09, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
OK, please take a look at how I just did it at the Kiev University and Kiev University (disambiguation). If you think that's adequate, we can implement the same solution for Odessa as well as other cities. --Irpen 21:45, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Yeah. That's fine for me. --TAG 09:56, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Correction - please take a look on Category:Universities in Ukraine - using short name for article (and not redirect) make usage of confusing short name in categories. --TAG 13:45, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
This is where we disagree. The whole issue came into prominence because the term "University" has been significantly distorted in post-Soviet countries due to the hectic renaming spree where each higher education institution renamed itself into a University while the institution's structures remaining unchanged. By the common definition, the University is "an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees at all levels (bachelor, master, and doctorate) in a variety of subjects." As you may well know, this definition does not apply to every institute of higher education in Ukraine that now calls itself "a University". Obviously the Mechnikov University qualifies by the breadth of the studies it offers but the Maritime University does not. In no way this implied that the Maritime University, as well as many other technical institutions of higher education in Ukraine with a rich and proud history of academic accomplishment are somehow inferior. Kiev, Odessa, Lviv and many other Polytechnics are very respected institutions. Nevertheless, they remain mostly technically oriented while the University has to by definition cover both technical and humanitarian fields of studies. That's why we use historic names of these institutions, under which they are still most commonly referred to to this date, for the article titles, but we give the full current official name within the article's text.
You raised a valid point about the disambiguation and I think the way it is done for Kiev University addresses the issue. In an unlikely case someone browsing the category:Universities in Ukraine looking for Kiev Polytechnic or Kyiv-Mohyla Academy clicks on the Kiev University that would lead the reader to the Shevchenko University, that person would immediately see the dab link at the top. But in all honesty, this is rather unlikely to happen. If all three: the KU, KPI and KMA are all listed in one cat, the reader would likely correctly identify what he is looking for.
While at it, I think it is a good idea to rename Category:Universities in Ukraine to Category:Institutes of higher education in Ukraine. The reason is that if the Pedagogical or Kharch-Prom institute in one city has renamed itself into a "University" but its counterpart in another city did not, this is no reason why they should still not be in the same category. Especially since we have now just a handful of the articles in the category, keeping them all together would add clarity and would not cause any confusion. --Irpen 18:28, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Template: User DinamoKiev
Template: User DinamoKiev has just been created. Feel free to fix it or edit it so that it looks better. --DDima 21:39, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Lodomeria
I suggest you to fix this silly situation with articles Lodomeria vs. Volodymyr-Volynskyi /Volodymyr-Volynia principality. mikka(t) 02:36, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
What is a rationale for two cats that duplicate each other? Can anybody articulate a difference between city and town? It's all very subjective imho. Suppose a new editor starts the article about Chartorysk - how should he know which cat should be preferred? --Ghirla | talk 09:50, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Something like Category:Cities and towns in Ukraine would be great. But someone should create a bot for changing: we have over 150 cities & towns. Ukrained 12:48, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
I recenty moved a few cities/towns between the two categories. Whatever is classified as misto according to 2001 Ukrainian census I put into category Cities in Ukraine. The rest are in the category Towns in Ukraine, which are almost all selyscha mis'kogo tupy. As a result, I created a new List of cities in Ukraine by population, which includes all cities in Ukraine, with links for each city to the Ukrainian wiki. Uapatriot 05:34, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
P.S. I think it makes perfect sense to go for:
misto = city
selysche mis'kogo typu = town
selo = village
I'm afraid this classification reeks of original research. Can you cite any scholarly publication defining s.m.t. as town? --Ghirla | talk 08:39, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
An SMT is a small settlement of urban character—in common parlance, a town. It's not research, just application of common terminology. Whether it's a fair characterization or in some way misleading is a matter of judgement, and I don't know enough about the subject to be the only judge, so more opinions would be welcome. —MichaelZ. 2006-02-16 15:30 Z
First, misto/SMT/selo is (1) a current Ukrainian classification, (2) a classification that existed for a long time, and (3) the only classification that I am aware of. Feel free to propose another classification and we will choose which one fits better for Ukraine.
Second, it seems that you agree that misto can be translated as city, and selo as village. If you also check town you can see that the first sentence says: A town is a residential community of people ranging from a few hundred to several thousands. SMT matches the population criteria precisely . The second sentence is: Generally, a "town" is thought of as larger than a village but smaller than a "city." It suggests that for a 3-level classification (as in Ukraine) SMT corresponds to a town. Again, if you have in mind another suggestion, it would be valuable to consider all and choose the best that applies to Ukraine. Uapatriot 18:14, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
I suggest we adopt this convention, and also add a short explanation at the top of each category. The top of the towns category can mention the specific definition of SMT with a link to the townlet article. Essentially, we would be defining it as "category:SMTs in Ukraine", but giving it a friendlier name for the benefit of general readers, while offering a prominent and clear explanation for those who are interested. —MichaelZ. 2006-02-16 19:09 Z
And there is also townlet. --Irpen 07:06, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Townlet =PGT (ru) =SMT (uk). —MichaelZ. 2006-03-01 18:35 Z
But it was argued above to use town for SMT, wasn't it? Anyway, I used townlet in Stebliv. I hope I did it right. --Irpen 19:43, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Oops, I see what you mean. Townlet is not a common English word—I'm not sure of its original source, but I think it is essentially made up to serve as a precise translation of the administrative term PGT/SMT. But in general use, e.g., category names or in the text of an article, I think the common term town is a more appropriate term, serving well enough for something that is in between a city and a village. (strictly speaking, I understand that misto includes all cities and larger towns, while PGT/SMT typically refers to "village-sized settlements of urban character", with exceptions) —MichaelZ. 2006-03-01 20:33 Z
Ukrainian family names
How come there are no Ukrainian sections in List of most common surnames or Family name. Are there any articles covering Ukrainian family names at all? .Kevlar67 04:39, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
I completely restructured this article and about doubled it's lenghth by adding many sub-sections. I would like comments on my progress. Kevlar67 01:05, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
List of massacres
Reading the list, you learn that the greatest "religious massacre" of the 17th century was as follows: "1648-1649 - Chmielnicki Uprising - 100,000 Poland Jews and Polish nobles killed by Cossacks under Bohdan Chmielnicki". Judging by the spelling of his last name, I get an idea as to who inserted this "fact" into the list. Please take a look if the quoted description is factually accurate. --Ghirla-трёп- 12:56, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
The comment below is moved from talk Ukraine. --Irpen 20:36, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
one contributor
Dear Ukrainian fellow-Wikipedians, one of our contributing editors Kuban coSSack's talking about dictatorial ruler Lukashenka (who massively and monstrously falsified the vote) and today's storming of the October square, when hundreds of special police arrested peaceful demonstrators, totally destoryed the camp, threw empty vodka bottles into the mess and videotaped that for Belarusan state television. Here's Kuban coSSack's comment about this police action and break-up of a peaceful protest, which took place at 3AM so that there would be no witnesses of their activity:
Dear fellow Wikipedians, do you understand that the only purpose of his contributions on articles about Belarus (such as Belarusian language, Belarusian history, Belarus, etc.) is to push Russian imperial POV and lies? Please, see history and talk pages of the Belarus-related articles. --rydel 16:34, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
Please join the discussion at Category talk:Russian people about whether the category should include ethnic Russians and Soviet people. Conscious 04:36, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Page move
Please state your opinion at Talk:FC Metalurh Zaporizhzhya (a cut&paste move needs to be fixed). Conscious 10:44, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
You don't need a vote to have cut'n'paste moves fixed. I will ask someone to do it for us. --Irpen 16:25, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
I added the cleanup tag to this article yesterday: it is in need of attention. I just thought I'd place a note here too. -- Roleplayer 12:09, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Raions and oblasts
I saw that Ukrainians Wikipedians love to mix English with their own language, and are using "raion" and "oblast" for districts and regions of Ukraine. However, the purpose of Wikipedia is not to enrich the English language. This Wikipedia is for ordinary English speaking people, and I don't think is necesary to force them to check the article raion or oblast in order to understand an other article. I suggest to use district instead of raion and region (or province) instead of oblast. Russians already made this change.--MariusM 22:04, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
De-russification of names and Naming Conventions
Dear editors of Ukraine-related articles,
I appreciate the de-russification of names, f.e. example Vasyl Ivanchuk instead of Vasily Ivanchuk. The only problem is that this breaks the Naming conventions. In a similar case I wanted to move Rafael Vaganian (an Armenian chess player) to Rafael Vahanyan but this was rejected by other users referring to the naming conventions, the only criterium of which is commonness. But the commonness (i.e. Google) is a result of thoughtless transcription of thousands of people from each other.
That is why I search for allies. In my eyes the mission of an encyclopedia is not the copying of incorrect information but throwing light on things. If anybody is interested in this topic, please answer. Ulf-S. 18:36, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
Dear Ulf-S, it is not Wikipedia's mission to correct something. encyclopedias do not represent truth, they represent knowledge. WP:NC are there for a reason. Common usage decides what name is to be used, true, even if it saddens you or me in a particular case. In one thing you are right, though, that google results in the raw are not the only factor that unquestionably proves the common usage. If you can run a media usage search, it would probably be more objective. --Irpen 00:16, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
It is a valid point: wp is a collection of knowledge NOT necessarily truth (sounds a bit paradoxical, does it not?). Anyhow, determination of common usage is where the line gets murkier at least in this case. Armenian press and international organizations seem to use Vahanyan whereas NYT and others use Vaganian. In my opinion, I think you have a good case for an article under Vahanyan with Vaganian redirecting to the former. This should not upset fans of the Armenian chess master who will most likely be the ones reading an article about him in the first place.--Riurik(discuss) 03:50, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
More, his "correct" name is neither Vaganyan, nor Vahanyan but Ռաֆայել Վահանյան and that's what he should be called in Armenian WP. This is the only sure thing. There is no strict rule for the rest. Perhaps the current official translit would be Vahanyan. But this does not make it a correct or incorrect name by itself. It would sure be a correct translit according to a particulat rule. But his English name is what people call him in English speaking world and that should be the title for the article, to avoid the reader's confusion. Other names belong to the text. This is the basic logic behind the rule given in WP:NC(UE): "If you are talking about a person, country, town, movie or book, use the most commonly used English version of the name for the article, as you would find it in other encyclopedias and reference works." Don't get upset over it. Nothing can make him anything else but an Armenian grandmaster :). --Irpen 05:43, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
But then the litmus test is: Do you want to remove Vasyl Ivanchuk to Vasily Ivanchuk because it is more common? Volunteers, one pace forward! Ulf-S. 08:38, 23 September 2006 (UTC) P.S. I do not know whether this phrase works in English, I meant it ironically. Ulf-S. 08:43, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
Per Irpen: google results in the raw are not the only factor that unquestionably proves the common usage. Like I said previously, you have a decent argument. If after you move it, there is still a lot of opposition maybe writing a couple of sentences about vahanyan vs vaganian can help. I really do not see any harm in having the article under Vahanyan with Vaganian redirecting there as long as the spelling is explained somewhere in the article. This issue does not need to usurp so much time as to take away from other projects.--Riurik(discuss) 19:10, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
I only said that google test in not a single argument, and I stand by that assertion. It does not mean that the common usage cannot be determined. The better than google test way to determine the common usage is to check what names are used my modern media. If NYT and other major media use Vaganyan, I am afraid you have no case. I have recently elaborated on the issue here. I think if you just move the article on your own, this would be an extremely poor and inflammatory action. Still, if you can demonstrate that the commonness of Vaganyan cannot be established, you would have a case. It is up to you to do a media search and raise the issue at the article's talk. As for the Ukrainian chess-player, perhaps the current article's name does not reflect WP:NC either. If someone would challenge it, the issue will be looked at. I won't because I have too much to do.
Just as a food for thought, take a look at the Dvorovenko article about a world-class ballet dancer, originally from Kiev, who mostly performs in the West nowadays. Transliterated from Ukrainian according to the adopted convention, her first name is Iryna. She is very well known internationally and is called Irina by the media and in the stagebills. As such, her article's name reflects that.
So, let's separate two issues. There is no question that the article should be titled according to the most commonly used in English name and our NC reflect that. How to determine such name and whether it is possible to determine it, is a separate issue. There are certianly no eastablished English names for the people and places that are relatively obscure. Such, should be called by the national name trasniterated according to a fixed rule. There is no question that chess-players and dancers of this' acclaim are known in the English speaking world. If we can show under what name they are known, that name should be used and the national name, if different, should be explained in the article's text. If we cannot determine which name is more common (that is both are used in equal measure) perhaps the national name should take precedence. But this is not the case for Վահանյան and Дворовенко. If someone (or myself) takes it upon himself to do the research on the Ivasyuk's name, than the issue will (or will not) be addressed. --Irpen 20:37, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
Dear Ulf-S: Being a volunteer, I checked "Vasyl Ivanchuk" vs. "Vasily Ivanchuk" and I didn't find a valid reason to prefer the latter name over the former. Best, KPbIC 22:31, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
I know that might dissapoint some but I did the same and the results do not support Krys's assertion. I made a search of the usage restricted to the Major English language papers in the last 24 months using Lexis Nexis. These are the results for several variants:
"Vasyl Ivanchuk" - 0 hits
"Vasily Ivanchuk" + Chess - 46 hits, most of which are in the Daily Telegraph
Rinning Google search, I found 400 hits on Vasyl Ivanchuk and 700 hits on Vasily Ivanchuk. Both numbers are unsignificant, thus I did not see a reason to prefer "Vasily Ivanchuk" over "Vasyl Ivanchuk". --KPbIC 01:02, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
As agreed above, google search results by itself are just one of the factors to take into account. Major media results here are very convinsing. But here, even google results if compared correctly yield the same. Just make sure you restrict your search to the sites in English:
The article needs moved to the latter title. --Irpen 01:26, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
Ivanchuk is listed on FIDE website as "Vassily Ivanchuk", and this is probably the reason for the rest of hits. The other Ukrainian players among top 100 are listed as "Ponomariov, Ruslan", "Karjakin, Sergey", "Volokitin, Andrei", "Eljanov, Pavel", "Moiseenko, Alexander", "Areshchenko, Alexander", "Efimenko, Zahar", "Baklan, Vladimir". Either they are all Russians, or FIDE is run by Russians. Guess what? --KPbIC 02:23, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
You can hypothesize what's "probably" but your (or mine) hypothesizing belongs to the talk pages at most. Please do not confuse the facts on the ground with the reasons why they are such. Encyclopedia should reflect the current situation. The person is known to the English reader under a certain name and the article should reflect that and this is exactly what WP:NC state. The proper place to campaign against the world injustices is the media and street demonstrations, not encyclopedias which should summarize available sources. When you attain some change in the world usage, the encyclopedia will reflect those changes. Similarly to how Kharkiv replaced Kharkov in the modern usage. --Irpen 02:45, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
Feel free to delete my last comment, if you think, it's inappropriate. However, in my opinion, in general, a person who understands reasons behind facts can do a better job in describing and following the facts. And, I don't see a reason you suspect that I confuse facts and reasons. I think I don't. --KPbIC 03:41, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
Dear KPbIC,
I took Ivanchuk as an example because I had checked it beforehand. I think there are only two groups of people who knows Ivanchuk‘s true name: People who know Ukrainian and people who know Russian but dislike Russification. The rest of the world trust in the FIDE listing. (By the way, Ivanchuk is the only top Ukrainian player whose mother tongue is Ukrainian.)
But my point is the difference between references in a printed encyclopedia and redirects in Wikipedia. We should reflect the technical possibilites of Wikipedia. One does not have to search or even take another volume, one is simply redirected and just has to read one, two or three sentences and everything becomes clear. I expect that somebody who reads Wikipedia is ready to do that and is generally interested in such things. I am not a fundamentalist. I do not oppose f.e. using Vasily (or Vassily) Ivanchuk in a list of famous grandmasters or somewhere else. People see this and know who is meant and if they are interested in Ivanchuk they click and are redirected. I think this does not overstrain average readers of Wikipedia (quite contrary, when I was redirected in the German edition to Wassyl Iwantschuk instead of Wassili Iwantschuk I became especially interested). Ulf-S. 10:38, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
DYK
The DYK section featured on the main page is always looking for interesting new and recently expanded stubs from different parts of the world. Please make a suggestion.--Peta 02:13, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Already being done. --Irpen 02:28, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
The page about an educator is on AfD. Could someone take alook? TIA (posting here as the Talk page looks abandoned) Pavel Vozenilek 13:10, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Don't forget these image sources
Just a reminder of a couple of excellent image sources that are UA specific.
http://ua.vlasenko.net - Petro Vlasenko, the author of the images confirmed in his email to me many months ago that he allows his images to be used under ((GFDL)) provided we attribute his authorship and web-site. This is an extensive collection of photos from many locations in Ukraine. A sample of suggested usage can be seen at Image:Zhovkva_vlasenko.jpg
http://www.photographic.com.ua - the site with thousands of professional quality user-uploaded images. Explicitely states the liberal copyright rules. See Image:Irpen_reka.jpg for suggested usage with ((Attribution)) tag.
http://www.kmu.gov.ua - the Ukrainian government portal images can be used with an attribution tag. See Image:Khotin_monument.jpg for suggested usage.
http://users.i.com.ua/~zharkikh/photos/photolist.html - the user explicitly allows unlimited usage and only requests (but does not obligate) his authorship attributed. Have to decide whether to use PD with courtesy attribution or just ((attribution)) with the link
http://www.world66.com/destinations - the entire site is under ((cc-by-sa)). You need to browse to Ukraine or specific location gallery like Kiev, Lviv, other locations as well as other countries (world-side sites)
Of course there are plenty of news and politics sites in UA-net that allow redistribution with customary acknowledgment, check the site's statements.
Tema (http://tema.in.ua/) allows other web-sites to use its material with an attribution (see Image:Kiev_beregynia.jpg for suggested usage).
Many political organizations' web-site allow the reuse. See the web-site of BYuT, Yanukovych's web-site and many others (they require referencing: usage example).
Also, remembering the worldwide sites such as Flickr goes without saying of course. Flicks is good by being very clear about the licenses.
Personally, I do not recommend uploading to commons, particularly the images from ua.vlasenko.net and klymenko.data-tec.net. Those images have watermarks and their being in commons results in this. If the image is copied from Wiki to commons, then deleted from Wiki as redundant and then attacked and deleted in Commons, the image becomes lost along with its source. So, sticking it to Wiki has advantages. See this for more. --Irpen 11:08, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
If there is no problem expected I would go for commons. You would help uk-wiki, ru-wiki and other wikis. Many editors from uk and ru have only dialup internet connections and uploading images is a big deal for them. If there are doubts over the copyright status then en-wiki might be better. Alex Bakharev 05:01, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Local wikis is a solution. If anyone has a problem with connection, the person only needs to leave/send me a message and I will upload any image from enwiki to any wiki. I know that this is somewhat a waste of resource, but I think it is a lesser evil than the danger of depending on the whims of the Commons. It may decide to change policies any time, as it happened before, by eg. outlawing country-PD images by the logic of what's PD in one country is not always PD in the US. Also, a possible change could be PD-US becoming insufficient and PD-Worldwide becomes demanded, which is impossible to prove. WMF may get into a political argument with CC and stop accepting CC licenses too. Who knows? Many things can happen in commons and since we are not often there, we may not even notice and only face the consequences.
On a brighter side, I am now corresponding with the owner of the web-site of an immense and well-sorted gallery of images from all over Ukraine. I am fairly certain about the positive outcome and will post you all once I get an approval. --Irpen 05:45, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Request: create from scratch or raise from pity shape any article related the history, politics, economy, anything of any of these three countries to WP:Featured status.
Additional requirement: the editor has to live in any of these three or other former-USSR countries (Baltic States are also eligible).
Reward: Reimbursement of three months worth of the costs of your Internet service provider (DSL or other high speed services are also eligible within reason)
Notes: please contact the awarding party by email here if you have any questions, to claim an award or if you are interested in cosponsoring. The donor is an established editor (maybe a group of editors) willing to make this offer anonymously. The moneys will be paid in cash in your local currency in an informal manner. If several editors co-edited the article together, the reward will not be divided. Rather all main contributors will receive a full award.
Limitations: None. The offer may be terminated at any time while there are no specific plans to do so.
I am fairly new to the English Wikipedia and have written only a couple of articles but the recent two of them were virtully massacred by User:Ghirlandajo. Hetman Vyhovsky was termed as a "traitor" and the articles as "nationalist". All the significant changes were made without any consultation whatsoever. Since he is obviously looking for confrontation, I myself stopped discussing with him any issues relating to these articles and would like to ask the more experienced users to arrange for outside mediation to revert the siginificant and very biased changes and to reach to mutually agreed and neutral versions. Thanks.--Hillock65 18:11, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Hey, you need to tone down the level of your aggressive rhetoric. Although you regularly dismiss me as a "vandal", I still suggest you should discuss content of those articles you presume to own. Instead, you refuse to communicate and post "calls to arms" on public noticeboards. This is not a right attitude, imho. --Ghirla-трёп- 18:27, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't know where you saw "calls to arms"? I only asked for mediation in this matter, as your use of bias and highly inflammatory words such as "heroize the traitor Vyhovsky" and "nationalist oversimplifications" clearly indicate your inability to raise above personal likes and dislikes and treat matters fairly. I need some people with experience to help me deal with such an aggressive behaviour. I am not asking for anything but a mediation that will prevent war of edits, which you seem to be looking for.--Hillock65 20:56, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Ghirla is problematic. See RfC/Girla, RfC/Piotrus on his standing conflict with Piotrus. I would recommend contacting Mzajac. If you get him interested in the articles you write, he is likely to help. --KPbIC 23:01, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Hey, I've had my disagreements with Ghirla, but please don't characterize me as his opponent. He's a respected editor, and if you disagree about article content, I recommend trying to continue the discussion and agree on an acceptable wording, supported by good sources. I'll try to do some reading and have a look when I have a chance, but it may be a few days. —MichaelZ. 2006-12-20 06:00 Z
Muscovy
It seems to me the subject below might be of interest of Ukrainian editors, but again I could be wrong. Since I am being continually reverted on the main page, let me place them here, so that others know what the controversy is all about.
An attempt was made to move Muscovy, a key article in our cycle on Russian history, to a different name without going through a proper WP:RM. I ask any admins reading this to fix the resulting mess. A properWP:RM vote is required for such large scale moves! Balcer 15:06, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
In addition, a large part of the Muscovy article was split off into a new Tsardom of Russia, without any discussion so far, with the year 1547 presented as an arbitrary dividing line. Please comment. Balcer 15:19, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
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