Talk:School system in South Tyrol

Language usage
I think a compromise with regard to the naming needs to be found. I wrote the article in the belief that Alto Adige is more widely used in English than South Tyrol. Apparently this can't be said with certainty and there is no data to corroborate that. In the light of all the arctilces on Alto Adige having South Tyrol in the name, I will not object to the new title. However, I do find it a bit unsettling that all mentions of Alto Adige have been categorically replaced (with reference to WP:NBZ). The way I understand these guidelines, they mainly say that occurences of place names in Alto Adige should be named according to their linguistic majority, saying nothing about the use of the name the province should be referred to as a whole. Moreover, in an article that centers around the situation of schooling in an autonomous region within Italy and also points out a few basic facts about the Italian school system, it seems "unnatural" to not use the Italian name of the province at all. --Mampfus (talk) 21:14, 2 December 2012 (UTC)


 * WP:NBZ defines not only the name of individual municipalities, but also by logical extension the name of the entire province. Accordingly, the main article is South Tyrol. Alternative names are, as with every subject, listed there, in the main article, but aren't picked up in the various sub-articles (other than for quite specific circumstances which don't apply here, that is if a different historical name had existed in the time span with which the article is concerned, like Constantinople for Istanbul prior to Turkish times). The province name actually is very much of secondary importance, if not to say entirely irrelevant. WP:COMMONNAME is rather concerned with common usage, not official names: "Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources". From the use of the article title derives the use in the article text. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 12:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't see it that way. The way I understand WP:NBZ it applies mainly to the names of municipialities. What follows by logical extension is, in my opinion, that South Tyrol should be used in page titles. I don't see any grounds, however, to object to the additional use of Alto Adige in articles based on WP:NBZ. I agree that the province name is not of very much importance here, I think the official name is Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano-Alto Adige/Autonome Provinz Bozen-Südtirol. Also, people might look for English information on South Tyrol/Alto Adige using the name Alto Adige. I think it should be made abundantly clear for those people that South Tyrol and Alto Adige refer to the same province (not everybody in Australia or Texas might suppose this) by at least introducing Alto Adige as an alternative denomination in the first sentence of the article. Then, for the rest of the text, we can use South Tyrol. --Mampfus (talk) 08:53, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * If you are not convinced by my reasoning, take a look at how the article title is consistently used throughout the text in the other 2.5 million articles. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 04:01, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * That does not mean that the use of Alto Adige is prohibited. Also, I think it would be sensible to make a difference between topics that are concerned primarily with issues of the German speaking population (Katakombenschulen, SVP, etc.) and topics that concern the population of modern-day South Tyrol equally (schools, administration,...). I do not object to the use of South Tyrol throughout the text, I would just like to add the Italian name of the area to the introductory sentence. What would you say to "South Tyrol (also known by its Italian name Alto Adige)". This would not impair the coherent use of South Tyrol throughout the text and it would seem fitting in a sentence that states that S.T./A.A. is an autonomous province within Italy. --Mampfus (talk) 08:29, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Education in Ladin Schools
Also, I know very little about education in Ladin schools, it seems that they take a very promising approach. Maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject can help adding more detail to the section. --Mampfus (talk) 21:39, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

German / German-speaking ?
Writing the article, I referred to the German-speaking population of ST/AA as "German". I'm not quite sure whether this is an appropriate labelling, though. "German-speaking" comes close to "popolazione germanofona" which is a term sometimes used by Italians (occasionally with a slight undertone of irony, if I'm not mistaken ;). This would also be in line with the discription of the groups as linguistic groups. However, the German-speaking group consists of people who are Italian by citizenship and more Austrian than German by culture, which is why they often refer to themselves as an "Austrian minority". However, it would be misleading to speak of "Austrian pupils" in this article. (Also, it seems to me that the notion of an "Austrian minority" is a political label to put pressure on the Italian government rather than based on the shared culture of Austrians and South Tyroleans.) What is the best denomination to show that the German-speaking population of Alto Adige are distinct from its Italian population on the one hand, without Austrianizing or Germanizing them all to easily? --Mampfus (talk) 08:43, 5 December 2012 (UTC)