Talk:Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné

Death date
Hi, This source says 1942. Regards, Yann (talk) 10:09, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Revert by kashmiri
@Kashmiri reverted me with “Wikipedia has its own set of policies. Besides, one certainly cannot be born in a non-existing country; not in Wikipedia voice.” I don’t understand what this means. I was entering facts from reliable sources. “non-existing country” is WP:OR in your own voice, and it also corresponds to denigrating language about Ukraine that you have probably seen in anti-Ukrainian social media.

Two of the best reliable sources on the subject, Grove Art Online and the Getty Union List of Artist Names, state that Baranov-Rossiné’s nationality was Ukrainian. You left one of the sources that says so, removed the other, and changed it to “Russian.” There is no basis for this. —Michael Z. 16:35, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The subject was born in 1888 in the then Russian Empire. There was no "Ukraine" in 1888 and so the subject could not have been born "in Ukraine" as you want. Our policy is WP:MODERNPLACENAME – to use context-relevant place names.
 * Re. ethnicity, we use either self-identification or the country of origin, but only when that's relevant to the subject's notability – see MOS:ETHNICITY (Ethnicity, religion, or sexuality should generally not be in the lead unless relevant to the subject's notability.) For the current subject, sources identify his ethnicity as Jewish (which is relevant to his notability) or Russian rather than Ukrainian – even Ukrainian sources.
 * Overall, looking at your contributions, you might need to be reminded that Wikipedia is not an advocacy platform, even for morally just causes. — kashmīrī  TALK  16:55, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Please don’t indulge in WP:casting aspersions, unless you want to explain why you are so insistent on ignoring reliable sources while pushing your personal theories about the nonexistence of Ukraine.
 * 1) There certainly was the country named Ukraine. The name Ukrainian was used for people from there since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ukraine appears on maps by the early seventeenth century and is mentioned in English by the middle seventeenth. That it didn’t have independent statehood is not in question, but please don’t indulge in denigrating Ukraine and Ukrainians by falsely denying their existence. It still existed and its name was in use in the Russian empire and elsewhere in 1888, although officially Russian censors required it to be called “Little Russia,” a name that is offensive today.
 * 2) Yes, his ethnicity was Jewish. I notice you did not remove it from the lead, despite citing guidelines against including ethnicity. I don’t see how this relates because I’m not writing or claiming anything about the subject’s ethnicity, I’m not changing what the lead says about his ethnicity. The sources you cite don’t mention ethnicity specifically, and a commercial art auction house and English-language local-interest magazine are not authoritative sources on the subject like the Getty ULAN and Grove: they seem more like randomly chosen search results that happen to say what you want.
 * Yes, many sources call him Russian because much of Ukraine was in the Russian empire at the time. I don’t dispute this. Clearly different sources say different things, which is why we should use up-to-date, high-quality sources. A big part of Ukraine was in the Russian empire, and better sources are more specific, especially recently (since the Russian invasion has made Western experts more aware that there has been a Russian colonial bias in our scholarship, which ignored or denied the existence of Ukraine). —Michael Z. 20:19, 17 August 2023 (UTC)