User talk:Ezhiki/2012

Счастья и удачи в Новом Году!

 * This must be the most amusing happy New Year wish I received over the years :) Thanks much, and I hope you had fun celebrating as well! May the new year bring you happiness (and us many more of your Wikipedia edits :)).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2012; 14:24 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot for your wishes, and the last one applies to you as well! I had great celebration, and today I've relocated temporarily to a place with some real winter and lots of snow, so I'm very pleased  Grey  Hood   Talk  15:40, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * You know, as much as I loved snow when I was a kid, it is overrated. Where I live, it usually starts to snow in late October-November, and it's not as much fun as one'd think, especially when you have to drive to work every day! This year, we haven't had any significant snow yet, and I couldn't have been happier about that. But, if snow's your thing, I'm happy for you :) At least you appreciate that it's temporary :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2012; 15:48 (UTC)
 * Hehe, seems your place was also affected by the global warming.. And lol, better not underestimate the significance of snow, people even go to protests because of the lack of it. Grey  Hood   Talk  16:04, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Couldn't follow the link because it is blocked for me, but it is not by any chance another one of Rick Perry's prayer fests, is it? :)))—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2012; 16:24 (UTC)
 * Hm, is it political censure that demotivators are blocked in the U.S. %)? Try this link. And rain-preying governors, lol, why not them hire some shamans? Grey  Hood   Talk  16:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, that one works; thanks! Funny indeed. The other link, I don't think it is blocked for political reasons&mdash;my company's management probably just doesn't want the employees to demotivate themselves at work :) As for the rain-praying governors, you'd think it would be funny, but it isn't here. Iowa holds caucuses today, by the way, and if Perry wins (which, fortunately, doesn't seem very likely), the world will get a chance to see a "shaman" nominated for President of the United States. And if he wins the elections, that is when all the fun will start :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2012; 16:49 (UTC)
 * This year will be interesting politically. Grey  Hood   Talk  17:04, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, in both countries.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2012; 17:05 (UTC)
 * Lol I watch TV news now and they tell about elections in Iowa. Something like "Why are the pigs so happy?" - "Because Rick is their best friend". ??? Grey  Hood   Talk  17:19, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Gee, finally some objective coverage in Russian media :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2012; 17:21 (UTC)

Translation of Russian text
Hi, I was directed by user Buckshot06 regarding a request of mine on my talk page. Unfornately, I don't speak Russian; so I'd like to know if you can translate the sentence "В период с 1987 по 1998 год «Тула» выполнила 7 боевых служб, в том числе 5 в высокоширотных районах Арктики, 17 боевых дежурств, 12 ракетных стрельб из подводного положения. Пройдено 134856 ходовых миль, из них 77245 в подводном положении." at Тула (подводная лодка), and compare that with "During 1987–1988, the boat conducted seven patrols, including five in the Arctic, 17 combat duties, and firing of twelve missiles." from Russian submarine K-114? I suspect the sentence from the English website (which I used as a source for my article) was hastily translate from the Russian Wikipedia article. Thanks --Sp33dyphil ©hatontributions 10:20, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * It is a fairly accurate translation, although somewhat abridged compared to the original (but only the secondary details have been abridged). Do you need me to translate the whole sentence, or is this confirmation enough for your purposes?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 4, 2012; 14:30 (UTC)

--Sp33dyphil ©hatontributions 22:08, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Here's the translation:
 * During 1987–1998, Tula conducted 7 combat duty operations, including 5 in the high-latitude regions of the Arctics, as well as 17 combat alert missions and 12 underwater missile-firing exercises. 134856 miles were traversed, 77245 of which were in a submerged state.''
 * Also please note that Buckshot was right when he said that I am in no way a specialist in military terminology, but the above translation should be pretty close to the original meaning (and if anything sounds especially awkward, let me know, I can probably come up with an alternative term).
 * Regarding the Wikimapia passage, it seems indeed to be an attempt at the literal translation of the Russian text, so I would say that the Russian text was written first, especially considering that the text in Russian is well-written, while the passage on Wikimapia is horrible. However, I suspect the Russian passage in ru-wiki was lifted from some other Russian-language source (perhaps verbatim) without attribution, but that's just a hunch.
 * By the by, Wikimapia really shouldn't be used as a source for anything anyway, since it is just a wiki.
 * Does this answer your questions?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 5, 2012; 15:25 (UTC)

--Sp33dyphil ©hatontributions 22:13, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Tatarstan
I have no clue what the problem is. Your source says 52.9% of the population is Tatar (whom are 99.99% Muslim). The source took this number from the 2002 census. The NEW 2010 census says 53.2% are Tatar (again, 99.99% Muslim). Your link only says the 52.9% are PREDOMINANTLY Muslim. It does not give the actual number who literally profess to Islam. This is a double standard on your part. 68.149.133.218 (talk) 20:53, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The problem is that the source saying one thing for one year and a Wikipedian saying pretty much the same thing for a different year are two different cups of tea. We can use reliable sources to source something (even though in this case I think the source I've been reverting to is full of it&mdash;no ethnicity is so homogeneously religious&mdash;it's like saying that all Russians are Orthodox or all Soviets were atheists). We cannot take what one source says, and transfer that statement to another source. It is called synthesis and is a variety of original research. Original research can (and should) be reverted on the spot, which is exactly what I'm doing. If you find a different source stating that such and such percentage of the Tatarstan population is Muslim (or professes Islam), by all means add it, but a 2010 Census results sheet which says not a word about religion is a no-go. Does this clarify my position?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 5, 2012; 21:02 (UTC)
 * Nope it does not clarify what you're saying. Because now we have two conflicting numbers. Just a few sections above on the demographics we see the Tatar population is listed at 53.2%, which is from the latest source available. Your link says the Tatar population is 52.9%, which is from the 2002 census. Will this not cause confusion amongst the readers? 68.149.133.218 (talk) 00:32, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Why should it cause any confusion? The demographics section clearly states that Tatars comprise 53.2% of the population as of the 2010 Census. The sentence we are arguing about states that 52.9% of the population is Tatar and Muslim (and the date is not specified). If anything, it makes sense that the second percentage would be lower, since obviously not all Tatars are Muslim (although this is exactly what the source is implying, only indirectly, which is a part of the problem). The Census link you are trying to add does not even contain the word "Muslim", so how can it be an acceptable source? Please do read WP:SYN; it covers just this kind of situations.
 * If you wish to replace that source (and I personally think it should be replaced, albeit not with the Census sheet, since it has nothing to do with religious preferences of the population), please replace it with one that explicitly gives a percentage of Muslims. Note also that it is an incredibly bad form to revert to your preferred version when it has been challenged, when you have not yet addressed all concerns, and when the discussion is still ongoing. Since it is you who initiated that edit, it is up to you to back it up. With that in mind, I'm escalating this to the appropriate noticeboard.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 6, 2012; 15:51 (UTC)

Tula disambiguation
Thanks for the feedback on the Tula page. I'm new at this and I see I was going well beyond disambiguation. SchreiberBike (talk) 03:01, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
 * You are welcome. The disambiguation guidelines are annoyingly obtuse these days, especially if you are new at doing these kind of tasks. Thanks for expanding that page though. While not all entries you added belonged there, you still found quite a few that did, and that's the important part :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 6, 2012; 15:53 (UTC)

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 * Fixed.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 6, 2012; 15:55 (UTC)

Pichshalnikov/Pishchalnikov
There are two articles, Kirill Pichshalnikov and Kirill Pishchalnikov, which should be merged (with the wrong spelling deleted). Could you fix that? Grey Hood   Talk  14:38, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Done!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 9, 2012; 15:19 (UTC)
 * Oh, thanks, surely redirect is the better decision. Grey  Hood   Talk  15:29, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

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Orphaned and unreferenced rural localities
Hello again! I suppose you are quite busy, as always, but may I suggest you one task to do.

You know, there is a long list of rural localities at WikiProject_Russia/Human_geography_of_Russia_task_force under the subsection "Attention needed", and a small list of urban-type settlements WikiProject_Russia/Human_geography_of_Russia_task_force also at the subsection "Attention needed". In 99% of cases with the listed articles "attention needed" means that those articles are orphaned or totally unreferenced.

I suppose also that those articles mostly have no chance for a decent expansion, unless some interested locals come and work on them. So the best decision would be to de-orphan those articles in a simple way (linking them from the district articles or so) and provide one or two references for them (or perhaps even delete some simultaneously orphaned and unreferenced) and then remove them from the task force list, which should concentrate on more important tasks. Would you like to do this sometime now or in the future? Grey Hood   Talk  18:01, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, this task is on my to-do list. My plans are for all district articles to have a section similar to this, so every rural locality will eventually be linked from one list or another. My database helps take care of this sort of tasks pretty well, but there are still several steps that need to be done first, most important of which is for those automatically generated lists to have references. Once again, the database is set up in such a way that proper references can be inserted where appropriate (already things like this are ~90% automated), but, of course, there is a "minor" issue of data entry :) The good news is that once the refs are in the database, it will be fairly easy to apply subsequent amendments, and backlinks like this make finding Wikipedia articles affected by those amendments very easy, too.
 * Another step is to have a network of set index articles for selsoviets/rural settlements, but once again, the refs need to be in the database before it can happen. How does this plan sound to you?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 10, 2012; 18:35 (UTC)
 * Sounds good, an automated and more global solution is always better. Grey  Hood   Talk  19:29, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

50 Let Pobedy (icebreaker)
Suppose it should be moved back to 50 Let Pobedy. There is no need to dab. Grey Hood   Talk  21:17, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Done.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 12, 2012; 21:20 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Grey  Hood   Talk  23:53, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

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Ivanovo Oblast
A belated New Years celebrations! Will get it done this weekend, cheers.♦ Dr. Blofeld  18:49, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I had forgotten. I haven't been very active recently. in fact today is the first day of the year I've really spent a good amount of time on wikipedia. Will try to do it on the weekend.♦ Dr. Blofeld  21:40, 19 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, one needs to take breaks every now and then. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed yesterday's blackout :)
 * Thanks for helping with the districts, by the way. It probably seems trivial, but it actually does help me quite a bit. Won't complain when they are all done, though :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 19, 2012; 21:50 (UTC)
 * Gavrilovo-Posadsky District. What happened?♦ Dr. Blofeld  16:44, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The refs for these districts are district-specific, but I'll have to actually create them as I go through the articles. If you could comment the refs out (same way you did with Irkutsk Oblast]], the article will display normally, and I'll take care of them once I start working on them.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 16:47 (UTC)
 * I'll get it done on the weekend.. ♦ Dr. Blofeld  16:56, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Works for me. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 16:57 (UTC)
 * I wondered if you'd be interested in creating a WikiProject Russia/Missing articles at some point. I know enough work is needed on existing content but it would be interesting. Of course I don't plan on doing any "sub stubbing" but I would like to actively create some from time to time. Russia is vast of course..♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:11, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I see how it would be interesting, but even compiling such a list is quite an undertaking in itself! We are currently missing articles on ~16,000 selsoviets, ~20,000 rural settlements (although those mostly overlap with the selsoviets), ~150,000 rural localities, hundreds of urban municipal formations, and ~300 city districts. And that's only those which currently exist; the number of historical entities is easily triple that number. Scared yet? :)
 * Anyway, for a more practical answer to your question, if you get an itch to create something, feel free to peruse the lists in this cat. Unlike other missing stuff, these at least are already incorporated into the navigational structure, so when a new article is written, it is automatically in the right place and no additional maintenance overhead is piled up. Will that work for you?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 17:29 (UTC)
 * Actually, what we are missing most in this category is a list of urban-type settlements without articles. My estimate is that they should be about couple of hundreds. Since I am doing them anyway, I could populate the list in several months. Is there any easy way to compile it different from checking the red links from all articles on administrative division?--Ymblanter (talk) 17:35, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Couple of hundred? How about 1,318? :))) As for the list, I can make one for you pretty quickly (I have a database, remember?). Just let me know the format you want it in and where to place it. The only thing is that I don't have most of the refs in yet, so for that you'll be pretty much on your own (the database provides for automated referencing of the basic factoids, but there's lots and lots of data entry involved, and I've barely started working on it).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 17:58 (UTC)
 * For the format, I would be fine with a list split by subjects (any order, alphabethical or numerical, I do not care) with an alphabetical list of missing urban-type settlements within the subject. For the place - as a subpage of Wikiproject:Russia? For the references, I do not have them anyway, so that I basically rely on you checking them sometime (for instance, now I am doing the districts of Novgorod Oblast, and the municipal links are clearly wrong in most cases since I can not find them anywhere, so that they need to be eventually corrected). I hope though that it is easier to check a couple of links that to write an article from scratch. There is no hurry. Thanks in advance.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:04, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't be too hard; how about I create this list next week? There is some other preparatory work I'll need to do before I hammer out the query, but I need to have it done anyway for something else, so it's no bother. I'll let you know when the list is ready.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 18:26 (UTC)
 * Actually I was not really thinking of geography, although rivers and mountains maybe. I was thinking more Russian biographies, theatres, etc. It needn't be a list of everything missing, just what are really notable missing topics..♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:33, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, aren't you in luck then. How about our nifty taskforces (such as this one, and there's more in the navlist at the bottom), courtesy of Greyhood? He spent weeks and weeks compiling what seems just the thing you are looking for. It's about time someone started to use it. :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 17:58 (UTC)
 * Do I detect a hint of sarcasm Mr. Ezhiki?m@Ymblanter, how about a List of urban-type settlements in Russia♦ Dr. Blofeld  18:14, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * This is probably a better idea than the wikiproject, but then the settlements should be split by district, not just by federal subject.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:23, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Why, no, sir! Honest! Those are mighty useful lists indeed, and we are missing people who would actually start using them . You seem to be a perfect candidate, and if you find those lists useful, I'll be one excited fella! (Probably not as excited as Greyhood, but still).
 * Regarding the list, I can do it by whatever divisions necessary (including the districts and/or the municipal/administrative split), but I think a WikiProject page makes more sense to start with. It can always be moved to main space later.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 18:26 (UTC)

I am ahead of you Ezhiki I created WikiProject Russia/List of urban-type settlements in Russia which can be worked on and moved once fully completed. I'd also like to see a List of district capitals of Russia which include rural type settlements and selos as well as twons, whatever the district seat is We should have articles on all of the district centers and urban type settlements. But the districts themselves of course are more important to sort out... I wouldn't bother with district divisions given that most don't have that many..♦ Dr. Blofeld  19:17, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, thanks. However, on my end it is actually easier to overwrite it rather than use as a starting point. The list needs to show the locality types (since not all are designated to be "urban-type settlements"); the district/city jurisdiction and the municipal jurisdiction information also needs to be included. Also, red links need to be cross-checked to ensure that ambiguous names are linked properly (simply copying them from the "administrative divisions of..." series isn't good enough, because those articles are rather old and I haven't been maintaining them too well). It's all a helluva lot of work if done manually; fortunately, I can run a query that'll produce all this in a manner of minutes, but just like I said to Yaroslav above, one preliminary task needs to be done first.
 * As for the other list, I should first note that the only entities in Russia that have capitals are the republics; all the rest have the administrative centers. While it seems like splitting hairs, it is not a difference an encyclopedia should ignore. That said, I can create such a list as well, just as easily.
 * Finally, what do you mean that districts don't have that many divisions? What do you think those 20,000-odd rural settlements are divisions of? :) They'll need to be taken care of eventually, but, of course, I, too, agree that the districts should take priority. Still, having a network of selsoviet/rural settlement-related set indices/dabs/redirects in place would make linking to them from the articles on districts and inhabited localities that much easier. And while it's not a big deal with the districts (lists of their divisions can be added to existing articles later), it is important in the articles about the rural localities (revisiting hundreds of them later just to link selsoviets is a task no one is looking forward to!). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 19:45 (UTC)


 * OK, it was just an idea. You've persuaded me to leave it. ♦ Dr. Blofeld  20:39, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I was just trying to save your time, doc! (Expect a bill in the mail.)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 20, 2012; 20:45 (UTC)


 * Will definitely get the districts done this weekend, promise. Sorry for the delay.♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:58, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Not a problem; I have plenty of other things to occupy myself with while waiting for these :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 26, 2012; 18:01 (UTC)


 * Ivanovo done.♦ Dr. Blofeld  19:41, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 30, 2012; 12:46 (UTC)

Your input is needed on the SOPA initiative
Hi Ezhiki,

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Military task force
Look here please. And here is the new name of the task force WikiProject Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history task force. Could you fix the WP:RUSSIA assessment template please? Grey Hood   Talk  15:13, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I've fixed the banner; please let me know if there is anything else that needs changing (I never remember!).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 17, 2012; 15:02 (UTC)
 * Thx, so far it looks all fine. Grey  Hood   Talk  19:20, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Tat'yana Sergeyeva
Could you move it to Tatyana Sergeyeva plz. Grey Hood   Talk  17:20, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Done.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 17, 2012; 14:56 (UTC)

korea-japan relations
thank u for ur answer about the sosnovy bor military base! and now i have a q regrading the japan-korea relations. i would like to make two different articles, Japan-North Korea relations and Japan-South Korea relations. how do i incorporate the japan-korea relations article to them? thanks for the helpSuperzohar Talk 20:58, 19 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I don't really know one best way to do this, but if it were something I needed to do myself, I'd leave the "Japan-Korea relations" the main article to hold the pre-split content and add two concise overview sections at the end (one for "Japan-North Korea relations", the other for "Japan-South Korea relations"). The "Japan-North Korea relations" and "Japan-South Korea relations" articles would contain a brief overview of the "Japan-Korea relations" article in the beginning, and then the details for the post-split years.
 * I would also recommend soliciting advice from the Japan and Korea WikiProjects; they might have better ideas. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 19, 2012; 21:06 (UTC)

Russian Rivers
Доброго времени суток! У меня к вам есть несколько вопросов:
 * 1. Как следует именовать статьи о российских реках в названиях которых есть слова "Большая/Большой", "Малая/Малый" и некоторые др? Насколько я понимаю эти слова не следует переводить на английский.
 * 2. Как следует именовать статьи о реках, когда нужно указать приток какой именно это реки? Например если река Барда это приток Сылвы то статья должна называться Barda River (Sylva River) или нужно Barda River (tributary of Sylva River)? Brainwashinguser (talk) 15:08, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
 * У нас с этим полный бардак. Названия типа Большой лучше не переводить, если только нет источников, прямо дающих противоположный вариант (Northern Dvina River). Что касается уточнений, лично я ставлю в скобках область (Uftyuga River (Arkhangelsk Oblast)), если это не помогает вылечить однозначность, то уже бассейн (Uftyuga River (Sukhona), Uftyuga River (Lake Kubenskoye)). Я видел, что другие участники называют по-другому. Образец оформления типовой статьи о реке, например, тут: Viled River.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:22, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Ну, не совсем бардак, какие-то правила всё-таки существуют. "Большой" и "Малый" так и будут "Bolshoy" и "Maly", поскольку части имён собственных действительно не переводятся (за исключением, как правильно сказал Ярослав, широкоизвестных названий типа Северной Двины). Что касается притоков, то действительно наиболее предпочтителен вариант с использованием названия субъекта Федерации для разрешения неоднозначности ("XXX River (YYY Oblast)" и т.п.). Разумеется, это работает только для рек, протекающих по территории одного субъекта. Для рек, протекающих по территориям нескольких субъектов (или стран) используется первый вариант ("Barda River (Sylva River)"). Для рек, впадающие в море или озеро, можно использовать название этого моря или озера ("XXX River (Lake YYY)"). В общем и целом, из двух равнозначных вариантов предпочтителен более короткий.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 23, 2012; 15:26 (UTC)


 * It's me again. What is about South Keltma River and North Keltma River? Should it be renamed to Severnaya Keltma River and Yuzhnaya Keltma River respectively?


 * By the way, the same mess is in Norwegian wiki where articles about those rivers named Juzjnaja Keltma and Nordlege Keltma. Brainwashinguser (talk) 18:26, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, the Norwegian wiki's problems are their own :) All we care about here is our policies and guidelines. As for those two rivers, they are rather minor and obscure, so romanization is the best approach.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 24, 2012; 18:38 (UTC)

Kumay River is confusing. If its only 23 kilometres in length how can it "flow into the Kolva River 326 km of its mouth"?♦ Dr. Blofeld  18:03, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Looks like an overuse of "it". I've made some changes. The rest of these stubs probably need to be verified as well; I agree it sounds confusing.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 26, 2012; 18:25 (UTC)
 * That makes better sense now. He is using "of" instead of "from", that's all.♦ Dr. Blofeld  18:27, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Bolshaya Vishera
Could you please check the status of this settlement? I believe it is not a work settlement anymore, and does not belong here.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:06, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, it was demoted in 2009. It is still listed in administrative divisions of Novgorod Oblast because the OKATO (the only source used by that article) has not yet been updated.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 27, 2012; 15:25 (UTC)

Deletion
Hello. The deletion of text based on a reliable source (journal “World Psychiatry” of the World Psychiatric Association) should be prevented. The deletion has been discussed on Talk:Psychiatry, but no results have been attained. --Psychiatrick (talk) 19:38, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Properly assessing the neutrality and reliability of the sources used in an article requires familiarity with and understanding of the subject matter&mdash;and in the field of psychiatry I possess neither. The best way to handle this incident is to continue the discussion on the talk page, and if that goes nowhere, there is always WP:RSN. I am sorry, but there really isn't anything I can do, at least at this point.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 27, 2012; 19:51 (UTC)
 * There is the archive of the World Psychiatry. When writing Wikipedia articles, I use only scientific publications, but references to them are constantly being deleted along with text. It is a surprise for me. Psychiatrick (talk) 20:09, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I understand and it looks convincing, but I really can't properly assess the quality/neutrality of a source in a field I know next to nothing about. From where I stand, you might as well ask for my "expertise" in the field of astrobiology :)
 * The editor who removed the paragraph is an editor in good standing, so the best way to find out his reasons is by continuing the discussion on the article's talk page. Perhaps it is all a misunderstanding, but even so it should be discussed by the people who are familiar with the subject.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 27, 2012; 20:15 (UTC)

Tatarstan
The President of Bashkorostan has said 55% of the population there is Muslim, and he uses this number due to the ethnic percentage of Tatars and Bashkirs who live there. Your source once again, uses the number from the 2002 census, not the 2010 one. There is a major double standard on your part. Your own source doesn't even mentioned the number of Muslims, it only says PREDOMINANTLY of the 52.9% is Muslim. Tatars are literally all Muslim. I only updated the source which means most likely means that PREDOMINANTLY the 53.2% of the Tatars are Muslim. 68.149.133.218 (talk) 22:55, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Do you understand the difference between using a source that actually says something and a source that you think most likely says something? If you don't, please read WP:OR and WP:SYNTH, and then let's continue the discussion here. My talk page is no longer an appropriate place for it, now that other people are involved.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 1, 2012; 14:48 (UTC)

Kyiv or Kiev
Dear Sir,

If you so principled, please change all words in wikipedia from "Kiev" to "Kyiv"! If you don't, then please don't meddle in the article "Kharkov". We, kharkovites, know better how to properly pronounce the name of our city.

Best regards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.194.56.131 (talk • contribs)

Translate
Just stalked you to see if you had started yet. Can you translate this:

Кизлярка — виноградная водка. Название происходит от города Кизляра (север современного Дагестана). Крепость — 40 %. По методу производства является полным аналогом итальянской граппы и грузинской чачи. Упоминается в повести Н. С. Лескова «Левша» под названием «кислярка»[источник не указан 215 дней]: "Платов ничего государю не ответил, ... а пришел в свою квартиру, велел денщику подать из погребца фляжку кавказской водки-кислярки."

Кизлярка изначально была водкой князей Эристовых[источник не указан 215 дней], производилась из фруктово-ягодного сырья. После введения водочной монополии 1894-1896 была переведена в категорию псевдорусских водок. Была популярна в народе. ♦ Dr. Blofeld  20:40, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Started what?
 * Here's the translation. Please copyedit it as necessary:
 * Kizlyarka is a type of grape vodka. Its name is derived from the town of Kizlyar (in the north of modern Dagestan). It is 40 proof. Its manufacture process is exactly the same as that of the Italian grappa or the Georgian chacha. It was mentioned in The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea by Nikolay Leskov as kislyarka[unsourced for 215 days]: "Platov did not say anything back to the Tsar,... he returned to his apartment and asked his batman to bring a flask of Caucasian vodka-kislyarka from the cellar".
 * Originally, kizlyarka was the vodka of the House of Eristov[unsourced for 215 days], and was produced from fruit and berries. After the introduction of the vodka monopoly in 1894–1896, it was recategorized as a pseudo-Russian vodka. It was popular among the commoners."
 * —Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 2, 2012; 20:55 (UTC)

Thans. Yeah I figured as much because I saw 40% in it!♦ Dr. Blofeld  20:59, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, this also reminds me of my alcohol stash at home which I can't find time to finish. No kizlyarka there, unfortunately :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 2, 2012; 21:02 (UTC)

Vologda Oblast
Should Vologda Oblast, Russian Empire be merged with Vologda Viceroyalty? Grey Hood   Talk  00:29, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
 * No, why? They are separate entities on different administrative levels, after all. It would be like upmerging the articles on modern districts into the corresponding articles on the federal subjects. Or is it the current length of the stub that gives you doubts? I assure you that there is definitely more than that to be said; I created it only as a convenience stopgap.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 3, 2012; 02:19 (UTC)
 * Ah, sorry, for some reason I confused these two administrative entities to be the same due to the same timeframe, and overlooked that one was part of another. Perhaps I should make less edits per day and spend more time actually reading the contents of the pages.. ;) Grey  Hood   Talk  20:45, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
 * ...but then there'll be no one left to do the grunt work! :) —Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 3, 2012; 20:53 (UTC)

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exact coordinates of Shakhovskoye
hi i want to add 52°37'23.88 - 58.55'47°15 is the exact coordinates of the Shakhovskoye selo. can u add it pls? i just dont manage to do it well. thx, Superzohar Talk 19:59, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
 * You seem to have mistyped the longitude above. Did you mean 58°55'47.15 '' ? You can actually enter the fractional seconds as lats and longs parameters (i.e., for Shakhovskoye you'll have lats=23.88).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 7, 2012; 20:02 (UTC)
 * sigh...i corrected it:-) another q: i want to put in the article of Slavyanka this pic. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slavyanka.jpg. but when i copy that file name it gives me other file which is in wikipedia (not wikicommons) and is not slavyanka, just a nature pic. can u fix it?
 * OK, done. The nature view is now on Commons under Slavyanka2.jpg.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 7, 2012; 20:29 (UTC)

rural okrug
hi! in the russian wikipedia its written shakhovskoye is се́льское поселе́ние. isn't it selsoviet? whats the difference between municiapl and administrative division? Superzohar Talk 22:11, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Do you mean this article? It is not about the village; it is about the municipal division (which includes several villages). And the municipal division itself is formed on the basis of the corresponding administrative division, which is Shakhovskoy Rural Okrug (which, for whatever reason, the Russian Wikipedia does not even mention). As far as our article goes, there are separate fields in the infobox for the administrative and municipal divisions. Does this answer your question?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 8, 2012; 13:53 (UTC)
 * Hi! first, i want to get the idea: what's the difference between administrative and municipal division? isnt it federal->oblast->raion->sub raion (urban type settlement, town, or сельского поселения which is composed of few selo/derevnya)? secondly, i apology i really thought that the russian wikipedia numbers r more exact. could u say me please on which articles i need to change the population numbers? Superzohar [[Image:Red star.svg|13px]] Talk 14:36, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The administrative divisions are the divisions used by federal and regional governments for their purposes (military registration and draft, social assistance and pensions, marriage registrations, police, etc.). The municipal divisions are the units of local self-government. The municipal divisions are often formed within the limits of the administrative divisions of the corresponding level (which is why people so often get confused), but not always&mdash;the exact implementation varies from one federal subject to another. There's a little more on that at subdivisions of Russia and subdivisions of Russia.
 * As for the numbers to be changed, if you could check your contribution history for articles to which you added infoboxes in the past week or so and double-check the 2010 population, that should do it. The 2010 estimates in the Russian Wikipedia aren't inaccurate; they are just not as recent as the Census numbers. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 9, 2012; 14:48 (UTC)

MSU Interview
Dear Ezhiki,

My name is Jonathan Obar user:Jaobar, I'm a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University and a Teaching Fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program. This semester I've been running a little experiment at MSU, a class where we teach students about becoming Wikipedia administrators. Not a lot is known about your community, and our students (who are fascinated by wiki-culture by the way!) want to learn how you do what you do, and why you do it. A while back I proposed this idea (the class) to the community HERE, were it was met mainly with positive feedback. Anyhow, I'd like my students to speak with a few administrators to get a sense of admin experiences, training, motivations, likes, dislikes, etc. We were wondering if you'd be interested in speaking with one of our students.

So a few things about the interviews:
 * Interviews will last between 15 and 30 minutes.
 * Interviews can be conducted over skype (preferred), IRC or email. (You choose the form of communication based upon your comfort level, time, etc.)
 * All interviews will be completely anonymous, meaning that you (real name and/or pseudonym) will never be identified in any of our materials, unless you give the interviewer permission to do so.
 * All interviews will be completely voluntary. You are under no obligation to say yes to an interview, and can say no and stop or leave the interview at any time.
 * The entire interview process is being overseen by MSU's institutional review board (ethics review). This means that all questions have been approved by the university and all students have been trained how to conduct interviews ethically and properly.

Bottom line is that we really need your help, and would really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. If interested, please send me an email at obar@msu.edu (to maintain anonymity) and I will add your name to my offline contact list. If you feel comfortable doing so, you can post your name HERE instead.

If you have questions or concerns at any time, feel free to email me at obar@msu.edu. I will be more than happy to speak with you.

Thanks in advance for your help. We have a lot to learn from you.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Obar --Jaobar (talk) 18:26, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

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Apology for italics
Thanks for noticing and correcting the mistake I made in the Krasnaya Polyana article in which I italicized the Cyrillic form of the words. I had known that, but I must have forgotten that rule when I did this. --Saukkomies talk 21:56, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * No problem; it's entirely non-obvious and easy to forget if you don't deal with this on daily basis. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 10, 2012; 21:58 (UTC)

local council of bishops
hi i want to create new article about the bishop council of the russian orthodox church. but i see i nrussian wikipedia two articles which seem deal with same thing. Поместный собор and Архиерейский собор. what is the difference between them? thx, Superzohar Talk 15:04, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
 * According to those articles, the former is the council of bishops, other clerics, and sometimes laymen. The participation in the latter is limited exclusively to bishops.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 11, 2012; 17:45 (UTC)

Oops, sorry about that one!
Hey! Thanks for changing back the Khasan stuff. I had no idea that there was a specific way Russian towns / cities are named in WikiPedia (first Russian article, I think). Hopefully it didn't cause too much trouble. At least now all the links to the town will be coming in without the double redirect... spent blooming ages getting them all pointing to the one page!

Do you think we still need the Khasan (disambiguation) page?

Apologies again.

Best Regards --Haruth (talk) 16:07, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Your change actually did more good than bad, because I've been meaning to fix the incoming Khasan links for a long time and your edit provided me with an extra incentive :) So, no trouble at all. As for the dab page, yes, I think having it is helpful, because the lake is often referred to as simply "Khasan" as well, and having all those first names in one place is kind of helpful, too. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 13, 2012; 16:18 (UTC)
 * Phew! Glad to hear that not too disruptive! Best wishes --Haruth (talk) 20:07, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

New Kedrovy, Yemelyanovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai article

 * Hmmm... Thanks?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 14, 2012; 14:24 (UTC) 14:24, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Grigoriy Gamburtsev
Could you please move it to Grigory Gamburtsev? Thx. Btw funny talk entry above ;) Grey  Hood   Talk  14:54, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Done!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 16, 2012; 15:16 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot! Grey  Hood   Talk  15:36, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

More
Will try to, yes. But if you posted a new section at the bottom of my talk page every time I'd be more likely to see the message or remember!♦ Dr. Blofeld  21:43, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. As for the new sections, I'll keep that in mind. Myself, I prefer to keep the related discussions under one header. Have a great weekend!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 24, 2012; 21:50 (UTC)
 * Its not that I don't like keeping things under one header, its the fact I get so many messages I have a job finding the sections once you've posted after some time so am likely to forget!♦ Dr. Blofeld  21:54, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Understood.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 24, 2012; 21:57 (UTC)
 * Not really feeling like it today, tomorrow perhaps.♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:58, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
 * No problem.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 27, 2012; 13:02 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the delay Kemerovo is done although you need to add the Russian. Afanasyevsky District for some reason says Kaluga Oblast in the intro? Also why is there no nav template?♦ Dr. Blofeld  21:15, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks! And the short answer to your questions would be "because I'm a dumbass who doesn't pay attention" :( The intro should, of course, say "Kirov Oblast", not "Kaluga", and the nav template is available at Kirov Oblast; I just forgot to link to it. I'll have that fixed. Thanks again!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 1, 2012; 21:19 (UTC)
 * I'll complete that one now. Done, again though you need to add the Russian and maps if they exist. ♦ Dr. Blofeld  21:23, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Will do!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 1, 2012; 21:57 (UTC)

no need to indicate stress when IPA is available
Hi Ezhiki, first of all, hello. We've interected in many articles in the past but we've never had a conversation. The reason I'm contacting you, is you've reverted my changes in 5 articles. As you know, these changes involved adding the russian pronunciation to articles about cities in Russia. While I agree with you that when IPA is available it's not strictly necessary to also have the stressed syllable marked in the russian name, I'd like to bring the following to your attention:

a) having the stressed syllable marked both in the name and in the IPA doesn't do any damage. And certainly not any damage that requires you to revert other people's changes.

b) having the stressed syllable in the name makes the stress information accessible to people who know the cyrillic alphabet but are not familiar with the IPA system. I'm sure you'll realise that there are far more people in the world who know the cyrillic alphabet than people who know IPA.

Of course I assume you have reverted my edits in good faith, but I would appreciate a response. Other people are of course also welcome to comment on this.

Cheers,Azylber (talk) 14:54, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Azylber! Thanks for your note. However, this subject was previously discussed, and several people who cared at the time agreed that showing stresses is not necessary at all as long as IPA transcription is present; the rationale being that the stress marks are confusing to people who are not that familiar with Russian&mdash;i.e., the audience which is somewhat opposite of the audience you described under b). Additionally, the stressed spellings are routinely copy-pasted by folks who can't read Russian (or Cyrillic) at all, and they end up in most strange places, such as, and I kid you not, interwiki links. That most certainly counts as damage, albeit minor (and easily fixable) one.
 * Consensus, of course, may change over time, so my recommendation would be to post your comment on, say WT:RUSSIA or a talk page of other applicable WikiProjects. The reason I reverted is pretty much due to previous consensus&mdash;I myself don't really care whether stress is indicated using the stress marks or IPA. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 1, 2012; 15:18 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your reply! I'll do that. Azylber (talk) 16:19, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

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Buranovo
Hey could you please create a small stub on the village of Buranovo in the Udmurt Republic? See Buranovskiye Babushki and this. Grey Hood   Talk  16:52, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Here we go: a dab, a set index, and a stub. And if you could spare a moment to pull your head out of Putin's ass, there's plenty to borrow from the Russian version. :)))—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 9, 2012; 17:17 (UTC)
 * Aww, thanks a lot. I definitely should take a break from Putinism: could you believe it, this night for the first time ever I saw a political dream in which I read a news article telling that Putin had mastered a new exotic martial art, called "na-na" in addition to sambo, judo, and karate, and I felt a strong urge to add that important fact to the Putin article. %) Or perhaps the martial art was called "На-на" or "Ha-ha", couldn't remember whether the spelling in the dream was Cyrillic or not ). Grey  Hood   Talk  17:36, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, you are definitely overdoing it! Have a drink on me this weekend—it'll help (we'll figure out that "on me" part later somehow). I know I will, although for entirely different reasons...
 * Пресс-конференция. Путин: Теперь во всем мире теперь будет использоваться только одна самая крепкая валюта - рубли! Журналист: Откуда же возьмется столько рублей? Путин: Поверьте, уж этого дерьма мы можем напечатать столько, сколько захотим.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 9, 2012; 17:46 (UTC)
 * Год 2023. Просыпаются Путин и Медведев с тяжелого бодуна. Путин: А ты не помнишь, кто из нас сегодня президент, а кто премьер-министр? Медведев: Да какая разница, ну пусть я буду премьер-министр. Путин: Ну, раз ты власть исполнительная, тебе за пивом и бежать. Grey  Hood   Talk  17:54, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Have tried to heal Putinism with Zhirinovskyism: from "Putin's ass" to Zhirinovsky's ass. Grey  Hood   Talk  02:52, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * .—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 10, 2012; 03:01 (UTC)
 * Plz watch over the article, I fear that some boreheads may try to strip it from additional bits of humor. ;) Grey  Hood   Talk  03:05, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Plz watch over the article, I fear that some boreheads may try to strip it from additional bits of humor. ;) Grey  Hood   Talk  03:05, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Проект "Россия"
Здравствуйте! Я хотел бы уточнить, нуждаются ли в улучшении статьи, рядом с которыми в скобках не указан комментарий с желательными действиями? User from Dag (talk) 21:58, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Здравствуйте! Да, они все нуждаются в улучшении. В скобках указаны только наиболее очевидные проблемы, но в целом приветствуются любые правки. Спасибо за интерес!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 16, 2012; 11:49 (UTC)

Russian police reform
Hi! How are you doing? I've been really busy with my studies and haven't had much time for WP, but I noticed that someone has merged Russian police reform to Russian police without discussion. I don't have the time to check for correct procedures; can I just revert it? It seems clear to me that the reform itself is a large and important enough topic to warrant its own article. And it's not good that now over 70% of the article "Russian police" is about just the reform. What do you think? Nanobear (talk) 02:02, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, good to see you back again (even if you don't have much time to do much)! Regarding the merger, I don't oppose it in principle, but you are right&mdash;when a related but sufficiently distinct topic takes up three-quarters of the article, a split is in order. As for how to proceed, I don't see a problem with just going ahead and splitting it back. It is a normal part of the BRD cycle, and your rationale is quite reasonable to deserve a consideration. Alternatively, you could contact the person who merged the articles in the first place and to explain why you disagree.
 * And while we are on a subject of Russian police, would you care to copyedit Sochi Police when/if you get some time? Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 19, 2012; 13:30 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * Thank you. I appreciate the sentiment.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 19, 2012; 13:30 (UTC)

More districts
Done.♦ Dr. Blofeld  18:37, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Great, thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 19, 2012; 18:39 (UTC)

Imeni Karla Libknekhta, but Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge
Hi, In Russia is Imeni Karla Libknekhta, which is named after Karl Liebknecht, a German communist. However, in Russia, St. Petersburg is Blagoveshchensky Bridge, which was 1918-2007 Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge, Мост Лейтенанта Шмидта, in memory of Pyotr Schmidt, Пётр Шмидт. So, no Lieutenant Shmidt Bridge at all? --WPK (talk) 02:34, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The former is a populated place, while the latter is a structure. The names of populated places are always transliterated, while the names of structures may be either transliterated or translated&mdash;the ultimate choice would depend on the purpose of the text and on the conventions adopted by the publication. Thus "Leytenanta Shmidta Bridge" would not be incorrect (as this would attest), but neither would be "Annunciation Bridge" for the modern name, or any reasonable variation in between. It'd be nice if the articles on Russian bridges followed one convention or the other consistently, but apparently there are no editors interested in this (fairly unimportant, I might add) task.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 26, 2012; 13:58 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your answer. However, should the Russian person's name be Pyotr Shmidt instead of Pyotr Schmidt? --WPK (talk) 17:14, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You are welcome. As for the Lieutenant, both spellings are also correct (as well as the variants which use "Peter"). The bridge article, I would guess, uses the "Schmidt" spelling simply because the article about the person is located at Pyotr Schmidt. The article, in turn, is located at that spelling hopefully because it is the spelling most often used by the English-language sources (whether it really is, I don't know; I haven't checked). In general, titles of articles about people are guided more by WP:UE than by general transliteration guidelines, because articles about people are subject to more stringent notability requirements, which in practice means that English-language sources about notable people are usually available in abundance and establishing the most common spelling is a no-brainer. Populated places, on the other hand, are considered to be inherently notable, which in practice means (especially for smaller places) that there are sources which are only sufficient to meet the verifiability requirements, that the English-language sources are often non-existent and transliteration/romanization is the only feasible way, and that even the existing English-language sources merely use the spellings which are a result of applying a romanization system.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 27, 2012; 17:36 (UTC)
 * So it isn't 'wrong' to write Imeni Karla LIebknechta, either? --WPK (talk) 21:11, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It is wrong. You can't mix German spelling with Russian genitive. Look again at the bridge example: "Leytenanta Shmidta Bridge" is OK, and so is "Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge", but "Lieutenanta Schmidta Bridge" would be a problem.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 28, 2012; 21:21 (UTC)
 * Мост Лейтенанта Шмидта can be written Most Leytenanta Schmidta - Schmidt is a German name ->  German spelling mixed with Russian genitive? -, but Имени Карла Либкнехта can not be written Imeni Karla Liebknechta - although Liebknecht is also a German name? Albeit in Estonian it is Imeni Karla Liebknechta : German spelling mixed with Russian genitive? --WPK (talk) 02:04, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You misread. I never said the bridge can be written as "Leytenanta Schmidta", I said it can be written as "Leytenanta Shmidta" (notice the difference between the italicized parts). Nor can the settlement's name be written as "Karla Liebknechta", but it can be written as "Karla Libknekhta".
 * What Estonian Wikipedia does is of no relevance on en-wiki. They have their own language, their own transliteration practices, and their own policies and procedures (none of which I am familiar with, and none of which are applicable here).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 13:46 (UTC)
 * If name Либкнехт would be Russian, it would be transliterated as "Libknehht" in Estonian. However, it is German and therefore it is written Liebknecht, of course, and same with Schmidt. So it is only logical, that Имени Карла Либкнехта and Мост Лейтенанта Шмидта is written e. g. in Estonian and English Imeni Karla Liebknechta and Most Leitenanta (et) /Leytenanta (en) Schmidt. Naturally, if Пётр Шмидт can be written Pyotr Schmidt. --WPK (talk) 14:52, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * There is no point in bringing other languages up. The only languages relevant to how place names in Russia are rendered in English are English and Russian. The only languages relevant to how a person's name is rendered in English are English and the language in which the person's name is originally in. The only languages relevant to how names of structures or organizations are rendered in English are English and the language(s) of the country in which those structures/organizations are located. How any other languages (or Wikipedias in those languages) handle the transliteration matter is between those languages and the language of origin of the place/person/structure/organization name. English has certain established conventions of how to deal with foreign place/person/structure/organization names, and those conventions are hardly ever applicable for some other language (such as Estonian). You are unnecessarily complicating the matter which is already complicated to begin with!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 15:01 (UTC)
 * Because Имени Карла Либкнехта has been named after Karl Liebknecht, what an earth prevents to transliterate Imeni Karla Liebknechta, when мост Лейтенанта Шмидта can have been written Most Leytenanta Schmidta after Pyotr Schmidt?! --WPK (talk) 23:38, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the fact that I never said that writing "мост лейтенанта Шмидта" as most Leytenanta Schmidta is acceptable? I did, however, say quite the opposite. Just look above in this very thread.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 2, 2012; 13:32 (UTC)

Problem with WP Russia assessments
I tried to assess this article as b-class: Talk:Anastasiya Vertinskaya, but for some reason it shows up as c-class, even though I put a b in the class parameter. I had the same problem here Talk:Polish–Soviet War, where I typed in a b and it showed up as c-class. I asked Greyhood about it, and he referred me to you. INeverCry  00:36, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Marek showed me a small fix for this, but see User talk:Greyhood, as this looks to be effecting all WP RU b-class articles, many of which are now showing as c-class. INeverCry  04:30, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * This is apparently due to the most recent re-design; it seems that the template was forced to go through the B-checklist and to demote articles to C-class when all entries in the list were not set to "yes" or if any were missing. In general, that's a good idea, but given how we have so many articles assessed prior to this having been implemented, I have disabled it for now. We'll need to decide whether we indeed want to go through all B-class articles and fill out the checklist fields (and then to reactivate this feature), or whether not to use checklists at all and leave this functionality permanently disabled.
 * I've removed B-checklist from Talk:Anastasiya Vertinskaya to illustrate that the template is now functioning as before.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 13:32 (UTC)
 * There's still a slight problem at Talk:Anastasiya Vertinskaya. The category "Mid-importance C-Class Russia articles" is showing up at bottom. INeverCry  18:14, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Not anymore :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 18:30 (UTC)
 * Спасибо. INeverCry  19:15, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Hello
(Received from you on my talk page)

Thanks and a request Just wanted to drop a quick thanks for going through Russian cities and doing the tweaks. One thing, however: could you please not commit the edits which do not affect anything visible in the article (such as here)? I believe one condition the users of automated tools have to agree is that the tools will not be used for edits consisting solely of trivial fixes, such as adding/removing spaces, or changing formatting style without a compelling reason. Other than that, good job, much appreciated, carry on! Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 18:51 (UTC)


 * I'll take this into consideration. However, there's no condition about automated tools as you suggest. Wikipedia has many bots that routinely make minor changes to articles all the time. I typically use auto-ed to prep pages before making additional edits to them. Also, using auto ed improves pages and makes it easier for editors to edit them in the future. Ultimately, doing so only improves articles and Wikipedia. Northamerica1000(talk) 18:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Check out the improvements that have been made to Zelenogorsk, Saint Petersburg. Northamerica1000(talk) 19:03, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Additional information: Here's the page for auto ed: AutoEd. Northamerica1000(talk) 19:06, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You are talking about the approved bots, which indeed can do edits consisting solely of minor changes because users can filter bot edits out of their watchlists by tweaking the preference options. Users can't filter out editors who use automated tools in the same manner. I can try finding the applicable guideline (which I'm pretty sure exists), but it is something to consider regardless.
 * As for AutoEd, you are partially right, but also not right :) In your few previous edits AutoEd added numerous white spaces. While some editors actually prefer it that way, many others do not. I personally find extra white spaces quite annoying, especially when editing from a mobile browser, where space in the editing window is at premium. Mind you, it's not that big of a deal, but it is rather annoying when adding white spaces is the only thing an edit does.
 * As for Zelenogorsk, I agree that for the most part it is good improvement (and which is one of the reasons for my previous "thank you" note :)). You might, however, want to consider moving the coordinates from the coord template to the infobox and filling out the "federal_subject" field&mdash;this will result in several lines of information and a map being automatically filled out in the infobox; otherwise the infobox is nearly useless at it basically serves as a wrapper around the coat of arms.
 * Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 19:11 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the useful advice!
 * Check out this discussion about whitespace/auto ed : Wikipedia talk:AutoEd— hopefully this matter can be resolved. Please consider posting your ideas about this matter there too!
 * I actually considered adding the coordinates to the infobox. The coordinates section of the infobox is quite technical and requires users to decode the coordinates information in articles. Here's how the data is in the infobox:
 * latd=
 * latm=
 * lats=
 * longd=
 * longm=
 * longs=
 * Regarding the federal subject field of the infobox: I'm unsure if Zelenogorsk, Saint Petersburg is a federal subject of Russia, although Saint Petersburg is, hence this area was not filled-in. I am aware of how the infobox is automatically populated in these types of instances, though.
 * — Northamerica1000(talk) 19:28, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the talk link; I'm sure I've seen similar threads with regards to AWB or other automated tools; I just never thought I'd need to cite them later :) Anyhoo, like I said, it's not that big of a deal.
 * Regarding the coordinates, the parameters starting with "lat" refer to the latitude, and those starting with "long" refer to the longitude. "D", "m", and "s" stand for degrees, minutes, and seconds. So, would result in:
 * latd=60
 * latm=12
 * lats=
 * longd=29
 * longm=42
 * longs=
 * Nothing needs to be done with the "region" and "display" parts of coord&mdash;the infobox adds them in the background automatically, and north and east are the default values (only a handful of Russian places are in the Western hemisphere and the infobox supports a switch to take care of that). Does this help?
 * As for the federal subject, all Russian city articles start with "XXX is a city/town/whatever in Suchandsuch District of Foo". "Foo" here is the federal subject; for Zelenogorsk it is indeed Saint Petersburg (only two federal cities are federal subjects&mdash;Moscow and Saint Petersburg&mdash;everything else are either republics, oblasts, krais, autonomous okrugs, or an autonomous oblast. Adding the designation will result in the time zone being displayed by the infobox, so it's kinda useful. Let me know if I didn't explain it coherently though :) Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 19:41 (UTC)
 * Just added in the coordinates you provided to the article. Nice how this automatically fills-in a map on the infobox (wasn't aware of this feature before). =) Northamerica1000(talk) 19:52, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Glad to be of service :) Have fun!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 29, 2012; 19:54 (UTC)

A question
I'm working on the Blagodarny article, but I'm unsure of how to fill in the coordinates for the infobox, as there are a total of six numbers in this case. I've searched around for information on how to do so, but not finding much in terms of how the information merges into the infobox. Here are the coordinates:

If you could provide some assistance on how these should be merged into Template:Infobox Russian inhabited locality:
 * latd=
 * latm=
 * lats=
 * longd=
 * longm=
 * longs=

...it would be of great assistance. Thanks for your consideration. Northamerica1000(talk) 03:17, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It's actually pretty straightforward—the numbers from the coord template go into infobox in that same exact order:
 * latd=45
 * latm=05
 * lats=52
 * longd=43
 * longm=26
 * longs=11
 * When you only have four numbers, they go, respectively, into latd, latm, longd, and longm (lats and longs would remain blank). Makes sense?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 30, 2012; 12:00 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the information and for filling in the data at Blagodarny. I've made a note of the correct formatting for future reference. It's imperative that this vital information is absolutely accurate in a digital encyclopedia. It would be nice if better instructions about adding coordinates could be added to various infobox template/instruction pages. Northamerica1000(talk) 13:07, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
 * No problem. The infobox supports a great variety of fields for all kinds of data, and all fields are not necessarily applicable to all cities/towns. Language fields, for example, only make sense for the cities of the republics, and there is a separate field for each possible jurisdiction level, even though for any given city/town some of these levels apply. That's why I removed some of the fields in Blagodarny&mdash;but it doesn't mean these same fields should be removed from all other infoboxes. But since empty fields don't show up in the infobox, don't worry about figuring out which ones belong there and which ones don't.
 * As for the coordinates, this particular infobox's instructions are found (and can be edited) at Template:Infobox Russian inhabited locality/doc&mdash;feel free to revise them in a way that you believe will be helpful to others who are unsure about how to parse the coordinates. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 30, 2012; 13:19 (UTC)

Federal subjects template
Hi Ezhiki, I've been off wiki for a while, and before that one of my last major contributions was reworking this template together with you. I noticed that the official results for the 2010 census are available now, which perhaps makes it a good moment to move the version of this template based on infobox settlement to mainspace (we couldn't do that before because it didn't have enough space to include the 2002 statistics, but this should no longer be an issue). What's your opinion on this? Let me know!--Lady Pablo (talk) 17:58, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, welcome back! Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we go through this last time and found that the result produced with Infobox Settlement does not work well compared to what a dedicated template can do? Census fields weren't the only problem. If you have a draft based on Infobox Settlement sitting somewhere, can you please remind me where it is so I could take another look? Perhaps I'm confusing it with a different template. However, even with the census fields alone, the 2010 Census is certainly not the last one Russia was planning to conduct :) This very same problem will arise a few years from now when the next census is started&mdash;are we going to re-design this template all over again then? Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 2, 2012; 13:39 (UTC)
 * Ah, it's the one on your user page, right? So, I tried in a couple articles, and with the exception of a few cosmetic changes (which I think were an improvement), I don't see any difference in output. Which is great and wonderful, but my question is: if the two templates produce nearly exact same output, what's the point of changing what we have? The cosmetic changes can easily be incorporated into the current template, and your version has a slightly higher preprocessor node count, post-expand include size, and template argument size (which is not surprising, since you are routing the same functionality through another template). Should the template require any further changes (such as when it's time for another census :)), the current template is certainly more amenable to modifications than having to sift through a gazillion of options Infobox Settlement offers (and which may or may not suit the purpose). So, in the end, if you don't mind me asking, what is the benefit? It ain't broke, why fix it? Thanks,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 2, 2012; 14:24 (UTC)
 * You're right, it's no great improvement over the current version and I brought it up mostly because it has been sitting on my user page for months ;)
 * The inhabited locality infobox, on the other hand, is long overdue for a makeover. If I were to rebuild it from scratches I would probably still use Infobox Settlement as a wrapper however, since it's so widely used for just about any inhabited place. Is that alright with you?--Lady Pablo (talk) 19:37, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
 * It is, of course, alright with me if you want to try (it's not like I can tell you what to do or not to do!), but I have the same concerns and more. If the re-built template is going to have the same functionality with no added benefits, then what's the point? Even with the federal subject template, you are basically overriding most parameters&mdash;to me, that's no different than simply using the generic building blocks of Infobox (which is a cleaner approach and results in a more flexible template without artificial restraints of Infobox Settlement, although you did surprise me last time by saying that you see no benefit in that approach). In addition, the inhabited locality template must support both the administrative and municipal aspect of a place&mdash;can Infobox Settlement do that? Last time someone tried to take a jab at that task, that infobox failed miserably. Can it display them in an order that makes sense? Will the re-designed infobox automatically generate the Russia-specific location map? The time zone information? Will it be able to check for common administrative/municipal field conflicts when parameters are entered incorrectly? What about the census&mdash;it is the same problem as with the federal subject? I'd say these are all interesting problems that make for a challenging programming task, but I just don't see any practical value in a conversion even if they are all overcome. Infobox Settlement is a bloated monstrosity, and the fact that templates like Russian inhabited locality cannot be converted without either bloating it even further or re-defining its parameters via a wrapper (which, for the federal subject template, for example, turned out to be not much shorter than the original; and certainly not any easier to maintain in the long run) doesn't win it any points, in my opinion. If you can reason me wrong, please do :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 2, 2012; 19:59 (UTC)

Hi Ëzhiki! I did some work on the template in the sandbox (my own as well as the template's), you can see some of the results here. Of course it's still pretty much a work in progress but it seemed to work with the few articles I checked.--Lady Pablo (talk) 16:27, 9 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks; I'll certainly take a look. Before I make any comments, however, would you please be so kind and answer my previous questions above? Regardless of the implementation, I still don't understand the purpose of the re-design or see its alleged benefits. What is wrong with the existing template that the new one fixes? What benefits does the re-designed template add? From where I stand, you seem to be going through a lot of effort just to reproduce something we already have (which, to my knowledge, works perfectly for its purpose) at the risk of introducing new bugs. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 9, 2012; 16:34 (UTC)
 * Coincidentally I have already made a list of a number of things I don't like about the current version, it's a bit unpolished as it was mostly intended as a memo for myself. You can find it in my user page.--Lady Pablo (talk) 16:56, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, here are my thoughts after trying the template out and seeing the code. However, let me start with the list of issues you have on your user page. Incidentally, I don't think any one of them warrants a complete re-design, as they can be dealt with just as well within the existing template. So, my question still stands&mdash;if you can elaborate further, I'd greatly appreciate it.


 * 1) it includes many informations not normally found in infoboxes, and are probably better presented in the lede
 * I won't comment on this one in depth, since I need to first know which fields you mean. However, most of this infobox's fields not found in other infoboxes are way too specific to be placed into a lede (which is supposed to be a summary of the article, not an infobox substitute).
 * 1) "Administrative center of", is probably already specified in the first few words of the article
 * When it's a straightforward situation (such as for a town which is the administrative center of a district), then yes, it often is. However, it's all too often not straightforward at all, as sometimes a place is the administrative center of several entities; often both municipal and administrative&mdash;putting it all in the lede will result in an awful clunky lede, and placing it in a standalone section often makes it hard to find and eyeball.
 * 1) automatically transcludes a large amount of 'citation needed' tags for facts that are either trivial or unlikely to be challenged
 * We've been through this already. Facts which are truly trivial, supereasy to verify, or unlikely to be challenged (such as the values in the website or federal subject field, or the coordinates) do not generate these tags. Everything else need verification and, sadly, often lacks it in the body of the text. How is municipal jurisdiction, for example, "trivial"? My standard reply to this concern is that if you don't like seeing the "citation needed" tags, go spend fifteen minutes on finding and adding sources to suppress them. If that's too much to ask, I assure you that I fully intend to personally hunt down and eliminate each and every "citation needed" tag in these infoboxes. And although overall it will, of course, take me a while to do, I am always willing to take requests to ref an individual article someone has a problem with.
 * 1) references are also used quite liberally, Vladivostok provides an example of this: the location of the city within the Primorsky Krai is made self-evident by the location map. This extensive use of references to verify patently accurate informations only contributes to the visual clutter.
 * I think you are confusing location with jurisdiction. With Vladivostok, location of the city is made self-evident by just having the city's coordinates&mdash;technically, you don't even need a location map! Jurisdiction, however, is not the same as location. First, there are two jurisdictional aspects for any inhabited locality (administrative and municipal). Second, while it's extremely rare for a location to change, jurisdiction may change quite often. In fact, in Russia it may change so often, that it is useful not only to provide a reference, but to also tell the readers as of which date the reference for the jurisdictional information is current! There is nothing "patently accurate" about the fact that Vladivostok is administratively incorporated as a city under krai jurisdiction and municipally&mdash;as an urban okrug. These facts are entirely non-obvious and need verification.
 * 1) it's too complex considering that it handles just over 1,000 articles. the main template is 25k in size and it calls another 30kb template just to determine the correct location map
 * It handles just over 1,000 articles now, but it belongs in 150,000+ articles (the number of inhabited localities in Russia as of now, all of which will eventually need to be created and use this infobox). The template for the location maps actually does more than just pulling the location map, but I fully agree that it is not optimal at all and could use a re-design. For one, it includes a large number of spelling variants for each federal subject&mdash;it was very useful to have when the work on these articles (which were then a complete mess) just started, but it is not nearly as useful now. I'd estimate that template can be cut in size by three-quarters by just eliminating the spelling variants which are no longer likely to be encountered. It can be further optimized by splitting it into the parts responsible for different things. As for the main template being "too complex", I'd say it is much less complex than what you've just created (which is basically a hack wrapped around an unwieldy monster :))
 * 1) the commons category shouldn't be included in the infobox (Sister_projects)
 * It was someone else's idea to put it there. I personally think it's pretty clever and convenient to have it in the infobox, but I see the point how it's not a likely place to look for those who are accustomed to seeing it at the bottom of the article. This issue could probably use a broader discussion than just between you and me. At any rate, before these links can be removed from the infobox, someone will need to return them to the External links section in the affected articles. Note also that the "where to place links" section does not mandate one location for the Commons link; it merely suggests one.
 * 1) 2002 census stats: removing them creates a glaring "Cite error" in some pages. This should be fixed in the corresponding articles rather than in the template (we can't keep the 2002 figures forever).
 * Could you please give an example of an article which produces a cite error when the 2002 stats are removed? Other than that, yes, of course we can't keep them forever, nor is it the plan. As soon as the final 2010 Census numbers are released (currently they are only available on the federal subjects level, but not for districts or individual localities), the current preliminary 2010 Census results will need to be updated and the 2002 Census data will need to be removed. This is going to be true regardless of what kind of infobox the articles have, or whether they even have one at all.
 * 1) overlinking of simple English words (flag, capital, etc)
 * I mostly agree, but this is easily fixable in the current template. "Flag" and "coat of arms" were first linked in this template's predecessor years ago, when it was a general practice, but currently we tend to unlink simple words such as these. I do disagree with unlinking "capital", though. While it is a simple English word, in this infobox it is used in a highly specific sense (to contrast it with "administrative center"&mdash;an important difference!). Of course, it would help if the target article were more specific about the definition as it pertains to Russia :)
 * 1) the right image maps, location maps and time zones for the article should be fetched by using the OKATO codes
 * OK, this one I don't understand. Why? What's the benefit of using obscure Russia-specific codes (which a person not speaking Russian will have a helluva trouble even finding) as opposed to perfectly standard ISO codes?

Now for the template itself. First off, in my opinion, it looks and is organized much worse than the current template. Mind you, I don't consider the current template the epitome of designer's genius, but it is nevertheless cleaner and more organized than your proposal by leaps and bounds. I'm sure you will be able to address some of these concerns, but much of this I just don't see as fixable as long as you stick to Infobox Settlement: Hopefully I've been specific enough. If I catch something else, I'll certainly follow-up.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 9, 2012; 18:03 (UTC)
 * 1) The biggest problem is the flow. I see you made an effort to keep the administrative and municipal aspects together (which is good), but you also made "Government" into a separate section. However, it refers only to the municipal aspect, which is why the current template groups them together.
 * 2) All in all, the new template looks cluttered. Since there are no longer section headers, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint the section being sought (or determining what aspect a section is dealing with).
 * 3) The approach to the flow is very much hackish. Take, for example, administrative jurisdiction. In order to display it in in a location that makes sense, you had to tie the administrative jurisdiction to the demographics parameter of Infobox settlement. As this guy would say, "I have a two-part question" (Part one being "are you kidding me" and part two being "are you frigging kidding me"). If anything, you've created a perfect demonstration of why using Infobox Settlement is not a good idea for this template! Once you have to jam a value to an unrelated parameter intended for something else entirely, it is a sure sign it's time to stop :) How the template displays to readers is important, but making it easy to maintain is even more important. If, in order to achieve a goal, you have to start treating Infobox Settlement as a generic infobox, then why not just use the generic infobox to begin with?
 * 4) Related to the above, once you have to fit values to ill-suited fields, you lose all flexibility. Current template can easily be re-arranged by just re-numbering the data/label combos. In fact, it's even easier to maintain than templates written solely in HTML! With yours, this task is either impossible, or one would have to resort to even more hacks such as the one with demographics field above. Which is, needless to say, not good at all.
 * 5) I see you replaced the call to the locator map subtemplate with chop head and tail. It certainly significantly cuts the template size, but it also results in illiterate captions such as "location of XXX in Republic of Bashkortostan" and completely eliminates one of the maps if one forgets to wikilink the name of the federal subject (or links to it in an acceptable but unanticipated way).
 * 6) You seem to have missed the longEW parameter. It's easy to fix, but it again demonstrates the pitfalls of an unnecessary complete re-design&mdash;you are bound to introduce new bugs which are hard to catch and which affect some articles in a profusely negative way.
 * 7) The new templates no longer detects impossible combinations of administrative and municipal jurisdictions. The difference between the two aspects is definitely something an encyclopedia worth its salt must cover, and considering how this subject is often confusing even to native Russian speakers, having an extra safeguard is of paramount importance. We can't, of course, fully prevent introduction of such mistakes, but we surely can catch the most common types and give an early warning!
 * 8) Why are the flag and coat of arms at the very top? The purpose of the infobox is to answer the most common questions about the subject of the article (and, preferably, in the order of their commonality). It makes sense that the first question would be "what is it and how does it look like", which is answered by having the name(s) and a well-selected picture at the top. I can't really imagine that the second question would be "what do its flag and coat of arms look like" :) In reality, it probably "where is it"; a question answered by the maps and the coordinates. After that, it's less clear-cut, and while the flag is probably still not the next question, at least at this point it makes sense to group it with the rest of the images. But now I'm just nit-picking :)
 * It will take me a while to answer all these points in full. In the meantime, it's probably better to move the discussion to WP Russia (if I've written something inaccurate in the introductory post feel free to edit it to reflect your view), both to give other users a chace to express their opinions and to avoid filling your user talk with my chatter ;)--Lady Pablo (talk) 13:02, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
 * No problem, take all the time you need. We are not in any particular hurry :) Also, I've summarized my response above an the Wikiproject talk below your post. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 10, 2012; 13:22 (UTC)

100,000 edits

 * You know, I appreciate the gesture, but I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to find a cure against countitis for several years now and this isn't helping :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 2, 2012; 20:38 (UTC)

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Wikipedia Stories Project
Hi!

My name is Victor and I'm a storyteller with the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that supports Wikipedia. I'm chronicling the inspiring stories of the Wikipedia community around the world, including those from readers, editors, and donors. Stories are absolutely essential for any non-profit to persuade people to support the cause, and we know the vast network of people who make and use Wikipedia have so much to share.

I'm scouring user pages looking for inspiring, motivating and interesting stories of how Wikipedia has affected the lives of people. I'm asking questions like "How has Wikipedia changed your life?", "What's the most interesting story you have about Wikipedia?" and "Has Wikipedia ever surprised you?"

Last year, we used the annual fundraiser as a way to show the world who it is who actually writes Wikipedia. We featured editors from Brazil, Ukraine, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, India, United States and England. This campaign was a huge success, resulting in the most financially successful fundraising campaign ever. It was also a campaign that stayed true to the spirit of Wikipedia, educating the public that this free top-5 website is created by volunteers like you and I.

This year we want to highlight more Russian-language Wikipedia editors, so I am in the process of planning a trip to Russia to interview editors.

If you or someone you know (or have heard about) has been positively affected by Wikipedia, or have something interesting to say about Wikipedia I'd very much like to hear about it!

Please let me know if you're inclined to take part in the Wikipedia Stories Project, or if you know someone else with whom I should speak.

Of course, if you have any questions or concerns, please ask! I will answer as soon as I can. I apologize for any poor translation of this letter, I am using Google-translate. I hope it makes you laugh :)

Thank you for your time,

Victor Grigas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Victorgrigas

vgrigas@wikimedia.org

Victor Grigas (talk) 00:55, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Shimanovsky and Svobodensky districts
Hello. Shimanovsky and Svobodensky are the districts which Vostochny Cosmodrome will be located at, and there is no map of them. I think it's important to map them due to the strategic facillity that is now built in their teritory. Do you know how to create and add maps of them? Superzohar Talk 14:12, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I could probably slap up together a basic (and ugly) map, but there are other people who'll be able to do a much better job. I'll ask the person who helped me in the past why there are no district maps for Amur Oblast yet; although it's most likely because usable sources to make such a map aren't readily available.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 7, 2012; 18:49 (UTC)

About that infobox
I read your reply in the WP Russia talk page. I renew my suggestion for you and Pablo to seek an outside opinion (and some designing advice) from someone with more experience in editing similar templates (WP:WikiProject Infoboxes would be the obvious place to look). Cheers, eh bien mon prince (talk) 16:02, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, thanks, but it's really redundant (we both already know that! :)). Pablo's original question was about the overall look and feel of the re-designed infobox vs the current box; autocite issue is only a part of it. I personally think the proposed box is not organized as well and I have a big problem with the fact that it is coded using a questionable approach, that it is going to be a pain to maintain in the long run, that it is not at all flexible in case changes need to be made in the future, and that every single Pablo's concern can be resolved by tweaking the existing template instead of creating a brand new one. Inquiring at WT:RUSSIA is a logical first step to clear all this up, since it's this WikiProject's members who are actually going to use the infobox, fill it out, and make sure that the information it contains is accurate (and verifiable). If issues which are beyond this project's scope surface, of course they can be taken elsewhere for wider input.
 * I also see that you preferred to post a short note here rather than address my concern about putting looks above verifiability. Funny, that :)
 * Best wishes,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 11, 2012; 16:22 (UTC)
 * I dislike addressing the same 'concerns' over and over again. Word to the wise and all that.--eh bien mon prince (talk) 16:35, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * With all due respect, you haven't addressed this one even once.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 11, 2012; 16:38 (UTC)
 * Nope, I have. I've said before that I consider the situation of infoboxes to be similar to the lead of an article, even if there's no policy mandating this. You disagreed, but instead of Refuting the Central Point (no other template on wikipedia behaves like this one, which points to an obvious consensus even lacking a policy) you just went through the previous points again. I've already expressed my opinion on the matter. Please do not write another wall-o-text if you're not genuinely interested in my point of view, I'm not trying to change your mind.--eh bien mon prince (talk) 16:49, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Nope, you haven't. You danced around it quite a bit, is all. You never gave any examples showing a consensus that infoboxes are to be treated the same way as the leads (and by "examples" I don't necessarily mean "policy"; a simple discussion thread on the topic showing a decisive consensus would have shut me up). What you did provide is an assumption that since no other template in Wikipedia behaves like this, it must mean there is a universal agreement that they shouldn't. Sorry, but this is not a "central point"; this is mere speculation. When something is not observed to be done a certain way, it may very well mean that no one else thought about doing things that way before. For all we know, the new way is an improvement (like the introduction of the reference system was in 2005), but unless pros and cons of that way are discussed based on their merits and not on speculative empiric observations, it's hard to establish, isn't it? Which is why I inevitably return to the same question&mdash;how come you put visual appeal (which is nice to have, but not mandatory) above verifiability concerns (addressing which is mandatory)? Do you honestly believe that not marking unreferenced facts taken from who-knows-where (and most of which don't "summarize" shit) in, say, this article's infobox (which, by the way, is a very mild illustration of the problem), will improve the article and "serve our readers better"? Honestly?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 11, 2012; 17:17 (UTC)

Administrative divisions of Kaliningrad Oblast
Hi Ezhiki, you changed the article and wrote (rv--the article is about the administrative divisions. The map deals with the municipal divisions). I don't quite understand, are Russian municipal divisions not identical with administrative divisions? Can you recommend a source with an overview over Russian 2nd and 3rd level (like counties) divisions, the Russian way seems to be confusing. Der Eberswalder (talk) 20:31, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi there! The administrative divisions are a concept distinct from that of the municipal divisions, although it is true that many municipal divisions are formed within the borders of the administrative divisions. The latter are used by the federal and oblast governments, while the former are the units of local self-government. And while in Kaliningrad Oblast the main differences between the two can only be observed below the district level, putting up an overview map of municipal divisions and labeling it "administrative" is still a bad idea. Ideally, of course, the article should cover both aspects (and be renamed after that), in a manner similar to one used in this article, but so far there have been no takers for this (rather daunting) task.
 * There is a brief explanation of both aspects in the subdivisions of Russia article (see the sections titled "administrative divisions" and "municipal divisions"), and you can also peruse the Adygea article I linked to above, since the idea behind the differences is the same across all of the federal subjects of Russia. Hope this helps. Don't hesitate to let me know if anything still needs clarification, or if you have questions after reading those two articles. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 12, 2012; 20:47 (UTC)

kwangmyongsong-3 picture
Hello! i would like to transfer the picture of the satellite from the hebrew wikipedia to the english counterpart. http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A5:Kwangyongsong_3.jpg how to do it? Superzohar Talk 11:13, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I can't read Hebrew, but it looks that the image is copyrighted, so it can't be transferred to the Commons. You can, however, save it to your computer and then upload it to the English Wikipedia using this upload form. Note, however, that you'll be doing so under the fair use provisions, and if those aren't met, the image will be deleted pretty quickly. If you have any questions regarding the process or unsure if this image qualifies for fair use, please ask at WP:CQ, because my familiarity with this kind of issues is only perfunctory.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 13, 2012; 11:52 (UTC)

Districts
Haven't forgotten, will get them done on the weekend!♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:55, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks; much appreciated as usual!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 13, 2012; 18:00 (UTC)
 * Done both, but I had to add a digit in the population templates to stop them giving an error.♦ Dr. Blofeld  12:24, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'll look into the error.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 16, 2012; 13:17 (UTC)
 * Actually, could you please show me where the error occurs? I removed the digits here trying to replicate it, but the result looks the way it is supposed to look when no parameter is entered. Thanks.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 16, 2012; 13:24 (UTC)
 * Area. I presumed the pop figures would create the error like it does for area..♦ Dr. Blofeld  13:27, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see. No, the pop template is designed to catch this kind of stuff. The reason why you didn't see this error with area before is because in the past I normally left the sentence dealing with the area commented out. I'll resume doing so in future templates.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 16, 2012; 13:35 (UTC)
 * OK and I'll avoid adding digits into the pop fields!♦ Dr. Blofeld  13:36, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Russian Federation
Hi! Re: this and the hatnote in Russia. The points made here are of course valid, and the constitution indeed was taken in 1993, but still you write yourself that "the RSFSR was renamed in 1991". Existence of the RSFSR in 1992-1993 is something contrary to the typical understanding of events as well as contrary to the naming. I'd propose to restore the more common dating but make a note explaining the situation with state progression in detail. Grey Hood   Talk  18:51, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi there! I understand what you mean, but while the 1991 date is firmly entrenched into everyone's mind as the typical understanding of events, that does not make it the right date :) I've never seen an academic work that explicitly says that the modern Russian Federation started in 1991; at best those works are vaguely worded than this date could be implied; at worst the wording is such that the 1991 date is inferred from the 1991 renaming of the country. However, if we aim at being an accurate encyclopedia, we should make an effort to stick with the facts, not with what the public opinion dictates.
 * As a quick check, I've pulled a random book off my shelf from the section which deals with post-Soviet Russia, which turned out to be a somewhat dry Federalism and Local Politics in Russia from the BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, edited by Cameron Ross and Adrian Campbell and published in 2009, and which is basically a collection of various articles on the subject of post-Soviet federalism. There, on pages 25–26 it speaks about the Russian "federations": one that endured for nearly seventy years, as... the USSR (1922-91), and the other as its putative successor, the Russian Federation, formally for a mere fifteen years (1993-to date) (emphasis mine—Ё). It further describes the 1991-1993 period as "the resurgence of Russia". As far as understand, this is the view prevalent in the academia, and while it may seem counter-intuitive at first, it makes perfect sense the more you think about it.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 14, 2012; 19:53 (UTC)
 * You see, the problem is that in 1992-1993 the Russian Federation was neither Soviet, nor Socialist, so extending the term RSFSR to that period is strange ;) The part of the source which you have cited does not define exactly what was the state in 1991-1993, but I guess the source would not claim it was Soviet or Socialist. The term "Russian Federation" apparently was used long before in the Soviet Era on the part of the RSFSR. As for the change of the name, here is a citation from Richard Sakwa, "Russian Politics and Society": Russia became an independent state, and the Sixth Congress in April 1992 adopted a constitutional amendment that abolished the name ‘RSFSR’ and introduced ‘Russia’ and ‘Russian Federation’ as names with equal legal validity. So, the name of the country was constitutionally changed in 1992, and extending it to 1993 is historically inaccurate.
 * Of course, the whole legal base of the state order was changed later, with the adoption of the new constitution in 1993. But on that ground to claim that modern Russian Federation started in 1993 is similar to claiming that the United States started in 1788 with the adoption of the constitution, not in 1776 with the declaration of independence or in 1783 with its recognition.
 * In case of Russia we have:
 * 1990 - declaration of sovereignty.
 * 1991 - de facto split from the other Soviet Republics and de facto stopping being Soviet and Socialist
 * 1992 - formal adoption of the modern official names of the country
 * 1993 - modern constitution
 * To all this one could add a question: if RSFSR ceased to exist in 1993 only with the adoption of the new constitution, did other Soviet Republics also exist until their new constitutions were adopted? And in case Russia adopts a new constitution in the following years (which is quite possible, there are two research institutes working on the projects of a new constitution), will Russia become a new state then? Grey  Hood   Talk  16:25, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, the country was not called "Socialist" or "Federative" in 1917–1918 either, yet both years are also included into the date span and no one seems to have a problem with that :) The problem, as I see it, is that our articles normally use the most recent name as a title, but in this case the entity was called the RSFSR for most of its existence, and the other names only were in use for a few years, so renaming the article "Russian Federation" would have been a bad idea even if the legal entity that succeeded it had had a different name.
 * On the issue of my source not claiming that the country in 1991-1993 was "Soviet" or "Socialist", you are partially correct, but that's not the question the article primarily deals with. It does, however, on more than one occasion explicitly exclude the 1991-1993 period from the date span of the modern Russian Federation, which leaves us with a choice of either having a separate article for the 1991-1993 period (which is a really horrible idea), or including this period with the RSFSR (which at least makes sense from the legal standpoint and is supported by the sources). This is further supported by the fact that the 1978 Constitution still referred to the society (if not the country itself) as "Soviet" and "socialist" even after the most recent amendments in 1992.
 * With the other Soviet Republics, one would have to check how the question of their existence is handled in academic sources (I don't really have much interest in that aspect, so I don't have any specific examples). However, you seem to be operating under the assumption that those sources have to treat this matter in a logically consistent manner; sadly, that's not always the case. When sources are contradicting one another, the best we can do is to carefully point it out, but the task of straightening out said inconsistencies is not our job as Wikipedians.
 * To answer your last question, no, if Russia adopts a new Constitution, the article is unlikely to be affected. That's for the same reasons as why we don't have separate articles for the RSFSR under the 1918, 1925, 1937, and 1978 Constitutions. The reason why we have separate articles for the Russian Empire, the RSFSR, and modern Russia, is because the RSFSR was unique in that it was a part of the USSR for most of its history (so the article deals primarily, but not exclusively, with the republic within the USSR, not a separate country), but just as the 1917-1922 period is included into the RSFSR span, the 1991-1993 span is also included. It may not be the most clean way to handle it, but from what I've read, that's the approach most common in the academia, hence that's the approach we should adopt as well. And while I wholeheartedly agree with your logic above, it's important to remember that our first duty is to record and summarize the knowledge, not to improve it.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 15, 2012; 17:00 (UTC)
 * In 1917 the country at least was proclaimed socialist and the power was taken by Bolsheviks supported by the soviets, which all justifies the application of "Soviet" and "Socialist". So I guess the best approach is the de facto approach. And de facto the USSR ceased to exist in 1991 and in 1992-1993 Russia experienced capitalist economic reforms and officially dropped the terms "Soviet" and "Socialist". I see why some scholars may hesitate including 1991-1993 into the date span of the modern Russian Federation (note, however, that even your source says formally for a mere fifteen years (1993-to date) ), but I strongly doubt that this necessitates inclusion of the same period into the RSFSR date span. Sakwa, for example is careful to write about 1991-1993 as transitional period, but he uses the general term Russia, not the RSFSR. I think that to extend the RSFSR date span we should have consensus among the majority of sources that RSFSR existed in 1992-1993, and the sources should directly say that. Grey  Hood   Talk  17:50, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Article 9 of the 1978 Constitution, even after the final 1992 amendments, said that "further development of socialist democracy" is the direction in which the political system of the Soviet society should move and consistently referred to the country's citizenry as "Soviet people". Chapter 4 was titled "Внешнеполитическая деятельность и защита социалистического Отечества", which is pretty close to the wording and spirit of the original 1918 Constitution (and the Constitutions that followed). The only difference is that these words were no longer used in the intro, but de facto the country's goals remained both "Soviet" and "socialist". Note that your Sakwa's example does not in fact refer to the country's declared political system, but rather only its name. Note that no one is trying to say that it is correct the refer to the country as "the RSFSR" during 1991-1993. It is equally incorrect to use this name to refer to the country in 1917-1918. However, both periods are included into the RSFSR article because it is definitely incorrect to include the 1917-1918 period with the Russian Empire, it is also incorrect (although, arguably, less so) to include the 1991-1993 period into the modern Russian Federation period, and it makes little sense to make these periods into stand-alone articles. The confusion is merely due to the choice of the title for our article—it uses the name which prevailed longest during the country's/republic's history, instead of the most recent name as more often is the case (but which would not work well in this case). The span during which the legal entity existed (under whatever name) is more or less universally accepted to be 1917-1993; I certainly can't recall seeing it explicitly questioned in anything I've ever read.
 * Theoretically, I would not be opposed to putting the span as "1917-1991 or 1993" in the RSFSR article, footnoting at the same time that various historians have different opinions regarding the end date, but that would only be on condition that one can in fact find sources that explicitly state that 1991 is the RSFSR's end date, and that the modern Federation also started in 1991. The only sources I can find either use the 1993 date straight up (as in my example above), or carefully sidestep the issue (like Sakwa does in his fairly recent Federalism and Democracy in the Russian Federation, for example), which proves only that some authors believe it's 1993, and others are hesitant to use either date as the divide. To me, that makes 1993 our best choice. What we can't do is to draw "logical conclusions" based on what we merely think the sources mean or, worse yet, what they "should" mean. That's the first step towards original research.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 15, 2012; 18:40 (UTC)
 * Hm, your example says about the formal start of modern Russian Federation since 1993. And the existence of other sources and authors who support this thesis doesn't automatically mean that the same sources and authors would support the thesis that the RSFSR existed until 1993. Yes, we have a transitional period which is excluded from the constitutional post-1993 Russian Federation by some, but inclusion of that transitional period to the RSFSR remains a question, and in my view even more questionable question than merging of the period with the post-1993 Russia. So again, we need consensus among the sources which would directly state the existence of the RSFSR in 1992-1993. The consensus on the point that formally and legally we may be sure that the modern Russian Federation started at least from 1993 is not enough since it deals with post-1993 period, not with the 1991-1993.
 * Perhaps the date span apparently could be put as "1917-1991 or 1992 or 1993" (or perhaps even 1918-1990) according to different definitions.
 * As for the wording of the 1978 constitution which was not immediately amended - well, obviously they could not change all the legal base in an instant, and while the constitution was adopted only in 1993, it was started to get prepared long before: The birth of the new Russian constitution was a long and painful process. Four days after the revolutionary Declaration of Sovereignty of the RSFSR on 12 June 1990, the First Russian CPD on 16 June established a Constitutional Commission to prepare a document that would reflect Russia’s new juridical and political status. Apparantly the first draft was fairly socialist, though Sakwa writes that it was attacked as being ‘anti-Soviet’. But then, after August 1991, With the fall of Soviet power ideological issues, such as individual rights, civil society and judicial reform, were no longer so contentious, but new points of disagreement had emerged. These focused above all on the separation of powers on the horizontal level (between executive and legislative power), and on the vertical level (between the central authorities and components of the federation). Basically in 1991-1993 the consensus was that the country needed new constitution, but because of the power separation disagreements they could not adopt the constitution for all that long time. Which again shows that de facto the country changed in 1991, nominally changed in 1992, and only formally the full legal transition was completed in 1993. Grey  Hood   Talk  20:28, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
 * To clarify my position, I actually like many aspects of the idea that the modern Russian Federation started in 1993. It is much nicer version of events when the country starts with the legal adoption of its basic law than when it starts with a coup and a dissolution of the larger country. But too many de facto developments preclude the wide acceptance of this version. Change of the name of the country, change of its flag in late 1991, de facto stopping being Soviet and socialist by 1992 at the latest - all this doesn't help to accept the "up to 1993" RSFSR version. Grey  Hood   Talk  20:41, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I think you are complicating the matter too much here. As far as Wikipedia goes, we only care about what the sources say. I have shown a source which explicitly dates the start of the modern country to 1993, you do not have a source that equally explicitly dates the start of the modern country to 1991 (Sakwa addresses only the issue of renaming in your example, and he masterfully dances around this issue in his other publications), and I believe we both agree that creating a separate article just for 1991-1993 would be a horrible idea under any circumstances. That leaves the 1991-1993 span no other place other than the RSFSR period. Like I said before, I've never seen a source that puts the end of the RSFSR at 1991, but since I obviously cannot claim I've read everything available on this subject, it may very well turn out that such a source exists. When it is found, the article will need to be amended to include both dates and to cite both views. Until it is found, however, I see no good reason why we should be interpreting the sources on our own or why any sort of consensus should override our most basic policy with regards to the sources.
 * You are obviously entitled to disagree with this assessment. If you wish to start a discussion about this involving a broader audience (I'm sure the folks currently debating Soviet federalism on Talk:Soviet Union will be delighted to include this topic into the scope of their discussion), you are welcome to use this thread as a starting point or even copy-paste it in its entirety and tie it to an RfC. I will be gone on vacation later this week and won't be able to participate, but that's OK, as I don't think I'll be able to add anything substantial to what I've already said anyway. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 16, 2012; 13:56 (UTC)
 * Indeed, no more point in repeating the arguments, so just few primary points to make it clear: you too do not have a source that explicitly dates RSFSR to 1993, that's a problem, and while many authors write about the formal start of modern Russia in 1993 and it is indeed pointless to have a separate article on 1991-1993, this does not mean that merging it with the RSFSR is a good and only possible solution - we should not so freely interprete the sources. Most authors agree that Soviet Socialism ended in 1991 and by the same logic (but in the other direction) we could add the transitional period nowhere else than to the RF rather than to the RSFSR. So basically, if this logic is adopted, it certainly does not provide a clear single solution. Which is strange. I won't pursue the issue while you are on vacation, and I'll be happy with the 1917–1993 RSFSR date span if all the primary details of the dating and state transition are explained in a note (I've just noticed btw - the inclusion of both transitional periods - 1917 and 1991-1993 - to the RSFSR is rather generous ;) ). The 1993 dating, however, visually contradicts the wording in the intro of the RSFSR article and perhaps elsewhere in the body. Also, the hatnote in Russia looks highly confusive to me, even while I understand what it means. ;) Good holidays to you!   Grey  Hood   Talk  23:51, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, point taken. When I find a source that explicitly dates the end of the RSFSR to 1993 (and I'm pretty sure I've seen one; just can't remember where&mdash;and as my luck would have it, it's probably in a pile of books I sent to storage!), I'll certainly let you know. I do, however, disagree with your logic in the post immediately above&mdash;the "Soviet socialism" is not the same concept as the RSFSR (the former is an ideology while the latter is a country/republic), so the logic is not the same, and the resulting conclusion is thus flawed. For all intents and purposes though, I'm starting to believe that it is the infobox approach that's the problem, not the dates. Some facts are just too complex to handle in the simplistic way the infobox forces us to. This should be addressed mostly in the text (with perhaps a note in the infobox saying "see text"), even though I still think the text should be based on what the sources say, not on what our logic leads us to believe.
 * As far as the hatnote in Russia goes, if you can think of a way to word that idea better, by all means please do so. Same goes for initiating a broader discussion&mdash;I don't mind one being had while I'm gone. All the points I could possibly make are already in this thread, and, to be frank, this whole issue is only of limited interest to me. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 17, 2012; 13:35 (UTC)

Me again ;)
Hey, sorry if I disappeared for a while but I've been terribly busy (still am in fact). By rapidly sifting through the discussions so far I understand that you most oppose using infobox settlement, so I will try and create a html-based template over the weekend (probably). I'll send you a message when it's ready so we can discuss changes and improvements. Cheers! Lady Pablo (talk) 01:44, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, yeah, you do have a tendency to suddenly disappear :) No worries, though&mdash;we all have times when we are terribly busy in real life, and we are all volunteers here.
 * Regarding creating an html-based template this weekend, please note that I'm leaving on vacation later this week, and thus won't be able to provide any feedback until I return in May. To be honest, though, I'd be more interested in first seeing your responses to my questions and counter-arguments above. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 17, 2012; 14:00 (UTC)
 * I think the points 1 to four can be solved by using html: government and municipal sections can be merged, the sections headers can be added back, and of course there won't be no need to use any "hacks" ;) 5: a string template can be used to detect whether the caption begins with "Republic" and accordingly add "the". 6: of course the template would be tested extensively for bugs before being moved to mainspace. 7: I'm not sure if this is worth keeping, it depends on how many lines of code it requires and how "expensive" it would be. 8: by using html, all the sections can be moved to any part of the infobox, including the flag. I will answer your other arguments as soon as I have the template working in my sandbox. Bye for now and wonderful holidays to you Ezhiki!--Lady Pablo (talk) 00:44, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, thanks for the answers! Here are a few more points to further the discussion:
 * On point one, yes, I understand that using html is better than using Infobox Settlement; my point, however, is that using Infobox has its own benefits which raw html does not have.
 * On point five, not all republics' names start with "Republic"; some end in "Republic" (cf. "Republic of Bashkortostan" vs. "Udmurt Republic"). I realize that can be caught by using a string template as well, but the question of flexibility and convenience still stands. With your approach, unless the value in the federal_subject field is wikilinked and is exactly what the template expects to see, you are risking losing the second map altogether. The subtemplate, on the other hand, can support a number of the most common name variants, and it is not so large as to visibly affect page loading time or eat up the page template allowances. All in all, using a subtemplate adds flexibility to the main template at the expense of the template allowance reserve (which exists exactly for that purpose). I don't see a compelling reason to make the template less flexible just to free up (and not even re-use) some of that reserve.
 * (Let's make this point 5a). I've just noticed that your remake no longer shows the ISO codes. In itself it is no big deal, but the same can be said about pretty much any other field in the template, and the lack of support is definitely not an improvement. I don't think this one can be solved by using string templates, though :)
 * On point six, who is going to do the testing?
 * On point seven, I respectfully disagree. In the current version, it is not expensive at all, and I find it to be a very useful safeguard. It's easy to enter the right value into the wrong field, and the error message points this out immediately upon preview even before the changes are committed. Also, of course, point seven is only a problem if the template is IS-based; the functionality should be easy to replicate in html.
 * On point eight, using generic makes moving sections around easy even for those who are not familiar with html.
 * That said, thanks for the warm holiday wishes :) I probably won't be able to continue with this discussion until May, so talk to you then! Also, just so you know, I asked this user to comment on the existing infobox, and he obliged here. He is a heavy user of this template, and he has no reasons to be attached to this template as strongly as I may seem to be, which makes his observations especially valuable. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 19, 2012; 13:18 (UTC)

Federal subject scale of maps
Greetings, Ezhiki. It's been a long time since I talked to you last, since I haven't done much on Russia lately. I am questioning why all of these Russian Federal Subject infobox maps are defaulted to 1:100,000 scale. What is the point of drilling down to some irrelevant detail? I just very recently edited a few (previously unmapped) articles with more appropriately-scaled maps. I would re-do the whole mess of them, but I am not sure how to unlock the default scale. Backspace (talk) 00:00, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Hey, long time no see :) Regarding your question, I assume this is the kind of edit you have in mind? Just so you know, moving the coordinates out of the infobox into a coord template is completely unnecessary. The infobox code itself can easily be tweaked to change the default scale (which will automatically change it in all articles which utilize that infobox). 1:100,000 is only used because that's the scale other similar infoboxes used at the time this infobox was designed. If you think 1:500,000 is better, I have no objections. However, I would appreciate it if you moved the coordinates back to the infobox after this change has been implemented. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, of course. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 10, 2012; 17:56 (UTC)
 * OK, it looks that I remembered incorrectly. The infobox template does not hardcode the scale, but it does specify region:RU_type:adm2nd, which is 1:300,000 by default. If you think that's still too detailed, you should probably bring it up on the coord's talk page. The template simply uses the definition which, I assume, was agreed upon elsewhere. There most certainly is no need to override this manually in hundreds of articles. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 10, 2012; 20:09 (UTC)


 * I do not know what a "typical" size is for a Russian "district", so I can't argue whether 1:300,000 is a reasonable default scale to use. All I can say is that, for the recent additions and changes that I have made, I used vastly different scales because, of the ones that I edited, most were among the largest "districts" in Russia. For instance, my edit of Krasnoarmeysky District, Primorsky Krai used a scale of 1:2,500,000, which allowed the entire district to be displayed on a map without zooming in or out. When you changed it back to the default value of 1:300,000, the map was zoomed in so far that I could not tell where the district was. It could have been anyplace, as most of these maps do not provide an outline of the district's borders. Many of the maps in Wikipedia (not just on Russian topics) seem as though they are trying to zoom in to a certain grain of sand, or drop of water (in the ocean)! I am, of course, exaggerating, but I hope you get my point. Backspace (talk) 07:38, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, I understand what you mean. However, you are also right that there is no "typical" size for a district in Russia, so I think it's impossible to pick just one scale that would accommodate them all (although adm2nd already covers most of them). On the other hand, I don't really see it as much of a problem. When I need to look at one of those maps, for example, it's usually because I'm trying to pinpoint a certain place within the district (so I'll have to zoom in anyway) or to see how a district is located compared to other districts (so I'll have to zoom out). The scale of 1:300,000 is usually a good enough starting point, even if on some occasions it's an overkill or an underkill. And of course, district borders not showing on a map doesn't do much for usability regardless of the scale :)
 * It is actually not that difficult to add something like a "coord_scale" parameter to the infobox template (to be used for unusually large or unusually small districts), but, frankly, I just don't see it as an improvement worth making. Every district would eventually have an svg map roughly corresponding to the area you are trying to replicate in external map services, so if the external map is off by one or two zoom levels, is it really that big of a deal?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 11, 2012; 13:21 (UTC)


 * Another good example is my recent edit of Taymyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District. The map scale that I chose pretty much approximated the area shown on the already-displayed map on the upper right of the article. When you reverted to the default scale, it pretty much zoomed in to a very tiny part of the district, without much indication of where the displayed area related to any surrounding entities. Backspace (talk) 20:30, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, you are quite right about that one. I've self-reverted. This district, however, is an abnormally large entity, and there aren't many more like it. Overall, I stand by my opinion that this is too isolated a problem to bother fixing (and I can't really think of a solution that's not too cumbersome :)). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 11, 2012; 20:35 (UTC)

WP:N/GEO
Hi, some time ago I noticed you have a certain interest in handling minor geographical issues. Therefore I would like to invite you to join Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geography) when you come back. I did post some community notices but see surprizingly little interest. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:45, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know. I am, unfortunately, too busy in real life to meaningfully contribute to that discussion, but I will be tracking its progress with interest (and perhaps join when things slow down on my end). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 10, 2012; 17:58 (UTC)

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Khasansky District
Hi! i created the Template:Khasansky District. Maybe u can add categories or any improvement u think that it needs. thx Superzohar Talk 22:32, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know. I'll tweak it a bit in a few days.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 10, 2012; 18:00 (UTC)

Jänisjärvi or Yanisyarvi, Aurora or Avrora?
Hi, here is this picture. So: should Янисъярви be written Jänisjärvi or Yanisyarvi? Also, should this Russian cruiser Аврора be written Aurora or Avrora? --WPK (talk) 15:56, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The answer to your first question depends on the language in which you need to write that name. The sign in the picture is obviously in Russian and Karelian, not in English. Regarding Aurora/Avrora, it's the same explanation as with the Blagoveshchensky/Annunciation Bridge. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 10, 2012; 18:05 (UTC)
 * "...depends on the language in which you need to write that name." Not at all, the place in Russia, Jänisjärvi is a Finnish name - not a Russian, not an English etc. - and written on Cyrillic script in Russian Янисъярви (as if '"Janisjarvi" in Finnish and "Yanisyarvi" in English).
 * Aurora is a Latin name - not a Russian, not an English etc. - and written on Cyrillic script in Russian Аврора (as if "Avrora").
 * Karl Liebknecht is a German name - not a Russian, not an English etc. - so the place in Russia is Imeni Karla Liebknechta and written on Cyrillic script in Russian Имени Карла Либкнехта (as if "Imeni Karla Libknechta" in German and "Imeni Karla Libknekhta" in English).
 * Schmidt is a German name - not a Russian, not an English etc. - so the Annunciation Bridge in St. Petersburg, Russia was written on Cyrillic script in Russian Мост Лейтенанта Шмидта (1918-2007) - not on Latin script "Most Leytenanta Shmidta" (in English) or "Most Leitenanta Šmidta" (in Finnish), but Most Leytenanta (E.)/Leitenanta (F.) Schmidta.
 * Karl Marx is a German name - not a Russian, not an English etc. - so the many streets still named in Russia are written on Cyrillic script in Russian Улица Карла Маркса - not on Latin script "Ulitsa Karla Marksa", but Ulitsa Karla Marxa.
 * --WPK (talk) 11:57, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Spelling errors in File: and Image: names.
I am aware that spelling errors in File: names and Image: names, not to mention #REDIRECTS, should NOT be fixed, but occasionally do not notice the same. It would help if wiki could highlight say File: and Image: etc, is a different colour, not being black, to make these keywords easier to spot.

If one finds an incorrectly "corrected" File: names, mark it briefly '''rv bad File: name fix. Tabletop (talk) 04:02, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the tip, and yes, it would have been nice to have those key words in a different color. I made this same mistake on more than one occasion myself :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 11, 2012; 13:24 (UTC)

Pushkin park
I just noticed the new article Pushkin's park. Should this be Pushkin park instead? Looks like the aricle needs refs etc. I switched to a copy-right free image. INeverCry  22:49, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, you are right, "Pushkin's park" is definitely incorrect. If the Russian name of the park is "парк Пушкина", then the article should be at "Pushkin Park", and if it's "Пушкинский парк", then the best title would be "Pushkinsky Park" (although "Pushkin Park" could work OK as well). At any rate, is it even notable?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 14, 2012; 13:28 (UTC)
 * It is Парк имени Пушкина, so that it should be Pushkin Park I guess. It is the biggest park in Saransk, I visited it couple of years ago. Must be notable, the question is whether someone will find the references proving notability.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:35, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
 * If so, then yes, I agree, "Pushkin Park" is the best choice. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 14, 2012; 13:50 (UTC)

Novgorod Oblast
I have completed all the articles in any way related to administrative divisions of Novgorod Oblast, and they are ready for inspection. In the meanwhile, I created one article on a district in Leningrad Oblast, and another one on a district in Pskov Oblast. I will greatly appreciate if you have a look at these two to correct the things, so that I could proceed with the others. No hurry though. Thanks in advance.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:50, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know! By the way, I'm quickly approaching the stage in my own master plan (mwa-ha-ha) where I'll start working on the districts articles quickly (i.e., not just the paltry three a day I do now). I want to finish Kursk Oblast next, but then will be able to do all of Leningrad Oblast and can also do Pskov Oblast out of turn no problem. This way you'll have carcasses to grow meat on without having to worry about all those pesky formatting issues :)
 * Novgorod Oblast, that one I'll probably be reviewing gradually—it's easy to miss things when looking at larger articles in rapid sequence.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 16, 2012; 13:15 (UTC)
 * Do you advise me then to keep away from Leningrad and Pskov Oblasts until you create the carcasses? It would be in principle no problem, but then in the meanwhile I would need to do smth where we have the carcasses already. You are probably the only person having the total overview. What are the federal subjects which have the carcasses but are not completely done?--Ymblanter (talk) 13:26, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
 * No, you are welcome to work on any of those&mdash;least of all I want to be an impediment to real improvement! The only major inconvenience to me is when an infobox is already in place and partially populated (because it is easier to add the whole thing at once without worrying about accidentally overwriting existing bits), so if you could skip the infoboxes for now, that'd be much appreciated. Other than that, it's easy to shuffle existing text around. With your work in particular it's even easier, because you are adding text in well-defined blocks.
 * Regarding the existing carcasses, they are in place for all the krais and all the oblasts from Amur to Kurgan (in this order; Kurgan Oblast will be finished early next week). Republics are technically also all done, but some of those were finished so long ago that I'm now no longer satisfied with the condition they are in. This shouldn't be a problem for the kind of work you do, however.
 * If I may ask, what is your preferred order of work? Perhaps I could tweak something on my side so we don't end up standing in each other's way waiting for the other to start or finish?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 16, 2012; 13:40 (UTC)
 * I do not particularly care of the order. I am unwilling to take the republics for now, since it would require me going into a lot of stuff related to national cultures (the articles on the topic I see make me crying), and also probably not Moscow and not Saint Petersburg since their districts are way too specific and different from the general pattern I was working on. For the rest, I do not have any preference. I was trying to move geographically since it is more convenient - for instance, I found the materials on pre-1944 Leningrad Oblast, which are good enough for Novgorod and Pskov Oblasts as well, but it is not crucial. My plan was to do Pskov, then Leningrad, then to start Tver. May a bit in parallel of Pskov and Leningrad since there are a lot of towns and urban-type settlements in Leningrad Oblast, and it would be plain boring doing them for days without any break, but this is not essential. It took me a full year to complete Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Novgorod Oblasts, and I do not expect that things would considerably speed up now. Each oblast would still cost me at least a couple of months, may be more.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:50, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks; this is good to know. I'll keep Leningrad, Pskov, and Tver Oblasts in mind, and will plan to create the carcasses for those before starting anything else (but after finishing Kursk Oblast). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 16, 2012; 13:55 (UTC)

Request for translation
Could you verify that the described type of subdivision existed in real? (ru:Туземный_район) If yes, could you create a stab for it with the correct naming. --Üñţïf̣ļëŗ ( see also: ә? Ә!) 07:41, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The concept is definitely real. I need to check my library to see if I have enough material for a stub, though. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 22, 2012; 14:03 (UTC)
 * Спасибо :) --Üñţïf̣ļëŗ ( see also: ә? Ә!) 05:49, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Luostari
As You see, Луостари, Luostari is a rural locality in Russia, but it has a Finnish name and means monastery in English and монастырь, monastyr in Russian. So, e.g. Янисъярви, Jänisjärvi is a Finnish name (not "Yanisyarvi"); Имени Карла Либкнехта, Imeni Karla Liebknechta (not "Imeni Karla Libknekhta") has its German parts from Karl Liebknecht; Тольятти, Togliatti (not "Tolyatti") has named after Italian Palmiro Togliatti - and don't forget TogliattiAzot. Also many, many other places in Russia have names, which are not Russian. --WPK (talk) 00:14, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * As I previously said many times before, yes, there are many places in Russia the names of which originate in languages other than Russian. There are, however, no places in Russia which do not have a Russian name. Romanization (especially romanization of toponyms) deals with those Russian names and pays no regard to their origins. Once you start paying attention to the origins, it's no longer romanization but a combination of translation, synthesis, and original research.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 29, 2012; 13:36 (UTC)


 * On the contrary, there are many, many places in Russia which do not have a Russian name: Luostari is a Finnish name and means monastery in English and монастырь, monastyr in Russian, Jänisjärvi is a Finnish name and means hare lake in English and заячье озеро, zayachye ozero in Russian etc. etc.
 * --WPK (talk) 17:26, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * You've got to be kidding me... "Luostari" is not the Russian name of the place, of course. But "Луостари" is. "Luostari" does not need to be romanized. But "Луостари" does. The place known as Jänisjärvi in Finnish is not called "Заячье Озеро" in Russian. It is called "Янисъярви"&mdash;that, and nothing else, is its Russian name. "Заячье озеро" is a translation of the Finnish word, but it is not the name of the place in Russian. For the purposes of romanization nobody ever cares what that name may mean in Finnish or through which language(s) it ended up in Russian; the only thing that's taken into consideration is how it is spelled in (spelled in, not translated to) Russian. What you are trying to show above has nothing to do with romanization, and once you understand that, a great number of your questions will answer themselves.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 29, 2012; 17:46 (UTC)


 * There are really many names of places in Russia, which are direct loanwords from other languages, e.g.:
 * Luostari is a Finnish name (means monastery in English and монастырь, monastyr in Russian) and is written as Луостари in Russian,
 * Jänisjärvi is a Finnish name (means hare lake in English and заячье озеро, zayachye ozero in Russian) and is written as Янисъярви in Russian
 * - not back as "Janisjarvi" in Finnish or "Yanisyarvi" in English,
 * Togliatti is an Italian name and is written as Тольятти in Russian
 * - not back as "Toljatti" in Italian and in Finnish or "Tolyatti" in English etc., etc.
 * You've got to be kidding me, that a Russian chemical company TogliattiAzot would have been named after a communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, but not either after a Russian place "Tolyatti" - instead is has been named after a Russian place, which has an Italian name Togliatti (from Palmiro Togliatti).
 * --WPK (talk) 23:08, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Shapsug Reservoir
Thought you might find something more on this in Russian.♦ Dr. Blofeld  22:08, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I never know what kind of request to expect from you next :) Anyway, I tweaked the existing text a little and added a couple sentences/refs from Russian sources. The most important facts are already well covered, so there's not much to add without going extra deep. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 29, 2012; 23:45 (UTC)

Thanks!♦ Dr. Blofeld  07:49, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

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dabs
Should I tag Russia-related dabs with wp:Russia? INeverCry  18:21, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's necessary. A dab is strictly a navigational tool, regulated by WP:MOSDAB, and the fact that all or most of its entries happen to relate to Russia is often purely coincidental. If anything is wrong with a dab, the task of fixing it falls onto the members of the Disambig WikiProject; there's next to nothing WP:RUSSIA members can do about it from WP:RUSSIA's standpoint, nor do I believe anyone is interested in tracking dabs which happen to include Russia-specific entries. That said, if you have a situation in mind where having Russia-specific dabs might be handy, it should probably be pointed out at WT:RUSSIA. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 7, 2012; 18:28 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick response. I'll skip these when going thru the new article announcements. INeverCry  18:35, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

New icon for the Physical geography task force
Hello! The old snowy satellite image of Russia was unfortunately deleted from Commons, and so far I haven't found any better replacement than this pic. Could you please insert it to the WP:RUSSIA template? Grey Hood   Talk  20:03, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Ugh, that one's pathetic (but it's better than what I was able to find, which is nothing). Thanks! I've updated the template.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 7, 2012; 20:18 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I am not happy about that picture but can't find anything better which would look OK at the needed small size. Grey  Hood   Talk  23:58, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Assessment question
I keep coming across pages like this: Burtnyk, that have stub tags on them. Should this really be a stub, or is it a list? It looks like something that would end up being a permanent stub if it's not a list. I ask because if I want to rate it list-class I would have to remove the stub tags, so I wanted to see what you thought about it. INeverCry  00:55, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * It's actually a set index article—a bastard child of Father Disambiguation and Mother List (with Family Friend Article sometimes playing a role) :) Set indices are WikiProject-specific, and are treated the way the WikiProject into the auspices of which it falls desires it to be treated. Set indices on last names are covered by WikiProject Anthroponymy, which tends to treat them as article/list combos (the idea being that it should be possible to write about the origins and history of any last name, and that blurb would then be followed by a list of people with that last name). WP:RUSSIA has set indices on districts and inhabited localities (like this and this or, in a less developed state, like this). Those are treated as lists (including in assessments), but don't normally have stub tags. With last name pages, I'd assess them as List-class regardless of whether they have stub tags or not, because that's what they are usually the closest to, but you might also want to inquire about this on the WikiProject Anthroponymy's talk page to make sure that's what they do. I don't normally assess pages about last names so my advice is just a hunch.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 8, 2012; 01:11 (UTC)
 * Your hunch matches mine, so I think I'll just rate them list/low and leave it at that. I still have 300 more unknown-importance Russia articles to go thru. INeverCry  01:36, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

World's First Hyperboloid structure
Hello. I saw your edit in this article so I came to ask your help. User:Arssenev moved this article from Polibino, Lipetsk Oblast (now redirects to disambig Polibino, Dankovsky District, Lipetsk Oblast which is incorrect as I think), so an article about village became an article about one unique construction from this willage and even with wrong name. So I'm asking you to revert his edits and to rename this article back with redirect suppression. If he wants to create a new article about a tower, he can split this article, moving his version to Shukhov's tower in Polibino. --Rave (talk) 07:14, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Rave! Thanks for your note.
 * The redirect is actually correct, since there are two rural localities in Lipetsk Oblast called Polibino (one in Dankovsky District, the other in Zadonsky District). "Polibino, Lipetsk Oblast" may refer to either, and neither is more notable than the other, so the set index page is the best target for the redirect. I'll create a stub for the other village later today.
 * Regarding the article about the tower, it definitely needs to be moved (if only to correct capitalization), but since there are multiple variants to choose from, I think this would best be handled by a move request. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 15, 2012; 12:03 (UTC)

executive authorities of Russia
i added ministry of energy in template:Executive authorities of Russia, and i dont see it. i dont get my mistake. thx Superzohar Talk 10:17, 17 June 2012 (UTC)
 * With these templates, you need to have something in both the "group#" and "list#" fields for the line to show up. If only the "group#" field is filled out, the line will not show. The problem with the line you added is the same as with, for example, group3, which also has nothing under list3 and also does not show.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 17, 2012; 16:09 (UTC)

Questions about Wikipedia & SuggestBot
Hi, we’ve been running a research experiment with SuggestBot and would like to ask you some questions about Wikipedia and SuggestBot. You can find more information and the questions on this page. It should take less than ten minutes to respond. We would greatly appreciate if you had the time to participate! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:20, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Assessment
Can you take a look at Main Centre for Missile Attack Warning and assess it for WP:RU? At first glance it looks like something that would be start/high, but I wanted to check with you, as it seems a bit strange that there's no Ru interwiki, and that such a seemingly important subject would be just now getting an article... INeverCry  08:22, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, it's not actually all that surprising that we only now got an article. I don't recall having anyone around interested in this topic until now. The subject is most definitely real and notable (as evidenced both by the sources used in the article and this). I've assessed it as C/Mid; feel free to change if you disagree.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 22, 2012; 13:29 (UTC)
 * Thanks for doing this one. I wanted to avoid rating it too high. You're assessment looks perfect. INeverCry  16:58, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Copyvio problem
I just assessed this article: Vladimir III Igorevich - most of it looks like it comes word for word from the given source, (Dimnik, Martin The Dynasty of Chernigov - 1146–1246), which was published in 2003. I searched one sentence: here and it matches exactly. I searched anthor sentence here and found that the exact sentence is used in several other wp articles as you can see. It would appear that the majority of material in these and possibly other articles by this particular user (User:Borsoka) are copyvio. INeverCry  08:40, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I've marked it as a copyvio as a precaution, although I will still need to look at it closer. My first impression is that much of the article is closely paraphrased, with only occasional sentences taken verbatim. The other sentence you searched for, for example, is not in the book at all.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 22, 2012; 14:56 (UTC)
 * I showed the 2nd link basically to call attention to the other articles, which have the same copyvio problems and extremely close paraphrasing. Svyatoslav III Igorevich has this exact copyvio sentence: here and probably more. I don't doubt the others do too. The language used in these articles, though not always exactly the same as that source, is still much too close throughout. The language used in these articles sounds like a historical chronicle rather than encyclopedia articles. INeverCry  16:54, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
 * There's a helpful listing of Borsoka's major contributions at Contributor copyright investigations/Borsoka, if you're interested. (Forgive the mojibake -- blame Windows -- but diffs should still work.) I've marked off the three you blanked a couple of days ago. MER-C 09:23, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you; I was not aware of that listing. It was a lot of work and is much appreciated. I was going to tell INC below that the barnstar is a bit premature since I've only just started looking the contributions over and only marked the three he pointed out to me. At any rate, I'll make a point to help out with the rest of those. If there's anything else I need to know (such as whether there have been sanctions or similar), please tell me. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 25, 2012; 13:43 (UTC)
 * Thanks for helping out. Borsoka hasn't edited substantially since the CCI was created, however if he contributes further copyvios he should be indefinitely blocked. MER-C 03:14, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

---

Roschinsky, Samara
Please place Рощинский (Самарская область) on your long-term stub creation list, for 3rd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade and other formations. All best wishes, Buckshot06 (talk) 08:34, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, done. Have fun with the rest of it :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 25, 2012; 15:43 (UTC)

Tatarstan
So I found a university paper which says 55% of Tatarstan's population is Muslim. This is a reliable source and I want to put this in the article, but its in pdf format and I don't know how to cite those. 68.150.245.177 (talk) 05:57, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Indeed, I removed the link as it was not working. I am not sure why you do not like the 2010 census anyway.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:50, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes it did not work so I want to source the pdf file. I want to know how to link to those.
 * I don't like the 2010 census because we have contradictory numbers in the demographics area. I am not sure why you don't like the new census numbers. 68.150.245.177 (talk) 20:06, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
 * If you post a link to that document here (don't worry about formatting or anything; just copy/paste whatever is in your browser's address bar when you open the pdf), I'll be happy to help you from there.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 25, 2012; 20:14 (UTC)
 * I've replaced the thesis link with the link to the original work that thesis cites. I don't have a problem with that source. However, do you not find it ironic that Krindatch's article was published in 2004, which most certainly means that he used either the 2002 Census results or one of the even older works listed among his references on page 136? :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 27, 2012; 18:54 (UTC)

Khasansky District
Hi, whats up? I just remind u, if you have some improvements u can add to the Temlate:Khasansky District I have created. Besides, i have created articles for all Russian Government ministries, if you have also smth to improve there, u r welcome to do it. Take care, Superzohar Talk 07:55, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi! Sorry for the delay. I haven't forgotten, but keep procrastinating :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 26, 2012; 17:03 (UTC)

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Re: dab page link
You reverted my change to remove the dab link for "eastern". I started a discussion on this topic here: Talk:Vostochny_District. Please let me know why you think a dab link is appropriate in this context. Coastside (talk) 14:05, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I've responded on that page. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 29, 2012; 14:22 (UTC)

Template:Mongolian legislative election, 2012
Hi I created the template, but as usual, problems. can u help me fix it? Superzohar Talk 19:00, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Certainly. I see that the lines are skewed somewhat. Is that all, or is there something else that needs fixing?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 29, 2012; 19:09 (UTC)
 * I think thats it basically, but can be sure only when numbers will be located. Superzohar [[Image:Red star.svg|13px]] Talk 19:13, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, I think I got it. Let me know if you find anything else (and sorry I overrode the numbers which were already there).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 29, 2012; 19:22 (UTC)
 * Yes thank you. Now it looks asthetic and good. BTW, in the template:Khasansky District there is one settlement Андреевка i didnt know how to write it in english andreevka, andryevka or smth else so its still in Russian. And Витязь i translated Vityaz' i hope its good. Superzohar [[Image:Red star.svg|13px]] Talk 19:40, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
 * You are welcome. "Андреевка" would be "Andreyevka", and "Витязь" would be "Vityaz" (the apostrophe for the soft sign is normally dropped; as per WP:RUS). The reason I'm postponing the review of that template is because most of the place names in Primorsky Krai overall and in Khasansky District in particular are ambiguous. It's very labor-intensive to manually check every single one for dups (just look at the Andreyevka page to see what I mean!). I am able to automate most of that, but I'm hesitant to work on such lists until the foundation for such work is built&mdash;it's really important to have all districts, cities, urban-type settlements, and selsoviets covered first, or we'll have to continuously return to the inhabited localities lists to tweak the links in the descriptions and/or relink the targets. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 29, 2012; 19:51 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 5, 2012; 20:06 (UTC)

Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces
Hi its me again:-)

I want to write article based on the russian wikipedia Верховный Главнокомандующий Вооружёнными Силами Российской Федерации. What is the more correct english wiki name? Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces or Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces? thx Superzohar Talk 12:15, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't really know whether this is the term which is predominantly used in English to refer to that rank, but as a translation it seems OK to me (if I were to translate it, I'd use that exact term). I'll ask someone else to double-check though.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 9, 2012; 13:43 (UTC)
 * hi! i decided the most correct translation is Supreme Commander-in-Chief. so what u think it should be: Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces, or Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Russia or Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation? take care Superzohar [[Image:Red star.svg|13px]] Talk 12:17, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd go with the last one ("Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation") as it's the closest to the original, but if you have sources in English using a different term, then you should probably use that instead.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 16, 2012; 13:29 (UTC)

Removed gallery
Hi. Why did you remove this gallery? --Søren 21:30, 9 July 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ceroi (talk • contribs)
 * Hi there! That one was more of an editorial decision than anything. Galleries are very useful tools, but having a gallery just for the sake of having a gallery isn't really that beneficial. When you have an article about a painter, galleries are the best choice to show that painter's most notable works, or when you have an article about a landmark, having a gallery illustrating various views of that landmark is also useful. Alternatively, pictures illustrating some important aspect of a topic but not covered in the text also rightfully belong in a gallery (at least until someone takes time to cover them in the text, after which they can be incorporated in the appropriate paragraph). But having a gallery which basically picks a few random pictures or duplicates a corresponding Commons category isn't really helpful. The gallery I removed, for example, contained three pictures&mdash;one showing the city on the banks of the river (which is a thematic duplicate of the picture in the infobox), a painting by Kozhin (a thematic duplicate of Bilibin's painting, although it can be argued which of those two is a better illustration), and a painting of a bridge by Presnyakov (which does not extend the article in any way). All three are available on the Commons, the Commons cat is linked to from the article, so nothing hasn't really been lost.
 * I understand this may seem a somewhat arbitrary decision, but that's why I never insist on keeping such galleries out if someone restores them. I do, however, stand by my opinion that the gallery in the condition I removed it was not all that useful to readers. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 10, 2012; 13:07 (UTC)

Snezhnoye, CAO
Hi, wondered whether you had time to review Snezhnoye? I Think I have exhausted all relevant sources in russian and english, it seems only one woman has published extensive studies of the village. Anyway, it was at start status when it was first reviewed. I was wondering whether there was any chance of a GA status. I'm still reading up on Chukotka and spent several weeks there last year so thought it would be a good idea to focus on one article to get some sort of critcism that I could take to other articles. I'd like to take this to peer review, but have built the article after reading numerous academic articles so if you could provide feedback on this I think it would help me out a lot on expanding a lot of the remaining CAO articles. I don't want to do the same thing to a number of articles but be heading in the wrong direction. Thanks in advance. Fenix down (talk) 23:33, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Funny you should mention this one, because I added it to my review list just a couple days ago :) I'll try to take a good look at it in the next week or two. But I must say, for a half-dead village in the Extreme North of Russia, the number of sources you've been able to dig up is truly amazing. I'm sure some cleanup will be required, but with this amount of material (and considering the obscureness of the topic) the article should easily pass the GA requirements (although putting it through a peer review first should indeed lay way for other articles you worked on). Thank you ever so much for your interest in this subject and for the amount of effort you put in! I only wish we could order the likes of yourself in triplicate :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 10, 2012; 13:18 (UTC)
 * As promised, I gave that article a read and made a few changes (which are by no means exhaustive). My overall impression is unchanged&mdash;the article has lots and lots of good material, addressing the verifiability and broad coverage requirements of GACR in spades. However, I've also noticed some problems with readability. The amount of material is great, but there seems to be a fair amount of repetition, jumping back and forth, restating the same fact more than once, and other similar things. I revised the Prehistory and Soviet history sections to show what I mean. In other words, the article is a great first draft, but I'm afraid it might fail the "well-written" criterion of GAN if nominated in its present state.
 * I will be more than happy to assist with copyediting, but you should probably go through the article as well (perhaps after taking a short break so you could read it on a fresh head), since at this point you are the person most familiar with what the sources say. After the readability concern is addressed, I think the article has a very good chance of passing GAN.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 26, 2012; 16:46 (UTC)
 * Thanks for starting the copy-ed process. i have had another look at it after a break and have made some significant changes, mainly merging the economy and history sections partly because they did contain a lot of duplicated information and partly because as a settlement founded to deal with an economic need, it is difficult to separate them without duplicating information. If you have a chance to have another read sometime and let me know whether it is in a worthwhile state to send to peer review I would be grateful. Thanks. Fenix down (talk) 13:43, 29 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Absolutely! I'll probably get to it after the holiday weekend. Thanks again!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 29, 2012; 13:47 (UTC)

Settlements in republics
In Russian Wikipedia, lists of settlements by size are widely used in articles about republics, see example: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кабардино-Балкария#.D0.9D.D0.B0.D1.81.D0.B5.D0.BB.D1.91.D0.BD.D0.BD.D1.8B.D0.B5_.D0.BF.D1.83.D0.BD.D0.BA.D1.82.D1.8B Is there a reason why we should not use these lists here? PANONIAN 21:32, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
 * If you are trying to list them by size, then perhaps labeling them as "most populous", instead of "main" would make more sense? "Main" sounds too vague, to me at least. As for the list being a part of the Demographics section, that's actually a good idea.
 * I don't really object to having those lists all that strongly, but I just can't shake off the feeling of redundancy and clutter when I see them (including in the Russian Wikipedia). A sentence listing, say, top five most populous places is a good addition to either Demographics or Administrative divisions section, but the minute details fit better in a subarticle. The fewer tables with stats we have in top-level articles, the better. The "Vital stats" sections are particularly horrible&mdash;I can imagine them being useful in an article dedicated to demographics of a republic, but on the top level they are nothing but clutter. There's a lot to be said for a well-placed concise summary :)
 * Regarding the actual population figures, perhaps listing the final 2010 Census population figures would be a better choice for this? The Gazeteer marks the 2012 figures as "calculation", and it's not really clear how they arrived to those numbers. What do you think?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 10, 2012; 21:42 (UTC)
 * Well, I just added another list here: (I used description "most populous" as you proposed and 2010 census numbers from Russian Wikipedia). We may not agree whether these settlement lists are useful or not, but I think that they are very useful (demographics is one of my main interests and lists of cities or ethnic groups by size are very important by my opinion). Of course, if you think that these lists do not belong into main republic articles, I would not object that they are moved to sub-articles. However, I think that we definitely should have these lists somewhere.  PANONIAN  21:54, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I've corrected some spelling/links and gave precise population numbers for the KBR list.
 * Regarding the demographics, I'm not saying that it shouldn't be covered :) I'm saying that all those lists would better belong in something like demographics of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic etc., instead on the top level where they are of interest only to a small portion of the readers and a clutter to the rest. There, a short summary is all that's needed, really. And if demographics is a topic you are mostly interested in, perhaps you'd consider starting working on the "demographics of..." series of articles? That would certainly be quite neat! Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 10, 2012; 22:01 (UTC)
 * OK, but, currently I do not have enough free time to create such detailed demographics articles. At this moment, I mostly work on maps and some demographic data related to ethnicities and sizes of the cities. In the future, I might do other things as well. PANONIAN  21:34, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I understand, but they don't have to be terribly detailed right from the start. Just a place to hold all those huge tables which are already there and a brief summary around them. But it's your call, of course.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 12, 2012; 12:05 (UTC)

Credo Reference Update & Survey (your opinion requested)
Credo Reference, who generously donated 400 free Credo 250 research accounts to Wikipedia editors over the past two years, has offered to expand the program to include 100 additional reference resources. Credo wants Wikipedia editors to select which resources they want most. So, we put together a quick survey to do that:


 * Link to Survey (should take between 5-10 minutes): http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N8FQ6MM

It also asks some basic questions about what you like about the Credo program and what you might want to improve.

At this time only the initial 400 editors have accounts, but even if you do not have an account, you still might want to weigh in on which resources would be most valuable for the community (for example, through WikiProject Resource Exchange).

Also, if you have an account but no longer want to use it, please leave me a note so another editor can take your spot.

If you have any other questions or comments, drop by my talk page or email me at wikiocaasi@yahoo.com. Cheers! Ocaasit &#124; c 17:16, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Vandalism redux
Sad. --Ghirla-трёп- 04:54, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, Ghirla, old chum. Top o' the morning to you, too!
 * You know, for a guy whose main argument in a similar situation in the past was "if it's good enough for the Russian Wikipedia, it ought to be good here as well", you seem to be rather inconsistent in what you find "sad" these days.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 12, 2012; 12:13 (UTC)

Administrative Divisions of Leningrad Oblast
The website where the were pages from the handbook of Administrative Divisions of Leningrad Oblast is dead (the domain registration not extended). The cache is still available, but it will be gone pretty soon. What are we going to do? I used it heavily for Pskov and Vologda Oblasts. For Pskov Oblast, we have apparently the same info, though the site does not look trustworthy, but for the west of Vologda Oblast I have no idea what we are going to refer to.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:41, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, crud! I hate when something like that happens. But by the looks of it, if it's just the domain that has expired, perhaps the resource is not yet lost (if they renew it soon).
 * For doing actual work, I did save that website for local reference&mdash;I'll be happy to email it to you if you need it. And as far as the refs already in place go, there really isn't much we can do there. Since the source is obviously valid and reliable, I suggest we just strip the links and leave the bibliographic information in place (with a note that the original text came from a website which is no longer available, per WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT).
 * I also have a couple of (actual paper) books on the administrative divisions of Leningrad and Vologda Oblasts, although they are more convoluted and generic that the online source that went south. I should be able to verify some things with their help, though, so please don't hesitate to ask.
 * As for the druzhkovka site, I also have that book in paper format, so if you use that site for your work, I should be able to verify everything in the actual book. If we do that, then it's probably unnecessary to cite the druzhkovka cite at all as giving bibliographic information should be sufficient.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 12, 2012; 14:42 (UTC)
 * Thanks. We probably need to wait a couple of weeks before replacing all links. (I do not believe the site will be available at the same address again). Concerning the druzhkovka site, they seem to be pretty informative. It would be great to have the page numbers if we site the book, but here probably the best course of action for me would be to finish all districts of Pskov Oblast + the administrative divisions, and then to ask you to check references (probably sometime in the fall, right now I am about 30% done).--Ymblanter (talk) 14:47, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, I was going to suggest the same thing—we should certainly not rush into changing the refs right away. As for the Pskov Oblast plan, sounds good to me. Just let me know when you need me back there (and no, I have not forgotten that I also promised to work on the dates in Novgorod Oblast districts). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 12, 2012; 14:52 (UTC)

Gazimursky Zavod
Greetings. Can you add the data to this? Will try to source it later unless you can.♦ Dr. Blofeld  11:18, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
 * How's this for a start?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 17, 2012; 16:49 (UTC)
 * That's great, thanks. I do miss the green color of the infoboxes though, seemed more suitable.♦ Dr. Blofeld  16:57, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I do too. But apparently it was that green color that hypnotized some folks into thinking that the whole template is "horrible", because the complaints stopped immediately after the color had been changed :) But hey, the districts are still green! Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 17, 2012; 17:02 (UTC)
 * I used to think that too but I gradually came to think of the green as "Russian" for some reason. The generic blue on the nav boxes is enough,..♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:05, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's the thing. Blue is too generic these days. I'm all for standardization, but when everything is blue, it starts looking kind of monotonous. A little color coding never killed anybody :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 17, 2012; 17:08 (UTC)

Istra, Istrinsky District, Moscow Oblast hatnote
FYI: Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation. --Joy &#91;shallot&#93; (talk) 08:48, 18 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Hi Ezhiki. Congratulations for taking a stand at WT:DAB. I especially agree with this:
 * "See, your argument is strictly in terms of Wikipedia infrastructure. The readers, however, reach our articles from all sorts of external places and aren't necessarily familiar with Wikipedia's rigid arbitrary rules of disambiguation upon arrival, or know which title can be considered ambiguous and which can't be (and it's not like we are consistent, anyway). Do a google search for 'Istra', 'Istra, Russia', or 'Istra, Moscow Oblast', for example, and imagine yourself in a position of a reader who is searching for a smaller Istra but isn't aware that another, larger, Istra exists nearby."
 * It is remarkable how the discussion there is insulated from the real world, in which real people are searching by real means for real information through Google – or whatever means they find available, some of which I have never yet seen mentioned by these "experts" on WP titling.
 * For now I have given up on that forum, along with WT:TITLE and all RM discussions. Typically these ignore any argument based on how people actually find their way to WP content. Life is too short. I may come back; we'll see. Meanwhile, thanks for continuing the debate. Do not accept assertions that the existing provisions at WP:DAB and WP:TITLE are "consensual". History shows otherwise. Check modifications to those provisions by notable closers of RMs and other "algorithmic activists"; and see if any wide conclusive discussion can be found to support them.
 * A well-organised community review is overdue, for all WP titling and disambiguation arrangements.
 * Best wishes,
 * N oetica Tea? 00:06, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Noetica! I don't believe we've ever communicated before, have we? Thank you for your supportive note. That the majority of the disambiguation guidelines are not actually built on consensus is hardly a surprise to me&mdash;on a few occasions I bothered to check some of the standing provisions, they had all been adopted by a "consensus" of a group of one to half a dozen people, who usually are, unsurprisingly enough, the folks running WP:DAB and its surroundings. Of course, one could always argue that the lack of opposition to those guidelines is in itself an indication of consensus, but upon some observation, that lack is more likely to the fact that regular people avoid WT:DAB like a plague :) I'm not a fan of posting there myself, because each time I go there, it's like arguing with a telemarketer who's reading from a script. Which is a pity, because while the disambiguation guidelines aren't all that important, they are still mighty useful. It's often not even the guidelines themselves which are a problem; it's the total lack of flexibility in their interpretation. A thorough community review could indeed do those guidelines much good. Perhaps I'll even start planning one; this got to return to normalcy at some point! Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 20, 2012; 13:28 (UTC)
 * That's right, we've never interacted before. Many thoughtful editors are becoming concerned with how the DAB and TITLE provisions have drifted from practicality to a kind of hermetically sealed Wikimicrocosm. Let's keep in touch, and see what might eventually be achieved through wider community involvement, yes? More later! N oetica Tea? 00:57, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Absolutely; please don't hesitate to contact me if anything! Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 23, 2012; 14:37 (UTC)

I do agree that quite a few or WT:DAB rules and restrictions are counterproductive. You're welcome to drop me a note whenever there is a discussion or "community review" there. -- Vmenkov (talk) 17:35, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I'll keep it in mind. I don't actively follow those discussions anymore, but if I happen to notice something, I'll certainly let you know. Hope to see you around more often than in the past few years! Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2013; 18:05 (UTC)

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File:Khiva.jpg
Здравствуйте. Пытаемся на Викискладе восстановить источник, время создания и/или подтвердить авторство (предполагается Prokudin-Gorsky) данного файла (ибо напрямую в коллекции найти не получается). Не могли бы вы посмотреть в удалённой историки в en-wikipedia, есть ли там какие-нибудь внешние источники или иная информация, которая могла бы помочь доопределить сведения о файле. Alex Spade (talk) 11:08, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Тут файл был загружен в июле 2005 г. участником Ghirlandajo, который в описании изначально указал, что это фотография Горского, но затем сразу же это описание удалил. Через несколько месяцев фотография была помещена в категорию фотографий Прокудина-Горского участником Hellbus, а в октябре 2006 г. добавлена в Category:Images of Uzbekistan участником Aelfthrytha. Рекомендую спросить у них. Больше ничего полезного в удалённой истории нет.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 28, 2012; 23:11 (UTC)

Administrative divisions of the Republic of Mordovia
The Republic of Mordovia is Mordovia. This was discussed at length at Talk:Republic of Adygea. For consistency's sake, Mordovia should be used across all articles unless there is a really good reason not to (I can imagine a few.) <font color="#21421" >Marcus <font color="#CC7722" >Qwertyus   23:06, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Marcus! Thanks for your comment.
 * To cut to the chase, I am aware of that particular RM, having been a participant there myself. And while I still mostly disagree with the outcome, I'm able to make my peace with it; at least for now :) In reference to this situation, however, I guess where I quite disagree is that the outcome of that RM means that any reference of "republic of" must be purged from every and all of our articles.
 * Guideline-wise, the names of places of Russia are covered by WP:NC:CITY, the examples in which utilize the full name of the federal subjects, which I should add, is how it had been customarily done for years before that guideline was formalized. That guideline had to a degree been influenced by WP:NCCS, which states that it is useful for all divisions of the same type in the same country to share the same article title format. As applied to this situation, when a place name is ambiguous with other place names in Russia, it is disambiguated by the full name of the federal subject. That is a very consistent and least surprising approach; indeed, disambiguating by the short name of the federal subject is in most cases simply impossible. "Foo, Ryazan Oblast", for example, has a completely different connotation than "Foo, Ryazan" would (the former implies a locality in Ryazan Oblast, while the latter would be used for a locality subordinated to the city of Ryazan). Even with the republics it is impossible to always use a shorter name: "Foo, Karelia", for example, is not unambiguous (since the Russian Republic of Karelia is a part of a bigger area called Karelia), and something like "Foo, Komi" would create more confusion than clarity.
 * Regarding the edit summary you left for most of your moves ("common name"), the titles you moved the articles to are not really "common names". And while "Makarovka, Republic of Mordovia" is definitely not a common name for that place, neither is "Makarovka, Mordovia". The only common name for it is "Makarovka", which, however, cannot be used because it is shared by more than one place. So in the end it boils down just to a selection of a disambiguator, not to "common names". And "Mordovia" isn't just the Republic of Mordovia; it's also the Mordovian ASSR, as well as the entities which preceded it.
 * I hope this provides enough of "a few reasons" for you to reconsider, although this is by no means an exhaustive list of all my concerns. Like any person who extensively worked on one topic for a long time, I can pinpoint a great number of reasons why things are done the way they are. Shorter disambiguators may seem like a good idea on the surface, but once you start digging deeper, it becomes more apparent why using them eventually results in an inconsistent system which ultimately confuses more than it helps. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); July 31, 2012; 13:57 (UTC)

Privyet from Putinland!
Nice to meet you! I fear we're prohibited to use Russian here:) Thus, about business:D I'd like to consult you: where could I learn to use Russian phonemic symbols? Sometimes, it seems desirable to show something here on the English Wiki. I'll be watching you;) JLincoln (talk) 15:55, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Josh! Nice to meet you too. I see you have no problems communicating in English :) but do feel free to use Russian on my talk page if it's easier for you for some reason. It's only considered to be bad tone on the pages outside user space or when talking about someone else.
 * To answer your question, your best bet is probably the Russian phonology article. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 3, 2012; 16:05 (UTC)
 * Thanks:) JLincoln (talk) 12:42, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * IPA for Russian: исправил там кое-что. А то похоже, там писал человек, эмигрировавший из СССР ещё при Дедушке:D JLincoln (talk) 13:39, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Я в IPA не силён, так что спасибо за помощь!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 4, 2012; 14:32 (UTC)
 * The issue's not about IPA itself — rather about phonology. They should clearly appreciate the difference between phonetics and phonology. The latter nominally considers the finite set of "model sounds" of a language in the same way as orthography considers the alphabet:) JLincoln (talk) 15:07, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * A good reminder; thanks. I'm not a linguist by a long shot, but I've always been fascinated with the field. It's always great to have one more of you around :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 4, 2012; 15:11 (UTC)
 * May I ask you one more question? How to make your signature ( ~ ) show something more than just your name? JLincoln (talk) 14:22, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Certainly. If you go to your preferences, there's a "Signature" section on the "User profile" tab (the very first one), and you can modify your signature in the "Signature" box there. Just make sure to test it out before you start using it :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 4, 2012; 14:32 (UTC)
 * Thanks again:) JLincoln (talk) 15:07, 4 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but it doesn't offer any "fields": I mean it's now "JLincoln (talk) - both linked; but there's only a plain box there...
 * And anyway, I thought of something formatted: some users' signatures contain upper or lower 'indexes', etc. And I doubt if there'll be preserved both the links - to the main and talk pages - the way you've shown... M? JLincoln (talk) 15:19, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Глянь, чё пишут: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:83.149.8.194&redirect=no :D Josh83.149.8.194 (talk) 19:51, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, on the talk pages of the editors involved it's OK. But since you are logged out, it's impossible for a third party to determine whether the IP belongs to one of us or not, hence the warning. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 7, 2012; 20:29 (UTC)

I still don't understand
I am sorry, but I still don't understand what the problem with my articles is. Please help me — Preceding unsigned comment added by Anfield2012 (talk • contribs) 19:59, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I assume you mean the Rostest article? In that one, while you listed your sources in the "References" section, it is still unclear what it is they reference in the article. Ideally, all major statements in an article should be individually referenced. Take the very first sentence (Rostest is the largest organization of practical metrology and certification on the territory of the Russian Federation), for example. It's impossible to tell which of the sources in the references section support this statement, without having to dig through each and every one of them. Same goes for pretty much all the rest of the article.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 3, 2012; 20:01 (UTC)

Vozdvizhenka
Would you be able to put the Vozdvizhenka disambig article on your translation list? I need to translate the article on the air base, and when the disambig article is created the full list of rural localities should be listed. Hope your 12 is going well and you're happy with Putinland's Olympic achievements !! Buckshot06 (talk) 00:28, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, those "achievements" are simply painful to watch! Luckily, to ease the pain, NBC does not indulge much in showing events in which the US team is not a participant, so I can catch only glimpses of the Russian athletic path to... whatever it is they are moving to :)
 * I've created a set index for your enjoyment, and as for the translation, do you mean translating this article? I don't usually like translating unsourced articles, and the only sources for this one are what looks like aviation fan sites and a dead link. Do you perchance have something more reliable?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 7, 2012; 13:47 (UTC)
 * Thanks. No, I mean the translation of ru:Воздвиженка, which you appear to have done most of with Vozdvizhenka (rural locality). Awesome list - emphasises the sheer *size* of your country! I will translate and clean up and source the airbase article. Buckshot06 (talk) 20:31, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, that. It's no problem. Since I now have them all in one database, creating such lists takes three minutes tops. And once the referencing engine is added, I'll be unstoppable :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 7, 2012; 20:40 (UTC)
 * Does your set index cover all the Vozdvizhenkas on the ru disambig page? If not, could you add them to the main en disambig page? Cheers Buckshot06 (talk) 21:10, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
 * It covers all inhabited localities by this name which currently exist. The Russian disambig also lists a couple places which either have been abolished or are unverifiable (and likely incorrect).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 8, 2012; 14:32 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much Ezhiki. The changes in the VVS in 2009 have created the need for some double-checking. You and I both know that military organisations do not tend to move whole units with large numbers of expensive pieces of equipment half-way across the country to completely new bases, but this appears to be what has happened. There's a new Dalniaya Aviatsiya base, seemingly at ru:Средний (Иркутская область), with, it seems, the 6952nd or 6953rd Aviation Base. Would you please mind running a couple of quick websearches for news stories in the Russian internet to confirm that Tupolev bomber aircraft were moved to this page in late 2009/early 2010, and then pointing me to the news stories? Once I have the stories I can confirm and translate things, but it's quite hard for me to run proper websearches in Russian as I do not know the right cases and suffixes to append to the search terms. Many thanks, Buckshot06 (talk) 23:57, 8 August 2012 (UTC) it's Belaya (air base). Buckshot06 (talk) 02:33, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the delayed response&mdash;I was traveling (and it took longer than I expected). Is there anything you still want me to do about this one?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 15, 2012; 15:11 (UTC)

Volochanka
Hope Herr Hedgehog is well. Can you add the population data to this? Spotted it on my world wall map.♦ Dr. Blofeld  12:27, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * It is unfortunately too small. The 2010 Census data released so far only include the localities with the population of at least 3,000; smaller ones are only included if they serve as the district administrative centers. The 2010 figure you had seems to be an estimate; I've added a source to back it up (it also contains a bunch of older population stats for this place).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 15, 2012; 15:26 (UTC)

List of Russian people
Can you take a look at this: User talk:Greyhood? The size of the list makes navigation and editing a real issue, and there are still entries at the bottom in need of biographical notes. <font face="AR Cena" color="black">I <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Never <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Cry 19:00, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
 * This sounds like a reasonable proposition to me, although I personally am not very fond of titling the pages "Part 1" and "Part 2". Perhaps it would make sense to split it into topical sections instead (using the headers already in the list)? The lists, after all, are only going to grow.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 15, 2012; 19:32 (UTC)
 * I suggested part 1 and part 2 for simplicity; it would be relatively easy to do as well. As for topical splits, we already have the List of Russian artists, List of Russian explorers, and lists of inventors, writers, poets, etc. These topical lists are quite extensive, and so the List of Russian people basically serves as a summary of the most notable entries from these topical lists. <font face="AR Cena" color="black">I <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Never <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Cry 19:46, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, OK, I forgot about the existing lists. But on that note, if the main list is only supposed to include most notable individuals, perhaps it would be simpler to cull it further? Splitting it into two parts kind of encourages to add more people, and eventually we'll end up with two unwieldy lists...—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 15, 2012; 19:50 (UTC)
 * Excellent point. Cutting the list would be the best solution. I could make cuts to the art and sports related sections, but the religion, politics, and science-related sections would most likely require the attention of you and/or Greyhood. It looks like atleast 50 to 75k of text would have to be cut to remedy the loading issues, and even then it would be pretty big. I just want this list to be more accessable for everyone, as it really is an important part of WP:RU and could be something of a flagship article. I'll link Grey to this, and we'll see what he thinks about it. <font face="AR Cena" color="black">I <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Never <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Cry 20:03, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, let's wait till GH can get his ass over here :) Myself, I can most certainly help with some sections. It would be a good opportunity to synchronize the main list with the topical lists, too, making sure that no one important is missing from either side. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 15, 2012; 20:23 (UTC)
 * We've knocked off 25k from the list so far. The military section still greatly outweighs all other sections, the explorers section is a bit big as well. There are more cuts all over that can be made. One idea is to get rid of entries with only small stub articles, unless the person is obviously important. I'm done for today, but I'd still like to try and get the list under 200k. <font face="AR Cena" color="black">I <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Never <font face="AR Cena" color="black">Cry 19:55, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm planning to review one section a day starting tomorrow, starting with the sections you asked about above. Hopefully the list will be of manageable size by the time we are done.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 16, 2012; 20:03 (UTC)

Rostislav Yaroslavich
I can't seem to find any copied content in this article. Can you please point it out to me? Theleftorium (talk) 21:06, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Henrik! This article was one of the several listed on this page which I reviewed. There were some articles listed there which I marked as copyvio (due to either verbatim repetition or too close of a paraphrase), and some others, like Oleg Yaroslavich, which were more or less OK but needed to be further paraphrased. I remember working on the Rostislav Yaroslavich article and some other one on the same day, and apparently what happened is that I mixed these two articles up. I can't find the other one in my edit history at all, which probably means that I previewed it but forgot to save, and it seems that the copyvio tag intended for that article ended up in Rostislav Yaroslavich. Ugh, what a mess...
 * I've reviewed Rostislav Yaroslavich again, just to be on the safe side, and the narrative seems to be OK copyright-wise. The article is still overly reliant on just one source, but that, of course, is a problem of an entirely different sort. Also, I'm unable to find some statements in the source at all (such as, for example, the 1192 expedition). Anyway, I've reverted the tag since it was misapplied; hope this resolves the matter. Thank you much for digging this up and bringing to my attention!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 20, 2012; 13:53 (UTC)
 * Thanks for explaining, I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything! :) Theleftorium (talk) 20:21, 20 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Certainly. In such matters it's always best to have more than one pair of eyes! :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 20, 2012; 20:24 (UTC)

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A barnstar for you!

 * Don't know what you are talking about, but thanks all the same! :)))—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 24, 2012; 20:07 (UTC)

Well, you're not a writer like Ymblanter but you consistently make great edits to Russian geography articles and plough through an awful lot adding sources so it does ring true.♦ Dr. Blofeld  10:53, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Can you check the translation from ru wiki for Ogdo Yegorovna Aksenov? I will try to source it afterwards.♦ Dr. Blofeld  14:08, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I'll take a look. I do have my doubts that she was born in a river, though :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 27, 2012; 14:11 (UTC)

Former districts
There is perhaps one thing we should discuss. I noticed that yesterday you started to move the info on abolished districts out of the articles, like this. Whereas I understand your reasoning - indeed, to the article on Krestetsky District only the info that Mstinsky District was merged into it at some point really belongs, and the rest should go into the (not yet written) article on Mstinsky district. On the other hand, writing articles on abolished districts is not a high priority for any of us, and it is unlikely they will be created, at least more than on a stub level, in the coming decade. These districts existed on lands currently belonging to te current districts (and ths is why I decided to include them in the articles in the first place). I would prefer to keep this info for now and only remove/shorten it once the articles are created, but I am obviously open for discussion.--Ymblanter (talk) 01:05, 28 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, after having edited a few chunks out yesterday and not really feeling comfortable about doing it, I was going to solicit your opinion today as well, but you beat me to it :) All in all, I'm of several minds about this. You are right, of course, that the abolished districts aren't really a priority now. On the other hand, when I was going through Murmansk Oblast, I was dumping the abolished districts' materials into separate articles anyway—nothing fancy (no infoboxes etc.), just to have it all in one place, making sure those articles have a beginning and an end (see, for example, the articles on Saamsky and Teribersky Districts). But then, for Murmansk Oblast doing so is relatively easy, since there aren't all that many abolished districts to cover. With Novgorod or Vologda Oblasts, it takes probably as much, if not more, work to cover the abolished districts as it takes to cover the modern ones. On yet another hand :), it pains me to no end to see barely relevant information in articles about something else. The only relevance of Mstinsky District to Krestetsky District, for example, is that the former was merged into, and later split out of the latter, so it just feels wrong to go into all those details about the events which happened in Mstinsky District when it was a separate entity. Argh!
 * As a compromise, how do you feel about doing both things at once: I'll incorporate the relevant bits from the paragraphs about the abolished districts into the main text (as I did in Krestetsky District), but we'll retain your prose as well, but move it into a subsection of "History". This way when we finally get to writing the articles about the abolished districts, the subsections can serve as the starting point, yet removing them then wouldn't affect the articles about the existing districts much. What do you think?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 28, 2012; 13:38 (UTC)
 * This is fine as an intermediate solution indeed, until we start writing articles on abolished districts (if this ever happens).--Ymblanter (talk) 15:26, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Dregelsky District
I checked again, and page 152 of Snytko et al says the Lyubytinsky District was formed in 1964 from Borovichsky and Pestovsky (agricultural?) Districts, and that it was composed of the former Lyubytinsky and Dregelsky Districts. I am currently sitting in a hotel at the Incheon International Airport and have no access to the maps, but I hope this info should be sufficient to clear the issue somehow and remove the tag.--Ymblanter (talk) 14:01, 29 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I'll have another look, thanks. Have a safe flight!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 29, 2012; 14:02 (UTC)
 * OK, found it. It's actually on page 221 (of the book, not the pdf), and the reason I couldn't find it is because it doesn't mention Dregelsky District by name, but rather refers to its nine selsoviets.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); August 29, 2012; 17:20 (UTC)
 * Saw it, thanks again.--Ymblanter (talk) 23:19, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Severouralsk
Hi:-) i added town template to Severouralsk but im not sure about the administrative divisions info so maybe you can give a touch to it. and i remind you about adding maps to Svobodny district and Shimanovsk district, because now they are the territory of the Vostochny Cosmodrome so i think they should be mapped well. Best Regrads, Superzohar Talk 08:49, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Sverdlovsk Oblast has one of the most convoluted structures in Russia, so no wonder :) I'm planning to do a holistic sweep of Sverdlovsk Oblast articles at some point in the (hopefully not-too-distant) future; I'll take care of Severouralsk then as well.
 * Regarding Shimanovsky and Svobodnensky Districts, like I said before, I'm not very good with maps (and it seems no maps are available in ru_wiki still). I agree 100% they should be mapped; it's just that there doesn't seem to be anybody willing/able to do this. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 5, 2012; 16:53 (UTC)

Richter or Rikhter?
Which one is the correct transliteration form of the name (Святослав) Рихтер to English: Richter or Rikhter ? --WPK (talk) 01:36, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Don't remove the Todo text
Don't remove the Todo text, as you did in Elista. Prior to the Russian colonization of Kalmykia Todo was the official text in Kalmykia.

Similar cases include the article Lhasa: not only is the Native text (Tibetan/Todo) presented, but it also comes before the national-wide/fedrational-wide official language (Chinese/Russian) since Wikipedia is not a place for Chinese/Russian nationalism. --110.232.42.147 (talk) 14:46, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * The importance of the name in languages other than English/Russian/local official language should be obvious from the text of the article. Unlike the Lhasa article, the article about Elista currently does not mention Todo at all, so the reason for having the name in that language is not obvious to the reader, which is why I removed it. Also note that when you revert someone's changes, you need to make sure you revert only the portion you disagree with (and in this case your revert affected parts unrelated to your grievance).
 * I've restored the parts of my edit which should not have been reverted and retained the Todo text, albeit relegating it to a footnote. Once the importance of that text is made clear in the article, you are welcome to restore it to the lede sentence.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 13, 2012; 15:16 (UTC)


 * Not like what you said, neither is Tibetan script mentioned in Lhasa at all. It's not require to mention Todo script in the article and I added it simply because it's a Native name, which going first. --110.232.42.147 (talk) 16:02, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * In contrast to Lhasa, Elista was never located in any area using the Todo script, therefore the analogy is incorrect. It was founded hundred years after what you call Russian colonization of Kalmykia. Please open an RFC.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:06, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * No! They used Todo until Soviets forced them to use Latin and Cyrillic. Why you reverse truth and lie? Till now there's full of Todo script in temples in Elista. --110.232.42.147 (talk) 16:28, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * See this. See the prayer whell in the pagoda --110.232.42.147 (talk) 16:37, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I suggest that in the future, you refrain from personal attacks. The oldest surviving Buddist temple in Elista was built in the 1990s. I can only repeat the suggestion to open an RFC, since there are at least two users who object to adding the Todo script to the lede.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:51, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I actually find it quite amusing to be called (or implied to be) a "nationalist" for a change. That's a nice break from being called a "traitor", a "turncoat", a "liberal scum", and a "hater of Russia" :) I do agree, however, that having the name in the Todo script is hardly necessary given the condition the article is in, and if it is retained, the best place for it is in the footnote. It's not such a critical piece of information that it needs to be conveyed to all readers, most of whom wouldn't even recognize what it is (and the article won't help them identify it either).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 13, 2012; 17:00 (UTC)
 * Ditto that. Also, it's not the script that needs to be explained, but rather why its presence is important. The Lhasa article has a passage dealing with the Tibetan portion of history; that's more than sufficient to justify having the name in Tibetan. The article on Elista has nothing of the sort (and as Yaroslav above correctly noted, the city was founded much later anyway).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 13, 2012; 16:10 (UTC)
 * The Elista article has a passage dealing with the Kalmyk portion of history. --110.232.42.147 (talk) 16:28, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * ...which is enough to justify having the name of the city in Kalmyk (of course, the fact that Kalmyk is a co-official language in the republic is itself sufficient for that as well). Modern Kalmyk, however, is written in Cyrillic script, not in Todo or Latin. The purpose of the infobox and the lede is to provide the names in the modern languages using modern scripts&mdash;it's no more a place for a Todo script spelling than it is for spelling in pre-reform Russian! The lede is usually a little more flexible, but still, including variants of the Kalmyk name in a script that hasn't been in public use for almost a century in a language 99.999% of the readers can't read is just piling up clutter (having it in a footnote is actually a pretty decent compromise). And lest you think my approach is too radical, there are editors who would relegate to "clutter" the spellings in any language other than English and would move the whole "foreign spellings" part to a footnote.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 13, 2012; 17:00 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Adamovsky
Hello Ezhiki,

I wanted to let you know that I just tagged Adamovsky for deletion, because it doesn't seem to have any encyclopedic content.

If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion, but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top.

You can leave a note on my talk page if you have questions. Thanks, Skyshadow382 (talk) 17:38, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Adamovka
Hello Ezhiki,

I wanted to let you know that I just tagged Adamovka for deletion, because it doesn't seem to have any encyclopedic content.

If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion, but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top.

You can leave a note on my talk page if you have questions. Thanks, Skyshadow382 (talk) 17:39, 18 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Contested and overturned; rightly so. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 18, 2012; 17:46 (UTC)

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Disambiguation link notification for September 21
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Typhoon Gay (1989), you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Tropical Storm Gay (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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 * Redundant dab tag was removed.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 21, 2012; 11:41 (UTC)

Sss.jpg
Can you help with the request at "commons:Commons:Village pump/Copyright"? Thanks. — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 18:16, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I already responded over there.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:19, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Yaroslav!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 23, 2012; 23:40 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Kola Peninsula
The article Kola Peninsula you nominated as a good article has been placed on hold. There are some minor changes or clarifications which need to be addressed before the article can be passed. See Talk:Kola Peninsula for issues. Good luck and happy editing! --<font color="DarkGreen">Tea with toast <font color="Sienna">(話)  19:28, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I've responded there.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 24, 2012; 16:45 (UTC)

Mélésville
Hello. Please change the name of the acticle incorrect Mélésville to correct Mélesville. Lawrentia (talk) 14:39, 23 September 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, done!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 23, 2012; 23:41 (UTC)

Danilovsky District
I appreciate the effort that you put into the Danilovsky District disambiguation page. I particularly like the maps, except that Moscow is hard to see. However, have you read Disambiguation? In particular you might want to look at the References section. --Bejnar (talk) 01:49, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Bejnar! That page is actually a set index article, not a dab (and is categorized accordingly). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 2, 2012; 02:01 (UTC)
 * I see that it is marked as a set index page, but I fail to see that it qualifies as such, since the only feature that they seem to share is that they all derive from the masculine form of the name Daniel. It is not like a car series where there is the opportunity to discuss a host of shared characteristics.  Also the footnotes seem to go to the individual districts and not to the shared features.  Have I misunderstood set index articles? --Bejnar (talk) 02:19, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * That the names of those districts all derive from the same first name is not the defining characteristic of a set index. The only things that matter are that the items listed are all of the same type (in this case, districts) and that they share the same name (Danilovsky). It's the same principle as in the mountains example. As for the references, as everywhere else in Wikipedia, they are supposed to source the statements being made; nothing more, nothing less. Just because we are dealing with a list does not mean that side statements can remain unsourced.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 2, 2012; 03:11 (UTC)
 * If they were all named after the same person, I could understand the set, like discussing all of the Leningrads together because they were all named after the same man. But that does not seem to be the case here. Simply sharing the same name cannot be a valid criteria, otherwise any disambiguation page that someone wanted to drop a footnote to could be relabeled as a set index page. --Bejnar (talk) 03:20, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * No, that doesn't really follow. If you add a footnote to a disambig page, all you'll have is a disambig page with a footnote, not a set index :) And while after years of asking I'm yet to hear anyone coherently explain why having references on dab pages is a bad thing, it is true that the current guidelines recommend against including them.
 * That said, I refer you back to the definition of a set index: it's a list article about a set of items of a specific type that share the same (or similar) name. There is no requirement to have a unifying reason behind that shared name; the fact that all entities on the list simply share it is sufficient. That's because the purpose of a set index is both encyclopedic and navigational. On a dab page which lists, say, a settlement, a spacecraft, and a Polynesian dish, all of which happen to have the same name, it is enough to specify the type of the entity for the reader to be able to make an informed choice and navigate to the article being sought. But when one is faced with a list of entities of the same type which share the same name, that's where a bare-bone disambig becomes pretty useless and set indices, which can contain additional relevant metadata, come into play.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 2, 2012; 13:29 (UTC)
 * Maps are acceptable on a disambiguation page, even single sentences like Moreno means "brown" is Spanish ... are quite common and acceptable. The problem here is that you do not include anything that is encyclopedic about the so-called set.  In order to justify a set index page there has to be something encyclopedic about the set, not just identificational.   --Bejnar (talk) 18:33, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Since when is the sourced information about jurisdiction and administrative/municipal status "not encyclopedic"? These are the two primary attributes of a district in Russia! That they also help in identification is just a happy coincidence. Note also how all three districts are administrative, but only two have a municipal aspect. Having that referenced in a set index sure beats opening each individual article and figuring out which entity is of which kind.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 2, 2012; 18:44 (UTC)
 * That is not encyclopedic about the set, that is normal distinction (this is different than that) information that is contained on a disambiguation page without footnotes and is confirmed on the article's page with footnotes. This article says nothing encyclopedic about the set and can say nothing encyclopedic about the set, since they really have nothing in common except that they are Russian districts with the same, or similar, names.  If this article were about the places named after Lenin, then discussion of the milieu where the original re-naming took place and the various un-namings would be possible. There is no such encyclopedic topic in this case. How would you feel about moving this discussion (copying the above) to the Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation page so that we could get some outside perspective on this? --Bejnar (talk) 19:06, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Like I noted before, nowhere does it say that it has to be "encyclopedic about the set" (whatever you mean by that). Describing the two most important aspects of the included entities is informational enough (and I'd be all for including the coordinates and the administrative centers' information, which isn't something one could do on a disambig), and if doing additionally aids with navigation, great! Most sets don't even go that far (see, for example, USS Ability, Enygrus, Mud Lake (Alberta), or Iris West), and that's perfectly OK, because those pages still meet the definition of the set index.
 * Note also that the specifics of a set index layout/content is usually tasked to the WikiProject under the scope of which the set index falls, not to WikiProject Disambiguation (which explicitly disavows them from its scope, in bold).
 * At any rate, what I don't understand is what problem are you trying to solve? Do you believe that removing references and the bits which aren't allowed per MOSDAB and then re-classifying the page as a disambig is going to help more readers than the referenced set index we currently have in place? If so, how?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 2, 2012; 19:31 (UTC)


 * The footnotes are visually distracting from the key information that allows a reader to quickly pick which item he or she is desirous of finding. --Bejnar (talk) 19:51, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Enabling readers to quickly pick an item is not the sole goal of the set indices (otherwise the whole concept would be redundant). The sets may contain information which allows readers to compare the entities being covered without leaving the page (and that includes red links, which are only useful with a description). Deciding which meta information is most useful is the job of the WikiProjects. And once a set index has an informational aspect, the information must be sourced, just like with any other article. Visual appeal concerns can never be more important than verifiability concerns, and footnotes are currently the only method we have in place for providing sources. Dabs, with their rigid and sometimes senseless restrictions, simply don't work well when one needs to pick an entry out of the list of entries of the same type (good luck finding the place you need on the Osceola (disambiguation) page if you don't know the state, for example!). That's where the set indices with their metadata come into play.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 2, 2012; 20:40 (UTC)


 * I see that we are not going to agree about the appropriate nature of set index pages. See my suggestions at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation. --Bejnar (talk) 21:59, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * The definition of a set index we have in place says what it says, and what it doesn't say, it doesn't say. No amount of us two discussing this situation can change that.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 3, 2012; 13:37 (UTC)


 * How would you feel about moving this discussion (copying the above) to the Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation page so that we could get some outside perspective on this? Do you have a better location? You pointed me to Disambiguation originally. --Bejnar (talk) 19:51, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't think WP:Disambiguation is an appropriate location, not the least because the concept of set indices is mentioned on WP:SIA only in the context of exclusion and the buck is passed elsewhere (to the list articles guidelines and to individual WikiProjects). WT:RUSSIA is, of course, the most appropriate location, since that's the parent project for the page in question, but it's been quiet there lately, so I'm afraid it's going to be just me again :) WP:VPP or some such might be worth a try as well.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 2, 2012; 20:40 (UTC)
 * The issue isn't about Russia it is about the nature of set index pages vs. disambiguation, and although the project has disavowed set index pages, the definition remains at Disambiguation, and we are after all talking about the definition. WP:VPP would be possible, but it is PDG (pretty darned general). Regardless, I shall start a new discussion at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation and mention this discussion in passing. --Bejnar (talk) 21:59, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * To tell you the truth, my interest in set indices is strictly practical. There is work to be done, disambiguation pages do not work well for that kind of work and set indices do. That's pretty much all that really matters as far as I'm concerned. Sets about Russian districts fully conform with the current definition, as do hundreds of other pages in Category:Set indices. If you randomly click around that category, you'll have a hard time finding many pages which are "encyclopedic about the set"; they are all mostly just lists of items of the same type sharing the same name. That, to me, is a perfect illustration of what the consensus really is, even though it's not exactly well-documented.
 * As any other Wikipedian, you are, of course, fully entitled to challenging any standing policy or guideline or definition, but it seems to me that WP:Disambiguation is one of the worst possible places to hold such a discussion. That project explicitly disavows set indices as a concept, so no amount of discussion there can possibly change the definition. Only a wider community can do that. If VPP feels too general, you can always open an RfC. That way you'll at least get opinions of a wider audience, not just that of the disambiguation gnomes. But frankly, I just don't see the point. Are your visual appeal concerns so strong that stripping hundreds of sets of encyclopedic information and installing barebone disambigs in their place seems to be the best possible solution?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 3, 2012; 13:37 (UTC)
 * No, I propose for set index articles which do not add encyclopedic information above and beyond the articles linked, that there be a separate visually easy-choice disambiguation page which offers the set index page as the first choice, but allows readers to go directly to the articles without having to plow through a complex set index page to find what they already have a reasonable inking as to what they want. --Bejnar (talk) 19:31, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, based on the empiric evidence at hand, your proposal does not represent the implicit consensus, but it is, of course, still your right to submit it. Just consider that, if implemented the way you've described it, we will all have two nearly identical substructures to support (dabs and set indices). That's never a good idea. I, for one, have no interest in wasting my Wikipedia time on syncing two near-identical pages every time there's a change (which happens more often than one would think); I know for a fact no one else on WP:RUSSIA is interested in doing that; and based on my previous conversations on WP:Disambiguation, no one there seems to be super excited about tracking such changes and syncing them either. So, if your proposal is implemented, you'd better be ready to volunteer, or we'll simply have one giant mess on own hands :) On the flip side, adding a couple footnotes hardly makes a page so complex that one would have to "plow through it". Think about it, and best of luck to you.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 3, 2012; 19:52 (UTC)

Tersko-Orlovsky Mayak
Здравствуйте. Почему Вы переименовали статью? Ведь ОКАТО и устав ЗАТО использует именно название Терско-Орловский Маяк. --Insider (talk) 22:25, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Здравствуйте! Вы совершенно правы, это моя ошибка. Форма "Маяк Терско-Орловский" использовалась в Законе о муниципальных образованиях, но была затем поправлена, а я у себя забыл заменить. Я вернул статью обратно. Буду признателен, если вы прокомментируете также на странице обсуждения по поводу другого предложения по переименованию.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 3, 2012; 12:14 (UTC)
 * Прокомментировал, полностью тут согласен с вашим мнением. --Insider (talk) 12:23, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for October 10
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e-mail
Hello! You've got e-mail. Check your spam folder if needed. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.76.138.128 (talk) 06:32, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi! Thanks for the nudge; the emails indeed ended up in my spambox again.
 * Regarding the request itself, this is not the kind of issue that should be discussed over email. In the interests of transparency, please re-post that request here on my talk page.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 17, 2012; 12:43 (UTC)

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Plyussa
Could you pls have a look at the top of the template? Apparently, you changed smth, and now it not only wants a reference for an urban-type settlement (which is provided), but also for a work settlement. If you fix this, I will propagate the same solution to other urban-type settlements of Pskov Oblast which share the same problem. Btw I almost finished the districts and the district centers in Pskov Oblast, only Kunyinsky District and Kunya are left, and I will finish them in a couple of days. Then these articles could be checked and copyedited. Thanks in advance.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:32, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * No, I haven't changed anything recently, but it's an easy fix. The top line refers to the broad category of a place, and it's always either "City" ("Town"), "Urban-type settlement", or "Rural locality". Ideally, that one shouldn't be sourced to OKATO, since the broad groups are normally defined in the federal subjects' laws on the administrative-territorial divisions. The term itself is specified by the "inhab_loc" parameter and referenced in "inhabloc_cat_ref".
 * The bottom line is the type, which is a specific term under one of those three categories (and that one varies wildly from one federal subject to another). Here, an ideal source would be the registry of the administrative-territorial divisions. However, this kind of document is not available in all federal subjects, so OKATO is often the second-best source to use for that. The term is specified by the "inhabloc_type" parameter and the source goes under "inhabloc_type_ref".
 * Pskov Oblast, however, has a somewhat unusual setup. Its law on the administrative-territorial divisions is very basic and does not even specify the categories of the inhabited localities, but it does specify available types (but without classifying them as "urban" or "rural", which is very atypical). There is no registry either: the law on the administrative-territorial divisions defers to the municipal composition laws (#419-oz for the districts and urban okrugs, and #420-oz for lower-level divisions and individual rural localities).
 * I haven't really thought of a good way to organize citations for district-level towns, urban-type settlements, and rural localities yet, but as an interim measure (for Pskov Oblast only) you can probably remove the values of inhabloc_cat and inhabloc_cat_ref altogether (which will result in showing a generic "inhabited locality" label without "citation needed", and move the OKATO ref to "inhabloc_type_ref" to source the type. Of course, if you come up with a better way to handle this, or if Pskovians expand the definitions in their administrative-territorial divisions law, that can always be changed later.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 17, 2012; 19:57 (UTC)
 * For work settlements and rural localities (though I believe we do not have a single article on rural localities in Pskov Oblast), this seems to be the only solution. For district-level towns, I do not know: OKATO I believe indicates them as towns belonging to the districts - isn't it the same as district-level towns?--Ymblanter (talk) 20:11, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, we have a few. Old substubs, mostly, and, thankfully, without infoboxes.
 * I used "district-level towns" as a shorthand for towns of district significance. The OKATO indeed shows when a town is subordinated to a district (as opposed to being subordinated to the federal subject), but it does it the exact same way for every federal subject for the document organization purposes. But since the law on the administrative-territorial divisions of Pskov Oblast does not recognize the term "towns of district significance", I don't think it would be a good idea to use it explicitly. But it is probably OK to specify inhabloc_cat=Town, source it to the OKATO, and leave inhabloc_type blank. Not as clean a solution as I'd like to see, but should be workable. What do you think?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 17, 2012; 20:28 (UTC)
 * May be I just leave it as it is now. Starts getting too complicated. I think we better have a statement that smth is an urban-type settlement and an unsourced one that it is a work settlement, than no statement at all.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I seem to have missed a colon. Duh! Here's what the law on the administrative-territorial divisions (#833-oz) actually says (Article 5.1):
 * "Населёнными пунктами области являются города, посёлки (в том числе посёлки городского типа : рабочие посёлки, курортные посёлки, дачные посёлки), сёла, деревни, хутора, местечки, станции, железнодорожные будки, железнодорожные казармы."


 * This explicitly states that the work settlements are a subtype of the urban-type settlements, and Law #420-oz lists them all as work settlements (there aren't any resort or suburban settlements). So I guess it's OK to source inhabloc_cat to #833, and inhabloc_type to #420-oz.
 * No such luck with the towns of district significance, though, so I stand by my previous recommendation.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 17, 2012; 20:43 (UTC)
 * I changed Plyussa, could you pls have a look when you have time. With towns your recipe seems to have already been implemented, see Gdov. For rural localities, I guess, for the time being we do not need infoboxes, though I will have a look at them. Thanks.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:00, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd name the refs "PskovO_adm" and "PskovO_mun", if we are to use that setup in other articles, but otherwise it looks fine, at least for now. Thanks much!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 18, 2012; 16:45 (UTC)
 * Like this?--Ymblanter (talk) 17:37, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Yup, that's it.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 18, 2012; 17:43 (UTC)
 * Great, thanks. I will amend the urban-type settlements now.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:44, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I would appreciate if at some point you could have a look at the template of Strugi Krasnye, there is some mess over there I am not exactly sure how to clean up. The rest I have done.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:20, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Can you please point me to the problem? I'm not sure what to look for... The template looks fine on the surface.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 18, 2012; 18:27 (UTC)
 * Is it correct that the municipal settlement is listed in both administrative and municipal parts? Are references in the administrative part correct?--Ymblanter (talk) 18:46, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, yes, and not exactly :) The best way to reference Pskov Oblast's entities is by elaborating on the relation between the administrative and municipal divisions in each ref (with the actual laws being cited in the "Sources" section as before), but that's just too complicated for an interim solution. The law on the administrative-territorial divisions of Pskov Oblast specifies (albeit in very obtuse terms) that the oblast's administrative-territorial divisions are its municipal divisions ("административно-территориальные единицы области - структурные части территории области в границах, установленных законами области о границах муниципальных районов и городских округов", from Article 2), so, technically, this is what needs to be said in each administrative-territorial ref (doing so would explain why a municipal law is used as the ref for an administrative aspect). Also, for inhabloc_cat we could note that the general categories are specified in #833-oz, but the subtypes are spelled out in the municipal laws. But, again, since it's an interim solution, I think just giving the law numbers for now is fine.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 18, 2012; 19:09 (UTC)
 * Yes, I see. Thanks again.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:28, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Request for help
Hello! I have to ask for your admin help. User Galassi is doing an OR and POV-pushing in Little Russia. He's simply deleted five times in a row the text with the reference to a dedicated academic work, which he dislikes. In other words he substitutes accepted science for his personal OR. So I sincerely ask you: 1) To prevent his next deletions of the text if it happens; 2) If he still continues doing this, to make some actions as an admin (though his ban or something else is not my goal here). Thanks in advance!--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 06:45, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I've summarized the situation on the talk page and protected the article.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 18, 2012; 16:46 (UTC)

regional/gubernatorial elections
Hi! i noticed the Russian regional elections, 2012 and Russian gubernatorial elections, 2012 touch in duplicate issues. what to do? Superzohar Talk 15:39, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't really see a problem with retaining both. If significant duplication occurs, then some pieces can be removed, but so far that hasn't happened.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 22, 2012; 13:13 (UTC)

RussBot
Please unblock User:RussBot. I will not run the script that creates redirects until I have addressed the issue you identified. (It would be helpful, however, if you could point me to specific examples.) However, the bot runs other jobs as well, so it would be appreciated if you could allow it to do those. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:15, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Certainly; the bot is now unblocked. As for the examples, Krasnoarmeysky District, Russia (disambiguation) (which I've deleted) is one and Prigorodny District (disambiguation) (which I haven't yet) is another; there are quite a few more. Thanks for the quick response!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 22, 2012; 14:39 (UTC)
 * FYI, I've found that the way Pywikipediabot was identifying disambiguation pages had a major bug, which I've now fixed. I'll run the bot manually for a while before the next automated run to make sure there are no further problems.  Thanks for the report!  --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:56, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for checking into this! But is there an easy way to undo those edits using the bot? I tried fixing them manually, but there are just too many of them, I ain't no bot, and the task gets tiring really fast :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 23, 2012; 14:14 (UTC)
 * Not exactly easy, but ... I've decided to just roll back all the edits from the last bot run, and delete all the new redirects created (as long as the page hasn't been edited since the bot touched it), and then I'll run the bot again, manually, to make sure it doesn't repeat the same errors. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:43, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, manual cleanup is what I tried to do (and quickly ran out of steam :)) Whether you have enough patience to go through it or not, I want you to know that your efforts are appreciated!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 23, 2012; 15:50 (UTC)

Cherlak
Уважаемые Ezhiki! Unlike some editors, I do appreciate very much your creation of numerous disambig pages full of red links; I quite agree that theses lists of homonymous toponyms add value. But I have a quibble about naming them. Is this an example of our rules been stronger than our common sense? (Much like we had with Vanino some years back, methinks). It seems to me that the article about Cherlak, Cherlaksky District, Omsk Oblast ought to be simply Cherlak, while the disambig page (which, besides the main Cherlak town, only has red links) should be Cherlak (disambiguation). Think of it: The above means that practically anyone who may conceivably look for Cherlak will look for the "primary" one. Just MHO, of course. -- Vmenkov (talk) 01:26, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Cherlak the town ("work settlement"; incidentally, the locals, strangely enough, say that "r.p." stand for rayonny posyolok rather than rabochiy posyolok, although that's probably not an official term) is obviously as "primary meaning" as it gets.
 * Cherlak, Tatarsky Rural Okrug, Cherlaksky District, Omsk Oblast is the station named after the town. Basically, the railway in those parts runs quite a ways (50 km) from the town, so the (tiny) station serving the town and the district happens to be shown as a separate populated place on maps. If we ever  create a separate article on the station, it probably can be better called Cherlak (station); note also that the district name in  Cherlak, Cherlaksky District, Omsk Oblast isn't even a good disambiguator, since the station is in the same district anyway.
 * The two villages in Bashkiria and Sverdlovsk Oblast are much smaller than the Cherlak in Omsk oblast (which is positively huge as far as "work settlements" go); they both together probably don't have even a few per cent of the "primary" Cherlak's population.
 * Hi, Vladimir! Thank you for your kind words of encouragement, although I hope you do realize that creating a bunch of pages consisting of nothing but red links is not where my work ends :) I fully intend to have all those red links painted blue at some point! These pages are just one of the first steps in a long-loooong process towards covering everything in Russia.
 * As for the naming issue, I neither agree nor disagree with you, really. On one hand, from the workflow point of view, as long as most of the links on these pages are red and lead to obscure places, it's just more efficient to treat them in a consistent manner (i.e., disambiguate them by their administrative jurisdiction, except when doing so is impossible). The task of creating these pages is semi-automated, so drilling manual exception holes is always a hassle. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I'm not a big fan of "primary usage" debates overall and think them to be mostly a waste of time. Sure, there is something to be said about treating high-profile cases as primary—such as having the article about, say, Moscow at "Moscow" and not "Moscow, Russia"—but even with seemingly equally high-profile St. Petersburg this starts to fall into gray areas: I've seen quite a few people who'd vigorously argue that since this is the English Wikipedia, St. Petersburg, Florida is more important and thus should be treated as primary usage. And the more obscure the case, the less productive these debates become. Take Cherlak, for instance. Yes, I'm sure most of the readers looking for "Cherlak" are going to be looking for the work settlement in Omsk Oblast, but consider that in the past thirty days the Cherlak page only got ~100 views. Now, if traffic patterns of other pages are of any indication, about a third of those are by spambots which create Wikipedia mirrors; bored readers clicking "Random article" account for another third, and the last third is divided between you, me, Russian Wikipedia editors wondering what the heck could the English Wikipedia editors put on that page, and readers genuinely interested in finding out something about one Cherlak or the other. And as long as all of the target articles are easily accessible from one location, is it really worth spending time arguing over which of these awfully obscure places is more notable?
 * To sum it up, I create the links on these pages in accordance with the practices documented in our guidelines, but, of course, there is no guideline which a well-reasoned consensus can't override. With that in mind, if Cherlak or any other similar page positively makes you itchy and keeps you from getting a good night sleep, by all means file a move request :) I might cast an "oppose" based on my belief that primary usage debates about which one obscure topic out of several is more notable are a waste of everyone's time, but more likely I won't even bother :)
 * Finally, regarding two of Cherlaks being in the same district and thus their titles still being ambiguous, that's actually my boo-boo. "Cherlak, Cherlaksky District, Omsk Oblast" is actually short for (rather idiotic) "Cherlak, Cherlak, Cherlaksky District, Omsk Oblast" (the first "Cherlak" is the name of the inhabited locality; the second refers to the low-level administrative division of Cherlaksky District, equal in status to that of a rural okrug), but considering that the two places in Cherlaksky District are the only ones in Omsk Oblast, the links, as per the guidelines and other similar cases, should have been "Cherlak (urban-type settlement), Omsk Oblast" and "Cherlak (rural locality), Omsk Oblast". I suspect this is still too long for your tastes, though :) Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 23, 2012; 14:59 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your thoughtful answer. Let Cherlak wait for a while; but, following your advice, and in the spirit of "Option E" proposed for another country, I've started filing requests with Kstovo (see Talk:Kstovo,_Nizhny_Novgorod_Oblast. Maybe I won't go beyond one or two requests of course, since I also have other things to do :-) -- Vmenkov (talk) 06:52, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Whatever strikes your fancy, although the spirit of option E would actually followed by not filing an RM :))) At any rate, primary topic concerns may override any naming conventions, and a primary topic concern is exactly what you have here. I still maintain that even the town of Kstovo is obscure enough to worry about whether it's a primary topic or not, but am too lazy to argue that :)
 * Also, if you don't mind, I've corrected the nomination text a little bit. The Kstovo page is actually a set index, not a disambig (if it were a disambig, this epitome of idiocy would mandate removing all red links and redirecting the page to the only entry with a blue link, making an RM moot). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 8, 2012; 21:08 (UTC)

Unprotect request
Hello.

You have previously (4 years ago) protected Template:Foreign relations of Russia, and it has remained protected since. Could you please unprotect it, or at least reduce the protection level to auto-confirmed? I have some edits that I'd like to make to it.

Thanks

HandsomeFella (talk) 11:55, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Changed to autoconfirmed. Enjoy!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 23, 2012; 12:07 (UTC)

Deprod
I don't understand the reason of the deProd. Stigni (talk) 13:26, 31 October 2012 (UTC)
 * When I plugged "российско-панамские отношения" (and the other two) into google, I got a number of what looks like reasonably good sources in return, including fairly detailed sketches on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website (example). While I haven't assessed the quality of those sources in any kind of detail, it's rather clear that they should be taken into consideration first, and one can't do that with a prod (but can in the course of an AfD, should you deem necessary to file it). Hope this answers your question.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 31, 2012; 13:33 (UTC)
 * My reason for PROD/AfD is the non notabily for WP:FOR, because there wasn't any war or significant trade and as the article you link: "Значимым событием в двусторонних отношениях стал состоявшийся в декабре 2008 г. проход по Панамскому каналу и неофициальный дружественный визит в страну большого противолодочного корабля ВМФ России «Адмирал Чабаненко»." So I don't think it respect the notability criteria for an "unofficial friendly visit to the country" and a trade of 66 million dollar. Stigni (talk) 13:46, 31 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't mind the articles going through the AfD process. But it's never a good thing when just one person looks at the available sources (or doesn't look at them at all) and decides the articles don't meet this or that guideline and prods them. The AfD allows other people to weigh in, too, and that's all I care about as far as these three articles go. Prods should be used in cases where the deletion outcome is nearly obvious; I don't think these three articles qualify, is all. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 31, 2012; 14:06 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the explanation. Stigni (talk) 14:10, 31 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Of course. By the way, I've only just noticed that WP:FOR leads to a WikiProject page, not to a Wikipedia guideline. With that in mind, I've filed my procedural oppose on all three nomination pages. That, of course, does not preclude further discussion of each of those articles' merits.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 31, 2012; 18:44 (UTC)

USPLACE RFC

 * Why, thank you, sir!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 7, 2012; 13:48 (UTC)

Category:Russian Muslims
I would be very obliged if you pay attention to this discussion. Thanks!--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:03, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * But what's that category's intent? If it is to list Muslim people of Russian ethnicity, then the name is fine (at least as compared to other similar cats; although I agree it's ambiguous).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 13, 2012; 14:24 (UTC)

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Template:Administrative divisions of Moscow
Заодно уж.)) А в чём там дело? Мне кажется, что шаблон вообще надо убрать из трёх статей про бывшие города, по крайней мере из статьи про бывший город Московский. --TarzanASG (talk) 23:09, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Вы это имеете в виду? Дело в том, что когда в шаблоне стоит Moskovsky, то в статье про Московский в шаблоне название будет жирным шрифтом. Если же использовать Moskovsky , то тогда в шаблоне вместо этого будет self-redirect, что не приветствуется. А поскольку визуально в шаблоне в любом случае будет видно только "Moskovsky", то проблемы с тем, что "города" не являются территориальной единицей Москвы я не вижу.
 * Статьи под названием "Moskovsky Settlement" у нас нет потому, что писать в ней особенно-то и нечего. Информация из таких коротких статей рутинно помещается в уже существующие статьи с наиболее близкой тематикой. А что может быть ближе, чем статья про самый крупный населённый пункт в поселении? Соответственно и шаблон помещается в ту же статью.
 * Также я не очень понял, почему вы называете Московский "бывшим городом". Согласно Закону "О территориальном делении города Москвы" (статья 3) поселениями города Москвы являются: ...территориальные единицы, образуемые на территориях, включенных в состав территории города Москвы в соответствии с Соглашением об изменении границы между субъектами Российской Федерации городом Москвой и Московской областью от 29 ноября 2011 года...
 * В статье 4 дан список поселений, описаны их границы и состав. В части о поселении Московский указано, что: В состав территории поселения Московский входят территории следующих населённых пунктов: Московский - город, Говорово - деревня...
 * Почему тогда "бывший город"?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 15, 2012; 14:03 (UTC)
 * Ну тогда бывший отдельный город.)) А теперь-то Москва состоит из районов и поселений, вот на поселения и надо ставить ссылки, потому что тогда посёлок Института Полиомиелита, деревни Саларьево, Говорово и т.д. как бы вообще не в Москве. Понятно, что удобно рутинно поместить в уже существующие статьи, но нам ведь истина дороже, не так ли?)) Иначе ради чего так скрупулёзно выстраивать всю иерархию? Хотелось бы хотя бы на примере Москвы и области показать пример проработанности темы деления. --TarzanASG (talk) 20:51, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Да нет же, не "бывший" он вовсе. Москва (как субъект Федерации, а не как "город") состоит из районов и поселений, а поселения (и некоторые районы) включают в себя населённые пункты. Уровень разный, только и всего. Пока дальнейших указаний от мудрого правительства не было :) А проработанность темы деления на теме Москвы показать совсем не так легко &mdash; у них бардак в законодательстве полнейший. Один Зеленоград чего стоит. Хоть сельсовет наконец в июле из закона убрали, и то радует.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 15, 2012; 20:58 (UTC)
 * Бывший независимый от Москвы.)) --TarzanASG (talk) 21:16, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Понял. Туплю :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 15, 2012; 21:18 (UTC)

A barnstar for you

 * Thank you kindly.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 16, 2012; 13:01 (UTC)

Why remove useful information about Nizhny Novgorod/Rostov?
Why remove links to articles about the history of the city? They may not be useful to some, but they are very useful to others, especially to those interested in history. Please restore the links (or provide a fuller explanation justifying their deletion). Thank you. M2545 (talk) 22:06, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Why remove links to articles about the history of the city? They may not be useful to some, but they are useful to others, especially those interested in history. Please restore the links (or provide a fuller explanation justifying their deletion). Thank you. M2545 (talk) 22:14, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * While I have no strong feelings about those links, I don't quite agree they are "very useful". At best, they are marginally useful to a small portion of the readers. Just because the books are old does not make them a valuable historical resource, especially considering that they are neither scholarly nor current. An outdated travel guide from 1868 is at best a curiosity, but certainly not a valuable academic resource. We de-emphasize travel aspect in modern context, for example, so I don't quite understand why you think it adds value in the historical context.
 * At any rate, I have no objections if you want to restore these links&mdash;I certainly am not going to insist on removing them again. However, please consider that to date at least three other established editors voiced their concerns about the usefulness of these sections. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 19, 2012; 14:24 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for November 20
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Lamutskoye, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Even (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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 * Typo; fixed.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 20, 2012; 21:44 (UTC)

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Shuya, Ivanovo Oblast
Are you planning to create Shuya, Ivanovo Oblast (disambiguation)? If not, should we amend the template at the top?--Ymblanter (talk) 20:27, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Definitely not. This one must have fallen through the cracks when I was organizing related stuff. I've amended the hatnote; thanks for catching this!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); November 21, 2012; 20:33 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that what I thought indeed.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:40, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Kalinka, Far East
Cannot locate this Kalinka: http://www.ww2.dk/new/air%20force/regiment/iap/301iap.htm. Our Kalinka article does not mention Russian locations. Appreciate your thoughts (and all your hard work) Buckshot06 (talk) 01:01, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Here we go: Kalinka, Russia. The coordinates on the one you need seem to be a little off. Let me know if you need anything else. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 3, 2012; 14:54 (UTC)

Yablonovka
Here, the internal links seem to be screwed up (all of them are in the first couple of paragraphs). I tried to do smth about them, but apparently failed. Could you may be have a look at some point. Nothing urgent, I found this article on the noticeboard of poor translations.--Ymblanter (talk) 22:33, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I'll get it cleaned at some point.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 5, 2012; 13:33 (UTC)

Merge discussion for Autonomous oblasts of Russia
An article that you have been involved in editing, Autonomous oblasts of Russia, has been proposed for a merge with another article. If you are interested in the merge discussion, please participate by going, and adding your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. 90.200.179.7 (talk) 22:28, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Grisha Goryachev
Hi, can you find anything more on him in Russian? Date of birth? I'm guessing c.1978 ♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  14:49, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not finding anything reliable after a quick search, but according to a comment on this page, the Classical Guitar in Russia and the USSR encyclopedia published in 1992 shows his date of birth as December 29, 1977. I'll keep looking.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 11, 2012; 15:45 (UTC)
 * That would be right I think, I guessed 1977 or 1978.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  15:52, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I've also found another page (on some guitar wiki) which gives the same date. Google books search for "Гриша Горячев 1977" also returns page 416 of the encyclopedia I mentioned above, although neither text nor snapshots are available. As far as guesses go, this one is pretty good methinks, but of course it would be better to find either another source confirming this date, or someone who can check the paper copy of that encyclopedia.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 11, 2012; 16:02 (UTC)
 * That's fine, thanks.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  16:22, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Balakhna
FYI: With all due respects, I've added a move request to Talk:Balakhna, Balakhninsky District, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. Too much of a mouthful of a name for me to say or to write... -- Vmenkov (talk) 00:32, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Lazy son of a... :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 12, 2012; 02:33 (UTC)

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City, town...
Dear Ezhiki: I wonder if you can enlighten me as to the accepted Wikipedia rules for using "city" and "town" with respect to populated places (or, in Wikipedia-speak, "inhabited localities") in Russia. I know that we do have a firm formal convention for P.R.China, so that a shi of any rank is always a "city", a zhen is a "town", and a xiang is a "township"; while this usage may on occasions disagree with the living usage, it is at least unambiguous, and allows a one-to-one mapping between the official Chinese and translated English nomenclature. Howwever, I have no idea if a similar convention has been worked out for Russia.

My informal way of speaking is to use "city" to refer to what's called gorod in Russia, and "town" for a p.g.t. (formally, urban-type settlement). This approach at least have a virtue of not creating a distinction in English where none exists in Russian, and not using "translatorese" jargon where it may be avoided. But if Wikipedia has a formal rule (a MOS item) on the matter, I'd like to be aware on it!

If there are no rules and someone wants to create them, perhaps he can use the city/town distinction to map the rather esoteric (but bureaucratically important) distinction between gorod oblastonogo podchinenia (a city whose government is directly subordinated to that of an oblast) and gorod raionnogo podchinenia (a city whose government is directly subordinated to that of a district (raion), which in its turn subordinated to an oblast). Any thoughts? -- Vmenkov (talk) 20:39, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * There really are no rules about this (nor, I believe, there can be). Strictly for consistency sake, we've been using "city" for cities/towns with a population of over 100K (as of the most recent census), and "town" for those where the population is below that (and that's why "goroda" are always collectively referred to as "cities and towns"). This approach, however, is based on nothing else than a quick discussion of this matter in 2004 or 2005 by interested editors. And yes, labeling cities of federal subject significance as "cities" and towns of district significance as "towns" is also a possibility, although that approach is not nearly as useful as using a population threshold, IMO. As for the urban-type settlements, those are always referred to as such, never as "towns" (otherwise it is way too confusing&mdash;trust me, it's been tried :)). Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 12, 2012; 20:58 (UTC)
 * Just to be on the safe side, we are talking about former Soviet Union. For other countries, the conventions are different.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:07, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually, this was for Russia only. I have no idea how this is resolved for other countries of the former Soviet Union.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 12, 2012; 21:11 (UTC)
 * I have not seen anybody but me interested in other countries of Soviet Union in the last year except for POV issues (the Baltic states are an exception), but from what I have seen the convention is the same.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:17, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Perhaps it would make sense to document it then (as a descriptive guideline, not prescriptive). In eight years of editing, apart from the methods discussed in this very section, I have not heard any alternative suggestions about how to deal with this situation, and the population threshold method is currently followed fairly consistently in the Russia-related articles. Thoughts?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 12, 2012; 21:24 (UTC)
 * One thing I would definitely not like is that if this convention becomes a policy, every time a locality gets the population over/under 100K, we would need to replace it in all articles to city/town. And if there are different sources providing different population estimates, that could lead to you know what... But I guess as a guideline it should be fine.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:27, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't like that much either, but the problem is mostly alleviated by relying on the most recent Census data instead of the various estimates. I've been updating all articles with the 2010 Census figures, and saw only two or three cities/towns crossing the 100K threshold. With a Census held about once every ten years, it's not all that bad, I guess.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 12, 2012; 21:30 (UTC)
 * Fine, but I think with the guideline we have more flexibility. Whereas updating articles on cities/towns and on administrative divisions should be easy, they also occur in articles on railroads, rivers and God knows where else, and not even always with markup. And another issue is historical usage.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:35, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I should also note that selecting a term based on the administrative status ("city of federal subject significance" vs "town of district significance") is not entirely stable either&mdash;in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast alone, for example, five towns changed this status just in the past couple of years. As for updating the term usage in other articles, I personally don't really see it as that big of a deal (although I would always update the term if I have to edit such articles anyway :)). Consistency within an article is more important than consistency between all articles, and if in an article about a river/railway some place is referred as "town" whereas the article about that place uses "city", it's not a problem worth losing sleep over, I think. And historical usage is a whole other animal, of course; there, I believe, each case should be looked at on its own merits.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 12, 2012; 21:44 (UTC)
 * Good. So do you want to formally nominate it as a policy?--Ymblanter (talk) 22:01, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
 * If it's merely descriptive, it doesn't really need to be nominated (because nothing will be changing in the articles just because a new descriptive guideline appears). I'm a bit at a loss as to where to put it, though. I'll look tomorrow (or if you have a page in mind, by all means let me know). Perhaps Vladimir will comment here by then as well&mdash;if he has reservations, I definitely want to know. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 12, 2012; 22:06 (UTC)
 * I've created a draft at Manual of Style/Russia-related articles to hold WikiProject Russia's descriptive guidelines and made an announcement on WT:RUSSIA. Let's move it there for further discussion.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 13, 2012; 15:12 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I will have a look.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

A belated note about the above discussion and the MOS (saw it, thanks). I suppose 100K population is as good city/town threshold as any, although for me the mental threshold - if I were to think in terms of a population criterion (rather than an official designation) at all - is more like 20-30 thousand. Obviously such thresholds (or informal criteria) would be different for different contributors. I personally would be in favor of the MOS using an approach similar to that used with respect to the British/American spelling dichotomy: Namely, if the earlier major contributors to an article have chosen to more or less uniformly use "city" or "town" within the article's text, then later contributors should be advised to refrain to making the city-&gt;town or town-&gt;city change without a really good reason, just for the change's (and between-articles uniformity's) sake. -- Vmenkov (talk) 02:35, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree that different people would have different mental thresholds. On a personal note, as someone born and raised in a place which at its peak had a population of upwards to 50,000 people (and currently has ~35,000), calling it a "city" in English always felt just plain wrong (and still does). Even for something like Ussuriysk "city" sounds like a stretch (even though we still call it that here because of its population being over 100K). I can't even imagine a 20-30K place which would feel like a "city" to me. If I could go back to 2004 today, I'd probably be peddling 250K as a threshold, not 100K :)
 * As for the terminological dichotomy suggestion, it's not a bad one in theory, but in practice most of our city/town articles were started by just a handful of contributors, most of whom, I believe, already followed the 100K "convention". I don't believe we currently are missing more than half a dozen articles about gorods. We could formalize your suggestion, sure, but in practice it would have little to no effect, I'm afraid. At any rate, I do, of course, agree that internal consistency is important (although one still has to remember about the historical aspect&mdash;what's definitely a "city" now may not necessarily have been an accurate description at the time when the gorod status was granted to it!). May I ask why you think the "city/town" distinction is even important enough to codify? Like I said before, the 100K provision is merely for convenience and consistency sake (one which no one really bothered to question so far); even if it's changed to 30K as you suggest, what's to prevent someone else from doubting it a few years from now as too lenient? The way I see it, while the city/town distinction is needed (if only for practical reasons), there is no one "best" solution, nor is there one that can be academically rationalized, so in the end one arbitrary but reasonable threshold is no better than another arbitrary but reasonable threshold. And if one is already in place, what's to be gained by changing it?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2013; 16:34 (UTC)
 * Rationally, I fully understand that the distinction is not really important; but emotionally, I do have a funny feeling when someone uses the word "town" with respect to a place that's built up with 9-story concrete buildings and is big enough to have a local bus system. In many English-speaking jurisdictions the city/town distinction is actually codified (different populated places, or "inhabited localities", if you wish, are incorporated as "cities" or as "towns"). E.g. back in British Columbia, Penticton or Vernon are definitely "cities" (both officially, and in informal writing), while Summerland and Oliver are towns; my personal mental divide between cities and towns runs somewhere in between; so it roughly corresponds to the divide between gorod/p.g.t, or perhaps between "Oblast significance gorod"/"District significance gorod" in Russia.  On the other hand, in Ossining, New York is a "town" with 35,000 residents while White Plains, New York (the nearest city) has 56,000 residents; so I guess Westchester County's city/town threshold is slightly closer to your definition.
 * It may be interesting to research the actual English usage for populated places in Russia, for all I| know, maybe the distribution does in fact match your threshold better. However,  I am not that interested at this point. I thought that the city/town distinction could actually be formalized to concisely express in English the distinction between various cryptically named populated place types they had/have in the USSR/Russia (this is what we do in China, mapping  shi/zhen to "city"/"town"), but since you don't feel it's a good idea, I certainly don't want to insist.
 * It's not like I want to get you or anyone else to modify your/their criterion; but I did think that it would be a good idea to make a rule (even if informal one) that we don't try to change reasonable usage already present in an article without a specific need. (That, is it's one thing to correct factual errors and spelling/grammar errors, and quite another thing to go an hunt for "theater" to make it "theatre" or vice versa). For one, I promise that I won't ever introduce the word "city" into the article about Vanino :-) -- Vmenkov (talk) 17:31, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
 * You've certainly put my mind at ease with Vanino :) Whew! :) (and by the way, years ago I temporarily resided in a US "city" with the population of 38, so I'm no stranger to the US formalized conventions).
 * To prolong this discussion a little longer, if Russia had a formal distinction between "city" and "town" like China does, I'd be all for using it, of course. The English-language publications, from what I've seen, don't really care about this issue that much either, but, come to think of it, there aren't that many academic publications in English about the intricacies of the Russian administrative system (and those which do exist certainly don't go into the level of detail Wikipedia aims to cover). Compiling terminology usage statistics on this is possible, but unlikely to lead to meaningful results. I've seen urban-type settlements referred to as both "towns" and "urban-type settlements", but then I've also seen villages referred to as "cities" or "small towns"; it all, I guess, depends on how much authors care about the accuracy in that department (and most don't give a damn, since they focus on some other topic and use this terminology only because they have to call a place something). In Wikipedia, the issue is further complicated by the fact that we are trying to be a collection of all human knowledge, which means that precision and consistency are of paramount importance, at least in the articles not too far removed from the topic (i.e., calling a village "a city" probably isn't that big of a deal in an article about, say, biological diversity of some region or a plane crash, but it certainly sends a wrong message in the lede of the article about that village or even in the history section of a nearby place!). Various publications use various terms because their scope is normally limited by one subject, but in Wikipedia everything is connected to everything else, so using layman's terminology or being lax in one's choice of terms is going to cause problems sooner rather than later, especially if doing so is practiced on a wide scale. In an encyclopedia as big as Wikipedia, organization and consistency are very important, even though occasionally the constraints may seem forced and artificial. When the majority of good-quality sources are in Russian, insisting on building terminological vocabulary based on the English-language publications alone is an exercise in futility (and helps overcome the systemic bias in no way at all!). But I guess I'm just ranting now... Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2013; 17:59 (UTC)

Commons
Я извиняюсь, вы обсуждали когда писать town/city, поэтому может будет полезна страничка в OSM (на русском). А вообще, как я как-то уже говорил, надо как-то объединяться и наводить порядок, т.к. в OSM - одни координаты, в Commons - другие, в Википедии - третьи, взятые с кривых снимков; в англовики - одни названия, в Commons - другие, в OSM - третьи, в Викиданных будут четвёртые. То же касается границ, разного территориального деления и т.п. Вот, например, в Commons administrative okrugs называются "districts", а "Arbat District" в Commons называется просто Arbat. Или вот единую территорию Москвы каким-то образом разделили на субъект федерации и собственно населённый пункт Москва, и теперь НП Москва выглядит вот так - без районов "старой Москвы" Внуково, Бутово и ЗелАО, которые были убраны из "населённого пункта Москва", а вот зато район Некрасовка, Люберецкие поля орошения, посёлок Рублёво и деревня Мякинино - это по-любому исконная территория НП Москва. Может быть это и правильно, но источника такого разделения я не увидел, а бесконечно вести обсуждения по кругу на куче разных сайтов невозможно. --TarzanASG (talk) 11:35, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * В Коммонс не надо вести никаких обсуждений, там просто категории называли двадцать разных человек, которые между собой ничего не координировали, и вообще о существовании друг друга ничего не знали. Если есть энергия - перименовывайте там категории. Вторая проблема - что категории там по муниципальному делению, а мы используем административное.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:41, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * В том-то и дело, что всё откатили и ещё заблокировали, хотя я сразу давал ссылку на англоязычный сайт мэра Москвы. В рувики радуются, что у нас ещё спада нет, как в англовики, но вся энергия будет тратиться впустую. Часто всё упирается в разные мелочи и, кроме того, я не так хорошо знаком с тонкостями Commons и тем более нюансами переименовывания, поэтому может у меня что-то было и не так. Вот бы принять правило, чтобы названия из англовики были обязательными без лишних повторных разговоров и переносились ботом. --TarzanASG (talk) 12:24, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Ну, тогда надо выносить на общий форум (по-английски) и обсуждать. Что происходит в русской Википедии, честно говоря, меня не очень интересует, пусть думают что хотят.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:29, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Я в общем-то то же самое хотел сказать&mdash;это надо обсуждать там. Не знаю, что думал админ, который защитил страницу, но проблему эту можно разрешить только на Commons, не тут. Организации на Commons явно не хватает, с этим я полностью согласен.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 13, 2012; 14:26 (UTC)
 * Ну это-то понятно, что приходится индивидуально всё разбирать... Увы.
 * Тут другое интереснее. Вы, как специалист по территориальному делению, можете подтвердить правда ли это НП Москва, а всё остальное - нет. Я просто сильно сомневаюсь. --TarzanASG (talk) 09:59, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Единственное, что я могу подтвердить, это то, что указано в законодательстве, а в законодательстве, к сожалению, уже который год творится полный бардак. В Законе №13-47 ("О территориальном делении города Москвы") ещё до июля 2012 г. упоминались различные населённые пункты (например, посёлок Новобратцевский в районе Митино); определения же "населённого пункта" в этом законе нет и до сих пор, даже после добавления новых поселений, для которых все эти населённые пункты в том же самом законе аккуратно перечислены. Соответственно и интерпретируют эту ситуацию все по своему. OSM показывает "населённые пункты" отдельно (что, в принципе, для их целей вполне логично — на карте иметь границы отдельных образований, вне зависимости от определений, всегда полезно), а вот Госкомстат, например, считал (по-крайней мере до июля), что в Москве (субъекте Федерации) сельского населения нет вообще. И пока законодательно ситуация не изменится, можно только продолжать гадать как всё на самом деле правильно. С логической точки зрения резонно предположить, что если в состав субъекта входят "населённые пункты", по списку, то территория субъекта вне этих населённых пунктов принадлежит населённому пункту город Москва, но без законодательного подтверждения этой точки зрения она остаётся хоть и логической, но спекуляцией... Зеленоград этому наилучшая иллюстрация — кто-то из русской Википедии (не вы? не помню...) как-то посылал запрос в Правительство Москвы касательно статуса Зеленограда и получил ответ, что статуса города Зеленоград никто никогда не лишал, что, однако, совсем не отвечало на вопрос, можно ли считать, что в субъект Федерации Москва входят населённые пункты "город Москва" и "город Зеленоград". Правительству ответ этот вопрос, по-видимому, практического интереса не представляет, и что делать с точки зрения энциклопедии остаётся непонятным. Единственное, что мы можем сделать, это описать текущую ситуацию; выводы читатели пусть делают сами.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 17, 2012; 15:07 (UTC)

Hand-coding
Hey all :).

I'm dropping you a note because you've been involved in dealing with feedback from the Article Feedback Tool. To get a better handle on the overall quality of comments now that the tool has become a more established part of the reader experience, we're undertaking a round of hand coding - basically, taking a sample of feedback and marking each piece as inappropriate, helpful, so on - and would like anyone interested in improving the tool to participate :).

You can code as many or as few pieces of feedback as you want: this page should explain how to use the system, and there is a demo here. Once you're comfortable with the task, just drop me an email at and I'll set you up with an account :).

If you'd like to chat with us about the research, or want live tutoring on the software, there will be an office hours session on Monday 17 December at 23:00 UTC in. Hope to see some of you there! Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:09, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for December 15
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Poor Folk
Hello,

if you have time, could you check my translations of Russian quotations in Poor Folk, especially Dobrolyubov's in the Reception section? Regards.--Tomcat (7) 12:15, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I'll be happy to, but I can't without seeing the quotes in original Russian first. Can you point me to them, please?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 17, 2012; 14:26 (UTC)

Rahja
Hi, what is Your opinion concerning the name Rahja written in English: place ru:Рахья from the person Рахья and Rahja? --WPK (talk) 20:56, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * My opinion on this subject is unchanged from the last fifty times you asked this question :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 17, 2012; 14:28 (UTC)
 * Of course, because the person was Jukka Rahja (not "Yukka Rakhya") and "В октябре 1923 года посёлок был переименован в честь революционера И. А. Рахья", the place Рахья has to be written in English Rahja, not unnaturally "Rakhya". --WPK (talk) 15:55, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
 * That's not what my answer was the last fifty times you asked this question. The person should be at "Jukka Rahja". The settlement should be at "Rakhya". See this talk page's archives to refresh your memory as to why. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 17, 2012; 15:57 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately Your comment is wrong, because both languages, Finnish and English uses Latin alphabets, so person Юкка Рахья, Jukka Rahja > settlement Рахья, Rahja. Be logical, please. --WPK (talk) 02:29, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
 * You are just trolling now, aren't you.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 18, 2012; 15:09 (UTC)


 * Trolling?! Just commenting, that in Finnish and in English are used Latin alphabets. Do You deny that? If not, then logically the settlement Рахья is Rahja, because is has been named after the person Юкка Рахья, Jukka Rahja. --WPK (talk) 22:30, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Look, I've addressed your comments on numerous occasions now, explaining that you are concentrating on issues which in real life have nothing to do with romanization/transliteration (such as word origins). My answer is always the same, yet you keep asking the same question over and over again for what, three years now? Looks awful lots like trolling to me... Go find a transliteration system of Russian that takes word origins into account, I dare you. Feel free to take your time.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 19, 2012; 17:30 (UTC)


 * What on earth do You mean? When a place has got its name from person Jukka Rahja, of course the name is Rahja - never ridiculous "Rakhya". Use Your sense, please. --WPK (talk) 00:24, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Wishing so doesn't make it so. Go find one map, published in English, that refers to that place as "Rahja" (make sure you don't confuse it with the one in Finland). Just one; then we'll talk about "never".—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 21, 2012; 01:19 (UTC)

TFD Infobox settlement
You have been involved with Templates for deletion/Log/2009 September 13. Would like your feedback at Redirects for discussion/Log/2012 December 18 NVanMinh (talk) 14:53, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Дивногорское училище олимпийского резерва
Hello,

could you translate дивногорское училище олимпийского резерва? Regards.--Tomcat (7) 16:23, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Based on this, "Divnogorsk Olympic Reserve School" sounds about right.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 18, 2012; 16:30 (UTC)

Urzhumka River
Hullo. Anything in Russian on this?♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  19:00, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
 * There's a stub in ru_wiki to get you started. Let me know if that's not enough; I'll look for more.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 20, 2012; 19:09 (UTC)
 * I will take care of this one. Just send all rivers to me (in reasonable amounts).--Ymblanter (talk) 00:28, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks! It'll be nice to have an in-house river specialist :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 21, 2012; 01:22 (UTC)
 * Thanks guys. Can you find me the Russian/Ukrainian names for Zhydovka, not a nice term but it seems notable for anti-Semetism in Ukraine and parts of the old Soviet Union, as disgusting as it is. The male form is Zhyd I guess. Also need the cast checked for Cossacks Go from Ukrainian wiki and a few sources.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  13:02, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Both Russian and Ukrainian are "жидовка" (masculine "жид").—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 21, 2012; 14:15 (UTC)
 * Happy New Year Hedgehog!♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  18:50, 3

January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Wishing you all the best as well!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 3, 2013; 18:57 (UTC)

Belarusian playwrights
Can you check Vyacheslav Adamczyk and Natalia Arseniev and try to help translate and source if you can?♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  20:21, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but while I can get the gist of a text in Belarusian, I'm not at all confident in my abilities to translate it accurately. Try asking Mr. Altenmann, perhaps?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 8, 2013; 20:35 (UTC)
 * How about from here?♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  21:04, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * But it only has two sources&mdash;one is in Belarusian, and the other is someone's website with a link to her bio, also in Belarusian. And you know I don't translate unsourced Russian wiki articles as a matter of principle :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 8, 2013; 21:21 (UTC)
 * Kanstantsia Builo or Constance Builov, the Russian translator says the latter.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  22:29, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd go with the former. Unless you find reliable English-language sources using a different spelling, the best course of action is to use the direct transliteration.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 9, 2013; 15:14 (UTC)

Thank you!
Thanks! I still have some outlying localities to upload under modern Russian names which could use your expertise in classifying. Olessi (talk) 19:56, 20 December 2012 (UTC)