Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 March 3

= March 3 =

Population of a Ukrainian village
Hello Wikipedians,

I was going to write a draft for an article on a Ukrainian village (translated from uk.wikipedia) but I ran into some inconsistencies I'd like to sort out before posting. The village in question is Тухля (Tukhlya/Tukhlia) and the population in the body of the article is given as 1812 in 1989 and 1752 in 2001. These can be verified. For example, the 2001 number is verified by going here, then selecting "Number and territorial distribution of the population " > "Number of actual population in rural areas (1,2,3,4) (2001(05.12))" > "Lvivska oblast" > "TUKHLIA", or "TUKHLIANSKA silrada", which is coextensive with the village as of 2001. The same thing goes for the 1989 number, but in that census the silrada (village council) is not coextensive with the village, as it does contain some other localities as well.

However, the infobox has an undated, unsourced population figure of 2826 and I can't figure out where this came from. Russian-language Wikipedia gives the same number, but cites it to the 2001 census. And to make it even more confusing, the Ukrainian WP article on the Tukhlyanska village council (silrada) gives a population of 1826 in 2001. This is exactly 1000 less than 2826. Coincidence? I don't know. I am confused. I don't know where either of these *826 numbers came from. 70.172.194.25 (talk) 03:41, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
 * This goes back to 2009 and the second ever edit of the article, which also managed to mess up the infobox so that it didn't display. The 1826 figure seems to relate to the village being a Село, and the 2826 figure goes along with redesignating it as a СМТ, or so it seems to me. I don't know what those things are, and the origin of both figures remains mysterious. Card Zero  (talk) 05:17, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Ah, given its history in the article, and the fact that that very edit changed the thousands digit with no source, it seems possible that it was placed there mistakenly and then citogenesis'ed into existence. Or maybe there is an actual source but it's just hard to track down. I think I'll go with the easily verifiable number for the draft article. By the way, a Село is a village and a СМТ is an urban-type settlement; I am pretty sure Село is the proper designation. 70.172.194.25 (talk) 05:50, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Here's a weird coincidence: I was trying to see if clicking on the wrong item in the census database (TUKHOLKA for instance) would explain the origin of the 1826 figure. It wouldn't, but because the list is so hard to use (search doesn't seem to work), I was viewing the source for the page, and the entries in the database have sequential numbers associated. There I found: ⟨option VALUE="1862"⟩ TUKHLIANSKA silrada ⟨/option⟩.
 * But anyway, yes, be bold, put in the figure you can source. Card Zero  (talk) 05:57, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
 * That, plus a swap in digits (and optional replacement of the leading digit), could even be the origin for all we know. I take it the HTML option elements are just numbered sequentially, so the value has no significance for the population. I agree the UI is not great; luckily there's a way of archiving the end result screen (by abusing the print function), which I'll include in the so other people don't need to go through the painful process themselves. 70.172.194.25 (talk) 06:00, 3 March 2022 (UTC)