Talk:Technical University, Sofia

Latest comment: 6 years ago by Lonaowna in topic Page title

Page title edit

I have moved this page back to Technical University of Sofia from Technical University, Sofia. User:Elkost moved it the other way in 2014 without motivation, and the university's website clearly uses "Technical University of Sofia" everywhere (after clicking "English" in the top-right corner). Lonaowna (talk) 10:31, 1 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

@ Lonaowna. Dear colleague, I will explain the reasons of my edits and renaming the article.
Responsibility. I have been working for 5 years for this university as the head of its Department of Cooperation and Public Relations, called informally the International Department. So I was responsible for the official foreign relations of the university, including a lot of issues and aspects like correspondence, agreements, website, even translation of the university's name to the main internationally used languages.
History of naming. In December 1995 the parliament of Bulgaria has renamed 3 public higher schools in Bulgaria (in the cities of Sofia, Varna, Gabrovo) to Technical University (Bulgarian: Технически университет) - without any indication of school's seat. Since that time there are various ways (in Bulgarian and in foreign languages) of indicating the cities of their seats just to distinguish these universities: by adding the city name, preceded by a comma, a dash (or a hyphen, what is incorrect in Bulgarian), or without any punctuation mark (inacceptable, too). Some years ago I have explained this confusion of names of universities in the Bulgarian wikipedia. Till now there is no change in their official names and any variant of translation is not official. Concerning the name in English of our higher school at that time - it was chosen, by my influence, to be Technical University of Sofia.
Translation. Here, in the English wikipedia, and in Commons as well, the most widespread way to indicate the city as a seat (or higher level) is to add the city name after a comma. That is why I have renamed the article in 2014 to this most uderstandable variant.
Have a nice evening! --Elkost (talk) 18:05, 1 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thank you very much for taking the time to explain your motivation behind the move. After doing some more research, there are indeed quite a few sources using the comma-variant. So based on that, both variants are fine according to WP:COMMONNAME. Both variants also seem fine according to WP:NAMINGCRITERIA, although the "Technical University of Sofia" variant is arguably more natural.
With this new insight, I don't see one being clearly superior to the other. You clearly are more knowledgeable on the subject, so I will trust your judgement and rename it back to Technical University, Sofia.
Thanks again for the explanation! Lonaowna (talk) 12:20, 2 July 2017 (UTC)Reply