Talk:Valuyki, Belgorod Oblast

Requested move 20 January 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. (closed by non-admin page mover) Sceptre (talk) 09:38, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

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Valuyki, Belgorod Oblast → Valuiki, Belgorod Oblast – WP:COMMONNAME, demonstrated by a Google Books Ngram chart. Charting an expression shows that the proposed spelling comprises 60% to 90% of usage.[1]  —Michael Z. 17:18, 20 January 2023 (UTC)— Relisting. —usernamekiran (talk) 03:37, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Google Book Search, per WP:SET:

• "Valuiki" -Wikipedia Page 45 of about 122,000 results (445 actually displayed)
• "Valuyki" -Wikipedia Page 31 of about 44,200 results (309)

Google Scholar Search:

• "Valuiki" -Wikipedia Page 31 of 315 results
• "Valuyki" -Wikipedia Page 21 of 212 results

 —Michael Z. 09:02, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

• Support per links submitted within the nomination. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 18:24, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, the number of hits is insufficient to determine what COMMONNAME is, and we need top use WP:RUS. The two above users are on a crusade in an editing area they have very little understanding about.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:47, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose any renaming of obscure Russian-language terms contrary to WP:RUS based on alleged English COMMONNAME. I might support changing the default transliteration of ⟨ё⟩ to e rather than yo (despite the latter being more phonetically correct), but going piecewise like this is futile (and borders on disruption). It's not as if an English reader will come here an wonder "Valuyki??!! OMG, I've always thought the proper spelling is 'Valuiki'". No such user (talk) 08:30, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

  What do you mean “alleged” commonly used name in reliable sources? Are the above hundreds of instances not enough evidence for you?

  How can this be disruptive, when the majority of titles with Russian names and terms currently do not conform to WP:RUS? COMMONNAME is the primary principle and has overridden WP:RUS in hundreds or thousands of article titles, because WP:RUS is non-standard. It is disruptive to insist on ignoring a Wikipedia policy, a “widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow,” without a better reason than “OMG”.

  If the best spelling seems trivial to you, then why oppose using it so vehemently?  —Michael Z. 16:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

  "Best spelling"?! Not according to Google maps, Reuters, TripAdvisor OpenStreetMap or RFE. And your samples of ~500 hits each, spread about equally between both forms, many from early 1900s, many coming for Russian-language papers, only demonstrates that this location does not have an English common name, at least not one worth changing. No such user (talk) 13:03, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

  Well, Reuters’ corpus is a total of 4 articles,[2], RFE/RL’s is actually 4:4 usage,[3][4] OpenStreetMap is user-generated content. New York Times is 2:3.[5][6] These are essentially anecdotal.

  I thought that the Ngram chart summarizing hundreds of sources gives a better indication of usage in published sources, and it supports different conclusions, with 61% to 91% of total usage every year.[7] The separate G Books and G Scholar searches that I added later are not identical, and unlike Ngram they are not designed for this purpose, but they still do support an unambiguous majority usage of Valuiki, with 45 to 31 pages (59%) if you go by sources shown, or 73% if you believe Google Books’s “about X results,”[8][9] and 312 to 210 (60%) in Scholar.[10][11]

  Restricting to the 21st century still favours Valuiki by 24 to 19 (56%) pages of results or 17,600 to 5,800 (75%) estimated in G Books,[12][13] and 239 to 182 (57%) in G Scholar.[14][15]  —Michael Z. 17:35, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

  And? Are we going to repeat this exercise for thousands of Russian-language names? Those differences stem from two (or more) different transliteration schemes; we have a preferred one in house, and I do not see a pressing reason to deviate from it here. I much more value WP:CONSISTENCY over WP:COMMONNAME in such cases, particularly as both forms are equally recognizable, and prevalence of any one will be always borderline over the other. Such moves are as productive as moving e.g. Centralisation to Centralization because more GHits can be found for the latter. And we don't do that not just because of ENGVAR, but mainly because we value stability; the same principle applies here. No such user (talk) 09:11, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

  CONSISTENCY is the lowest-priority WP:CRITERION according to WP:CRITERIAORDER. It should not trump COMMONNAME without a good reason.

  No, it is not ENGVAR. It is COMMONNAME and WP:TRANSLITERATE. I am trying to make article titles better conform to these policies. WP:RUS is lower priority, and it is a non-consensus essay that ignores advice in TRANSLITERATE that “established systematic romanizations” are preferred.

  It’s a WP:VOLUNTEER project and there is no WP:DEADLINE. No one is obligating you to participate in this. Why do you begrudge us making these minor improvements?

  If you value stability, what better way to achieve it than to determine consensus with a fair RM? At least as long as the RM process isn’t suppressed by objections to conducting it at all. —Michael Z. 18:18, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose: the name is too obscure for COMMONNAME to be a useful guideline. Before and during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the locality -- a staging area for Russian troops -- gained a bit more prominence. The current spelling, "Valuyki", has been used by prominent publications such as Reuters, CBC, Kyiv Post, The Moscow Times, BBC, Newsweek, Voice of America, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, etc. In general, this RM, along with the RM for obscure Russian-language periodicals, appears to be a solution in search of a problem; debating minor spelling variantions does not seem to be a good use of community's time as the result would not significantly improve the readers' experience. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:02, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.