Talk:Branislav Djurdjev

diacritics in the last name

@Krisitor is there a reason why you didn't just use Đurđev in the article title? --Joy (talk) 21:26, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

@Joy I hesitated, but looking in English and other non-Slavic sources, the name without diacritics seems to be the most common. There are similar cases on Wikipedia such as Milovan Djilas and Novak Djokovic, probably because the form without diacritics is easier for English speakers. Krisitor (talk) 21:40, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

@Krisitor if the article is actually referenced to a spread of sources, a lot of which actually use Đurđev, I think we might as well just use that. The diacriticless version redirect will remain to aid navigation. --Joy (talk) 09:37, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

@Joy References in the article that use Đurđev are in Serbian, Slovenian and Bosnian. But most other references use the form Djurdjev, which prevails in English-language historiography. I'm updating the article with a recent source (2020) from Routledge that uses Djurdjev, and you can check that on several official institutions he is also referenced as such:

SAZU: https://www.sazu.si/clani/branislav-djurdjev

French archives: https://francearchives.gouv.fr/fr/agent/18780408?items_per_page=25

You can also check Google Books and Google Scholar for English and other Western references. Therefore I strongly disagree with your unilateral renaming before even ending this discussion.

I've restored the previous name, since the discussion hasn't ended. Krisitor (talk) 10:02, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

This is incoherent; either you use references as reliable sources to describe a topic and then trust that their titling of the subject isn't completely wrong, or you don't. There is no middle ground, you can't say oh all these Serbian references are great sources about the life of this person but then completely ignore their way of naming the same person in favor of some vague idea of what might be easier for the English speakers. How about we don't treat our average English reader as some apparently weird creature who somehow absolutely can't handle a diacritical mark in a surname in article title and text, but can handle it in reference content, and can also handle two completely foreign words for both the given name and the surname? Do you not see how incoherent this is? :) --Joy (talk) 11:30, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Bosnian and Serbian sources will, of course, always use the form with diacritics (well, not the Serbian ones since they are mostly in Cyrillic). But there are also plenty of Western references that refer to Djurdjev's works and write his name without diacritics, sources that I didn't use in this article because they are not relevant for this particular biography page. Most English and French sources do write "Djurdjev" and the few sources I found in German do the same. In other talk page debates I read or I participated in regarding articles renaming, the prevailing argument was that the name of an article should correspond to the most widespread form in English-language literature first, then in other languages if there are too few references in English. Now, in this particular case, we have 3 references in English which use the form "Djurdjev", one in English that uses "Đurđev", one Slovenian and one Bosnian that do the same, and a Serbian that uses the form "Ђурђев" (which I have translitared to "Đurđev" in the reference). Considering this and my argument above on the predominance of the form without diacritics, I'm not sure the decision to move to Đurđev is as obvious as you suggest. But you're the administrator and you have far more experience than I do on Wikipedia, so either you decide, or we ask for an outside opinion? Krisitor (talk) 12:51, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

The catch with this reasoning where of course some will always use and some will always not use diacritics is that we don't actually know if they're doing that because of actual intent, a manual of style, just not caring, happenstance of not having the technical means to print those letters 50 years ago, etc. You should analyze the sources to see how good they are overall according to WP:RS, and then apply WP:AT criteria - commonness, recognizability, naturalness, precision, concision and consistency. As long as you make a coherent argument that takes all the relevant policies and guidelines into account, including behavioral standards like WP:CONS, there's absolutely no difference between us with regard to administrator status as far as how this is decided. --Joy (talk) 14:07, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

@Joy I understand your point. The last source I used is from 2021 (published by Routledge) and uses the form "Djurdjev", while the only fairly recent source in English that I've found that uses the form with diacritics is Michael Antolović's, but Antolović is Serbian and so it's pretty standard for him to use the Gaj alphabet diacritics in all his English articles, regardless of the readers. I'm going to do a bit more analysis of all the sources so we can settle this. Krisitor (talk) 16:56, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, I sense a bit of a double standard there - you don't make a value judgement on the dj-form for the former, but you do seem to do that for the latter. Why does it matter that this person is Serbian? Does that mean that they are somehow implicitly worse for their readers? This shouldn't be the case, really.
BTW, I should point out the existence of the WP:SERBIANNAMES guideline here. It has existed for many years, and it has had the dj vs. đ situation clarified since 2015 and further since 2016. --Joy (talk) 17:37, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Why does it matter that this person is Serbian? Does that mean that they are somehow implicitly worse for their readers? That's not my point at all, I'm just guessing why this particular source, written in English, uses one spelling rather than another. In fact, I've taken the time to check most of the English-language sources available through Google Books, Google Scholar and elsewhere, not just those used in this Wikipedia article, and I'd say that over 90% of them use the form "Djurdjev". Now, there is a convention for Serbian names which indicates that it is preferable to use the spelling "đ", but it seems to be applied mostly to little-known people. While Djurdjev, who is quite well known in Western historiography, is almost exclusively mentioned with the spelling "dj". In that case, I'd be inclined to rely on WP:CRITERIA and WP:COMMONNAME to decide on the title of this article, which would then remain "Branislav Djurdjev". In fact, this is what has been agreed for other people, such as Milovan Djilas and Novak Djokovic, as I mentioned in my reply above. Krisitor (talk) 08:21, 18 December 2023 (UTC)