Proposal for multilingual Banat categories

Question

After processing the replies to Batschka and Banat categories (Serbia, Romania and Hungary) and some additional thinking, I'm pretty convinced, that we should have trilingual categories in areas where that's appropriate (e.g. Banat, Batschka, Syrmia, Transylvania).

The current mixture of Hungarian-Romanian and Hungarian-Serbian categories, with Romanian and Serbian categories does not really fit together on a country level. Additionally the Germans are left out completely.

My suggestion is therefore to unify the categories of those areas to a point where there's at least the category in the language of the current country and - if applicable - also aka categories in Hungarian and German. The categories that do not fit this pattern, will have their content moved to the correct category and be deleted.

In order to make setting up those categories a little less annoying I wrote a tool that does most of the work.

Please read all about the proposal and the tool at Banat Location Categories and give your feedback here.

Comments

Update: the categories can now also be created using WikiTree BEE, without the need to install the bookmarklet

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Thank you, Florian, for introducing us to BEE.

Answer 1

I wish you good fortune in this worthy endeavour!

I agree 100% that this has to link back to locations in the present day countries - it is very important to start with a solid reference point.

Answer 2

sounds like a good plan, I am just wondering however if the gizmo you are proposing to use will create categories in the format required by WikiTree and whether the parent categories will be correct also.  Are you also going to do a category tree structure in English, since so many members don't speak the other languages?  aka template has no limitations on number of languages it can be used for that I know of.

Comments

gizmo quality: check out the akas for Category: Stanišic, Serbia, those were created with it yesterday

English: for the moment, I would skip English, because I don't see a real benefit of having something like Category: Stanišić, Srbija and Category: Stanišic, Serbia in parallel. In the Germany Project, for example, we're also only creating German location categories (maybe with some examples like Munich etc.). But if the majority wants it, I can extend the gizmo^TM without too much trouble.

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looks good!  Carry on my friend, you're making sense out of a maze.  

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This looks good to me.
I do not know much of the history and geography of this region. Nevertheless I find this set of location categories easy to follow.
In the example of [[Category: Versec, Szerbia]] I like the parallel parent categories for modern Serbia and the historic Temes vármegye in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Answer 3

It has the current country in the location, which is important in my opinion, because that way it fits into the current category system. So you have my go.

Answer 4

The suggestion makes sense to me. Not a simple case…

Answer 5

Hi, so I think the idea is pretty good.

Greetings Lisette

Answer 6

Organising parallel categories is an important and difficult task and I really appreciate your efforts. I think the priority is to establish the correct official - in the local language - names with the relevant timeframe; language alternatives are a huge bonus. It is not completely clear to me whether the profiles are automatically linked to each language alternative or not. I think it is the latter, which may create a bit of a chaos.

Comments

Thanks for your feedback. The aka template will link them and have the contents mirrored into each other. If that's not clear in the free space page, I should probably improve it. Can you please check again?

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That AKA template should be a great saver, Laszlo.

Answer 7

Florian, thank you for your commitment to planning a logical categorization for Banat regions. Please know that I am grateful for your knowledge in the borders and history in figuring it out.

Answer 8

This area has always been so confusing and difficult to pin locations down in. I finally took the time to focus, read thru the page and play with the links. My gosh, where was this 25 years ago when I was trying to find my grandparents village??

Fantastic job, Florian! This is much needed and extremely exciting to see. It will be of such help to new researchers and old ones too for that matter.

Comments

Exciting, isn't it, Lori?

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Oh, it absolutely is, Maggie!!

Answer 9

Florian, how many AKA are allowed in a category template? For instance, in creating a Romanian one for the Donauschwaben project. I add an AKA for the Hungarian (HU) with it's proper village name. Can I add another for German (DE) ?

Comments

I do not know for sure. My guess is that the limit is the number of characters that you can fit in the yellow box:

Please refer to: Categories and Europe (en)

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Thanks, Steve. I will try and see what happens

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Check out category Europe, to see, what is possible in terms of aka. Also multiple aka entries for one language work to support synonyms.

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Florian, I posted the link to Europe above. The link to Categories is even more impressive with 27 languages.

The simple answer to Maggie's question was "Yes, you can add German (de)"

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Thanks, I didn't see that. Yes, as layed out in Banat Location Categories, it is explicitly possible (and desired) to add German village names. Some are already in place at Category: Rumänien

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Thanks you for this excellent explanation, Florian (-:

Answer 10

OK, so Florian changed a category on my great-great-grandfather the pastry chef who studied in Nagyszentmiklós.

I object EXTREMELY STRONGLY to my ancestor -- who died three years before the travesty known as Trianon -- having any association whatsoever with a country that he never even visited, namely, Romania.

I changed the category back to Nagyszentmiklós, Magyarország, because that's where it was, but I realize that that's probably not how y'all mean for things to work. If so, I would rather have the category removed than having it refer to the wrong country.

While I add Yet Another Reason that I Do Not Do Categories, please consider the needs of other WikiTree users like me, who would like to stick to placenames (and all of their jurisdictions) as they existed at the time of the event.

Comments

Hi J, I must admit, that I wasn't aware that there is such a complete historical structure below Category: Kingdom of Hungary and its Hungarian counterpart, since I only saw the mess of languages in Category: Banat and Category: Batschka, where there are barely categories with suffix Magyarország. This suffix, on the other hand, doesn't contain the word Kingdom and therefore makes it impossible to separate formerly Hungarian places from the current ones, without having to check the parent categories. This I also do not consider a good solution.

On the other hand I also have to admit that there are - if the count is correct, almost 1600 categories below that Kingdom category and that it would be a lot of effort, now to rename those. Also it would then lead to the requirement of having two categories also for the "still Hungarian" places, which also seems a bit too much, in my opinion.

My original intention was to get rid of the language mess in the Banat category. As one can see at the query link above, language mess is a fact in those categories. There are some German ones, some Slovakian ones and some English ones. Those should be moved out of there and should be replaced by duplicates with ", Magyarország" and linked via the aka template like it is done in Banat now.

This also implies, that the subcategories of Category: Szerbia should no longer also be in the historical county categories like Torontál vármegye as well. 

So the goal should be, to only have ", Magyarország" categories in there and those should be linked to the present-day categories via the aka template as well, so the category content gets synced and all categories contain all profiles.

I will then try to adapt the bookmarklet and WikiTree BEE, so also be able to create ", Magyarország" categories and to no longer include the historical county in the present-day Serbian/Romanian category. I hope this fits your needs?

Having to do those changes now, when there are over 100 Szerbia categories in place already, is pretty frustrating for me. I was thinking that you meanwhile were ok with the suggestion, since after your initial reply there was no reaction from you to the comments that were afterwards. Anyways, better late than never.

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Can you please change the ancestor link in your reply to Sándor (Styavniczky) Selmeczy (1842-1917)?

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The reason I didn't speak up again until now is that the full ramifications of the changes didn't become clear to me until you edited my ancestor. (Have I mentioned that I Don't Do Categories?)

I linked to the title page of his recipe-booklet because it shows exactly what I have to work with relevant to this category: "N. Sz. Miklos". Given that he was born in Mád (Zemplén county), got married in Fancsal (Abauj-Torna county) as a resident of Losoncz (Nógrád county), and died in Balassagyarmat (Nógrád county), which are all northern, it was a non-trivial endeavor to figure out that he wrote that thing in Torontál county, which is southern.

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I've updated the free space page and the bookmarklet. WikiTree BEE will also receive an update in the next hours to reflect the changes. At one point I will remove the Szerbia categories from Torontal and Temes counties, but that will take some time, since those are over 200 already.

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Done cleaning https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Temes_v%C3%A1rmegye and https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Jude%C8%9Bul_Timi%C8%99 -> both now only have subcategories of the correct country (two are currently waiting to be automatically renamed)