Can we decide on a last name for Yaropolk Vladimirovich, Grand Prince of Kiev?

+6 votes
208 views

There are two duplicates for Yaropolk Vladimirovich, Grand Prince of Kiev, and they have been stuck in a unmerged match since August 30, 2015.

The issue is clearly the last name at birth, since the two profiles are clear duplicates. One of the profiles has the LNAB Kiev and the other has Рюрикович.

Can we decide on one and complete the merge, please? It does not need to be one of the two alternatives, but they are the most frequently used Last Names At Birth for Rurikids and appear less problematic than other alternatives.

Thanks !

in The Tree House by Isabelle Martin G2G6 Pilot (560k points)
retagged by Isabelle Martin

Should Duke not be in his name? (I have my own style, which is probably a bit effusive: Yaropolk II Vladimirovich Prince of Smolensk Prince of Pereysalav Grand Duke of Kiev. Not to worry, I trust you guys to sort it out. 

Yes, but per our conventions it should go in the nicknames field. It takes a little time to get used to.

I'd recommend to put only the principal title in the data fields and the complete set in the biography.

3 Answers

+6 votes
 
Best answer

I re-merged them, and I think the best one is Рюрикович. The other more recent Rurikid G2G never came to a consensus but the dynastic name in English "Rurikid" seems better as a LNAB than Рюрикович (aka Rurikovich), or the territorial designation (e.g. Kiev). It is a common way to describe the family in English (see Wikipedia Category:Rurik dynasty) and makes them slightly more findable. 

We also should start tagging these profiles with the WT category  The category can be updated with instructions which hopefully will help.

Did you ping the PM on Kiev-40 to see if you can be added to the trusted list so you can change the LNAB? The other PM is not active.

 

by Kirk Hess G2G6 Mach 7 (71.0k points)
selected by Pip Sheppard
If we can reach a conclusion on this, I absolutely plan to use the results to follow-up the other Rurikid request.

So you think Rurikid? It's always been my opinion that, since these people did not use a family name at all and we need to invent one, it might as well be in English. To be honest names in Cyrillic are terrible to research for the huge majority of WikiTree users.

So, I tend to agree with you. No, I did not ping the PM, but I will. Thanks Kirk.
Thanks for bringing these problems up! If we're picking a name I think the English name is slightly better too, although either one is going to work.
In my opinion any preferential treatment of English names for non-English speaking people whether they use the roman alphabet or not goes counter to the international aspirations of WikiTree. Until a decision is made that the current name and location style should be changed to "we don't care what they were called in their own time and language, we use English" we should stick with our current policies.

There is always the Other Name field to use for transliterations or translations.
Kirk says either will work, Helmut, so it looks like we could go with Рюрикович, and it's likely John would prefer a Russian version as well. Provided we come up with something (and it's not something horrible like "Russia"), I'll be happy.

I wish I could be completely sure WikiTree's international aspirations go to the extent of preferring local alphabets to transliterations, but I'm not. (this from someone who renamed the Elsa Triolet's profile to Каган, and that's an example).

From Use their conventions instead of ours:

This applies for names with accented characters, and even for languages with non-Latin alphabets. WikiTree can accept most character sets, such as Cyrillic, Chinese, and Arabic.

Note that English translations can go in the less formal fields, such as Nicknames and Other Last Names.

But again, if we would all decide to throw out these internationalist sentiments and go with English instead, all that the people who liked the international aspirations of WikiTree could do would be to pack up their stuff and try to find something else worthwhile to do or conform to the new order. So far we have not done that.

The problem with using Russian, or Ukrainian for that matter, is that since the names used for males and females are sex-specific and different from the dynastic name, we need to settle on what to use: the individual name ore the dynastic name. For Rurikids this would be Рюрикович for a male, Рюриковна for a female, and Рюриковичи for the dynasty. Similar issues would be encountered with Czech, Greek, Polish, Lithuanian etc.

Helmut,

Frankly this is an absolutely terrible policy for wikitree, especially on pre-1500 profiles where the people are ancestors throughout the world.  It serves absolutely no purpose to use a name like Рюрикович.  Essentially no one on wikitree speaks Russian, or reads Russian.  I will say it again, like it or not, this is an English language site where 100% of the users speak and read English (whether it is their primary language or not).  Using non-Latin alphabets is confusing to the vast majority of wikitree users - it actually makes wikitree a less useful and trustworthy site.  It is at times embarrassing at how out-of-step wikitree can be with standard genealogical literature, and academic literature.  There needs to be some degree of common sense to names and not follow an idiotic guideline which does not work for this time period.  Yes  I feel strongly that the name should be Kiev, and names such as Рюрикович can be placed and discussed in the biography where it belongs.

Would you like me as a native German speaker quote standard genealogical and academic German literature more extensively? Where would you draw the line, a statement that non-English speakers are not welcome? Frankly, one of the more annoying aspects of working with WikiTree is this absolutely Anglocentric way of approaching everything else in the world, from laying claim to English being the one legitimate language by some to name people to name orders that transliterate names as Zedong Mao just because I suppose we in the West have an exclusive right to decide how things and people should be named.

English as a lingua franca for the website has an absolute place, but I for one would welcome having the names, locations, and bios of Russians in Russian and Cyrillic, with the English transliteration in the Other Name field and an English synopsis of the bio appended to it.

Helmut - this is a particularly bad situation which shows the many flaws in Wikitree's architecture. As a notable person, Wikitree is going to be inferior to Wikipedia (Russian) which can address all these language issues much better than WT. 

Joe, I do not have a strong preference, esp. considering Kiev is just as wrong as Рюрикович. We could also use the transliterated Rurikovich, which avoids Cyrillic. It's hard to create any profiles for this dynasty! 

+3 votes
Ok, 30 days later. the merge is ready to go. Neither PM took action, one has not used wikitree for a long time. Why do we have pre-1500 PMs again?

Unfortunately, this conversation petered out, probably because it is very confusing and difficult. So which one - Kiev-40 or Рюрикович-24? I'm pretty sure we're going Рюрикович-24 but maybe a leader can make the call?
by Kirk Hess G2G6 Mach 7 (71.0k points)

I'm a leader, but not of the European Aristocrats so I'd prefer one of them to make the call. There is no concensus. 

If we use Рюрикович or Рюриковичи as the LNAB we could still put Kiev in the CLN, which would make the profile searchable (I'm less sure about how searchable the OLN field is). - I'm a member of the school who thinks searchability is more important than display (i.e. I would clutter the OLN field and live with the clumsy way names are displayed in consequence). I totally understand the opposite point of view however.

Kiev-40 has been merged already into Рюрикович-24. 

+1 vote
Whatever is decided should also include AKA Kiev for ease of searching.
by Stevenson Browne G2G4 (4.5k points)
Agreed!

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