Talk:Matúš Vallo

'Backed by' vs 'Supported by'

@Andrej Shadura I've noticed my recent change of this sentence fragment "... of the vote backed by his own local party..." was reverted back to "of the vote supported by his local party".

I substituted the phrase 'backed by' for the phrase 'supported by' because of this nuance in the meaning – the 'backed' term is often emphasizing financial support, as seen, for example, in this dictionary definition.

The provided resources didn't specify whether the mentioned parties did indeed financially support Mr. Vallo. Therefore, to avoid possible confusion, I replaced the phrase 'backed by' with a more neutral 'supported by'.

As far as the removed word 'own' is concerned, I removed it because it seems a bit redundant in that sentence since it is preceded by a possessive pronoun, 'his'.

Please elaborate on your thoughts on this matter to prevent back-and-forth edits and reverts.

Thanks! Alpyn (talk) 07:00, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

I disagree that backed by and supported by could be misunderstood in this sentence; especially considering that Team Bratislava did pay for his advertisement on Facebook, for example, which can be considered financial support. It’s also quite common to use the word back to describe when someone strongly (and publicly) agrees with something or someone.

Regarding "his own", the inclusion of "own" makes the sentence easier to read.

Another change was the names of the political parties: I know that for some reason articles on all Slovak political parties have their names translated, but that’s a very uncommon practice in general, and should not be done unless parties in question actually have a corresponding English name (the majority do not). Having done a bit of research, Progresívne Slovensko seems to actually have an English name they use, Spolu doesn’t (so for example naming them Together is just wrong), but I’m not so sure about SaS — I guess that change could be brought back.

The rest of the changes were spelling flips (-ise → -ize), doing that isn’t usually considered polite when the original spelling isn’t wrong 🙂

Andrej Shadura (talk) 17:21, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

By the way, I appreciate the fact you posted here instead of going ahead and reverting. I should do the same more often myself 🙂 Andrej Shadura (talk) 17:22, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

'Backed by' vs. 'Supported by'

Okay, if there was some form of paid advertisement by either of the parties, the 'backed by' phrase seems to be justified.

Regardless, in general, I have the impression that the phrase 'backed by' is kind of overused in Slovak politics-related Wikipedia articles. I am no political expert, but it seems that politics-related English-native media outlets use this phrase especially in the context of military intervention or to stress substantial financial assistance by the backers.

Nonetheless, as said above, I do agree that the 'backed by' phrase is acceptable in this article.

Redundant 'own'

I still think that the sentence flow is slightly better without the 'own'; it feels like it was a word-by-word translation of the sentence structure in Slovak. Nevertheless, it's a minor stylistic issue; I don't insist on leaving it out.

English-like vs. Slovak-like names of the parties

I appreciate that you did some research here; your reasoning sounds good enough. That being said, what would you think if you put this outcome of yours to the guidelines of WikiProject Slovakia? Maintaining consistency would be much easier if this information was provided so editors could refer to that.

US vs. UK spelling of '-ize' and '-ise'

My vague impression is that most Wikipedia articles employ the US spelling, which seems reasonable, given that there are more readers from the US than the UK and that the American English variant of English is predominant in the international community.

However, this seems like an issue that could be resolved by stating the preferred spelling variant in the aforementioned guideline, doesn't it?

Conclusion

To sum it up, I value that you took your time and replied to my objections; I feel like we have a shred of productive conversation here 🙂. If anything, the dispute could inspire development of so lacking guidelines of WikiProject Slovakia – at least for the party naming and US v UK spelling concerns. Alpyn (talk) 18:25, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Regarding US vs UK spelling: WP:ENGVAR says the English Wikipedia prefers no national variety of English over others. Andrej Shadura (talk) 22:54, 2 November 2022 (UTC)