Talk:Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University of Russia/Archive 1

Archive 1

re "Racist violence" section

I have a problem with this section, and I propose to delete it. It seems rather slanted, but (more importantly) the refs don't pan out. The first one is broken, and the other one doesn't support and indeed seems if anything to contradict the thrust of the section. If anyone wants to defend this section, they should do so now. Herostratus (talk) 03:23, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

No objection having been voiced, I have deleted this section. I hate to delete an entire section, but I just don't trust it's reliability, and it's thus basically libelous. Herostratus (talk) 05:55, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

I removed "Barry Soetoro" from the alumni section, as that is a reference to Barack Obama, and there is no information available to associate Mr. Obama with this institution. It appears to be vandalism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.70.120.166 (talk) 13:12, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Removed material

• BBC: "a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists to the Soviet Union"
• Encyclopedia of terrorism: "was not a typical center for academics; it's purpose was to train future terrorists and revolutionary leaders for the Third World".

Why it was removed? Gazpr (talk) 10:57, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't see any reason not to include the BBC comment.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/42244.stm Although as I mentioned on your talkpage, there is nothing special about that in a uni as they are all hotbeds for such things and the fact that the BBC quote is from 13 years ago also should be included in the text. IMO there is nothing actually notable in the fact that a moscow university was a place to recruit foreign communists to the Soviet Union..I would say, it was notable if that was not the case. I have no idea as to the encyclopedia of terrorism, have you got a link or a cite or anything? Off2riorob (talk) 11:11, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

"450 nationalities"?

The article says: "The university has 57 programmes with about 35,000 students (including postgraduates) of 450 nationalities." The information isn't sourced, but I assume it comes from the university itself. If so, what definition of "nationality" are they using? There are fewer than 200 widely recognised passport-issuing sovereign States in the world... Aridd (talk) 17:52, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

The problem lies in the inappropriate terminology translation - the Russian word "Национальность" has the same root as "Nationality", but would be more appropriately translated as "Ethnicity". 93.80.182.145 (talk) 18:23, 29 September 2016 (UTC)Phil

• A state is not a nation, kid. Jesus Christ. 184.147.89.192 (talk) 18:43, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 24 October 2016

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: NOT MOVED (non-admin closure) Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 04:08, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

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Peoples' Friendship University of Russia → RUDN University – Not only is "Peoples' Friendship University of Russia" a fairly poor translation of the Russian name of the university, but more importantly the English-language version of the university's official website uses "RUDN University", avoiding the translation issue altogether and just using the Russian acronym. We could of course object to the fact that "RUDN University" is tautologous as the U already stands for "universitet" (university), but nonetheless Wikipedia should use the official name, following the practice of institutions like KIMEP University in Kazakhstan. Static Sleepstorm (talk) 17:11, 24 October 2016 (UTC) --Relisting. Andrewa (talk) 03:52, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

• Relisting comment: User:Static Sleepstorm, have you any case based on the article title policy? The official name does not count for much. Andrewa (talk) 03:52, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. In the absence of any attempt by nom to provide a valid rationale, I did a quick Google on the rector's name plus univeristy and rector and excluding Wikipedia [1] and the first few pages of hits all use the current title for the University, with a few also giving the official name, but only ever later in the text. This indicates that the current article title is overwhelmingly more common in English. The nom was pinged and has now had ample time to come up with evidence; It would appear that the proposal is based purely on the normal misconception that Wikipedia article titles automatically follow official names. Andrewa (talk) 06:48, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. The Russian Wikipedia article is "Российский университет дружбы народов" which (more or less) translates to "People's Friendship University of Russia" (like most anything, you can translate it various ways -- "Russian University of People's Friendship" or whatever -- but the way we're doing it now seems OK. I haven't checked if that is the most common way of rendering it in sources, but IIRC I think it is.) The editor's point about how they present their name on their English language website is cogent, but not enough to overturn; I would need to see lots of English-language sources using RUDN for that. Herostratus (talk) 20:30, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Watch for move attempts

@Static Sleepstorm, Andrewa, and Herostratus: It might be a good idea to keep this article on your watchlist. Some new accounts/IPs try to change the name of the article. XIIIfromTOKYO (talk) 12:49, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Good point. I've created a redirect from the official name, which I would have done anyway had I been the RM closer. I might have another go at promoting wp:official names to have a bit more authority than just an essay, as I think it's currently the only place such redirects are recommended. They should be mandatory.

The redir will probably be enough. If it isn't, then protection is the next step. Andrewa (talk) 15:11, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

I noticed that you made two edits to that redirect -- good, because (as I just recently learned) anyone can move a page over an existing redirect provided the redirect only has one edit (its creation).

I confess that was deliberate, but I concealed that fact by adding the template after the creation, so both were legitimate edits. I'm not aware of any guideline that authorises a second edit purely to prevent move over redirect, but AFAIK there's no guideline that prohibits it either, unless you see it as gaming the system. Anyway, done now. Andrewa (talk) 20:16, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm sure it's fine. I see no reason not to be like "Well, a move over this redirect should not be done without discussion, so let's make sure it doesn't happen". Herostratus (talk) 20:41, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

As the rest, we also have to watch for people going through the article and putting in RUDN. I had to roll back someone doing this, and I may have lost some good edits in the process. Frustrated by all this, I added a section Peoples' Friendship University of Russia#Name in the body of the article, which explains the issue. Not to say there can't be a case for moving to RUDN provided most sources use it, but I'm not generally a fan of using transliteration acromyms.

It's an interesting question because we don't usually translate proper names. That is why our articles are titled Ecole des Sciences Byimana instead of "Byimana School of Sciences" and so forth. (I think we usually should, but we don't.)

The problem is that we can't have an article titled "Российский университет дружбы народов". Yet "Rossijskij Universitet Druzhby Narodov" is not really the native name either. So we translate.

We certainly usually do for idiogramatic languages -- we don't name our article about "日本電気株式会社" as "Nippon Denki Kabushiki Gaisha". But that's because "Nippon Denki Kabushiki Gaisha" is just an attempt to render the pronunciation. "Rossijskij Universitet Druzhby Narodov" is not. It's an attempt to map the written characters to the Latin alphabet. Which is a different thing. But at the same time it sort of does render something close to the pronunciation. So it's confusing.

Russian (and Greek) is a in kind of middle ground because they neither use the Latin alphabet nor (like Chinese etc.) use a scheme entirely unrelated to the Latin alphabet. They occupy a middle ground where it is possible to correspond their names to Latin alphabet equivalents.

It's an interesting and complicated question. I don't know as there's one right answer. Herostratus (talk) 16:58, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Agree it's an interesting question, and timely IMO.

As I see it, there has been a creep over the years towards looking to reliable secondary sources (henceforth RSS) in all things, and it's a subtle tendency and not good. Of course we should rely on RSS for content, and always have. But as to matters of presentation of this content I am not at all convinced. Presentation I think includes style, whether we translate article titles, and similar issues. I think it would be far better, for example, to follow our own Manual of Style and article title policy rather than going to secondary sources case by case for whether we capitalise and use diacritics in titles. For particular subject areas, particular languages and constructions etc., the MOS can and should say follow RSS - that is fine, but we should be fearless in adopting our own Wikipedia style and article title conventions whenever this has any advantage to the general reader (remembering we are a general encyclopedia). The current (non-)policy leads to a great deal of inconsistency and discussion, and occasionally even to bitter and unproductive conflict, and IMO to plainly wrong decisions when the article topic is of general interest but most sources are written for specialists in the area, which is quite a common scenario. Andrewa (talk) 20:24, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

As far as I can see, this issue has been settled. For what it's worth, my suggested move was indeed motivated by the mistaken belief that the official name had to be used. Now I know otherwise, I no longer support a move. I've taken the liberty of reworking the paragraph that had been written about the name, just to make it a bit clearer. Hope I haven't written anything controversial there! Static Sleepstorm (talk) 17:16, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

He

There are many instances of use of "he" where "it" would be correct in English. User:Fred Bauder Talk 06:02, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

2003 Fire

I see that sometime in 2003 there was a fire on campus that killed forty-seven people. Does anyone have the details?

References