Talk:Russians in Belgium

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Numbers

Is it OK for you if I first define Russians in Belgium as community members and not citizens of Russian Federation and then revert to the original >50.000 claim?

Another solution would be to sum up the Russian citizens (the number you quote), asylum seekers from Russia (can be obtained from [1]) and naturalisation statistics (I recently requested and received extensive statistics from [2] on naturalizations from Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries over the last 100 years.

But I do not like the idea of substituting "Russians" by "Russian citizens". The latter deserves a separate page, if you like.

Sam lowry2002 (talk) 09:36, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the better thing to do is to find academic sources (journal articles, books, etc.) about Russians in Belgium and let them define "who is a Russian". Listing naturalisation statistics or place-of-birth statistics is fine, if they explicitly refer to people from Russia. But this analysis [3] consists of three really shaky parts:

An unscientific poll of a non-random sample (website's own members), which is linearly extrapolated to the whole population
An extremely broad definition of "Russian" as "someone who either have being through the soviet educational system and speaks fluent Russian, or someone who speak Russian in family." (Pretty much any citizen of an ex-USSR country who managed to emigrate to the EU legally is going to be an educated urban Russophone --- this doesn't necessarily mean they identify as Russians. For example, most of Almaty speaks Russian at home.)
No evidence that this is a widely accepted estimate (e.g. acceptance by peer-reviewed journal, repetition of this figure in a newspaper without a caveat about its source, etc.)

So I don't think it can really qualify as a reliable source by Wikipedia standards. But anyway, I'll keep looking for other estimates, look forward to working on this article with you. Cheers, cab (talk) 10:05, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is, I am the author of many sources and many of the other sources reference me or the resource [4] I completely control. For instance, Zhirorova N. that you reference in the Further Reading section has half a dozen references to [5]. Back in 2004, she probably though listing online resources in the bibliography of a sociolinguistic article is reprehensible, so she only does it textually within the article, but nevertheless ;-)

Anyway, I get the point. Will try to improve the article further. Stay tuned.

Sam lowry2002 (talk) 11:04, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]