User talk:Буньков Денис

Welcome!

Hello, Буньков Денис, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions.

If you are interested in Russia-related topics, you may want to check out the WikiProject Russia and its task forces, the Russia Portal and the project discussion page. You might even want to add these pages to your watchlist.

Again, welcome!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 16, 2013; 14:28 (UTC)

Your inquiry

Dear Mr. Bunkov! Thank you kindly for your note. It is always a thrill to have someone working close to a certain subject to join the ranks of Wikipedia editors. Welcome again; I look forward to future cooperation, and I am sure other participants of WikiProject Russia will be equally delighted.

That said, I feel obligated to comment on the situation you are in. Pardon me if you are already familiar with what I am about to say, but I feel it's safer to include it for the sake of completeness. Since you are not an individual editor but rather a representative of a government organization, you should be extra mindful of Wikipedia policies and guidelines covering your position, of which the guideline on the conflict of interest is the most significant. Another important point is that Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia, so it's not supposed to include any material which is purely promotional. Even valid encyclopedic content may routinely be edited by any other editor, and understanding this point is vital for anyone who is planning to contribute anything. One cannot prohibit others from editing one's additions and no permission is needed to be able to edit content added by others. This, in fact, is one of the five pillars of Wikipedia.

This isn't to say that you must agree to each and every change others make to things you add, but all such disagreements should be resolved within the framework of applicable policies and guidelines. You'll notice, for example, that I've made a number of fixes to the style you used to format your addition to the Kaluga Oblast article—this is not because the style you used is somehow inferior, but simply because it does not conform to the style used across other articles in the series on Russian oblasts. At any rate, style matter are pretty low on the chain of importance, and as a new editor you are not expected to immediately be familiar with all nooks and crannies of Wikipedia's Manual of Style. You should not, however, be surprised when others fix it.

Style issues aside, Wikipedia is all about content, of course. It's understandable that as someone close to the source of information you will have a lot to share, but the applicable policies to bear in mind here are those on verifiability and reliable sources. What this means in practice is that every statement which can reasonably be expected to be contested must have a source, and the source must be a reliable one, published by an organization with a reputation for checking the facts and/or with editorial oversight. Ultimately, this means that articles should be based on reliable secondary sources, and in your situation it means that sources produced by the Government of Kaluga Oblast in general and by the Agency for Regional Development in particular would most likely fall under the definition of a primary (not secondary) source. Primary sources are still perfectly acceptable to verify hard facts, but they immediately become unsuitable once judgement is passed. In other words, it's OK to to use a primary source to back up a statement that Kaluga Oblast's GRP in 2010 was 214.5 billion rubles, but a secondary source is mandatory to back up a statement like "this demonstrates the oblast's high economic potential".

With formalities and general introductions taken care of, let's address your question about "Kaluga Oblast" somehow being a wrong translation. That actually is not the case. The term "oblast" is a loanword in the English language, included in all major dictionaries, and it is much more precise than a more vague "region", "territory", or "province". This isn't to say that any of those terms are "wrong"—they are not—but they are simply not as suitable for use in a reference work with such a huge scope as Wikipedia's due to their ambiguity. This issue had been discussed on several past occasions, and the general consensus is that using a more precise term is better than using a less precise one. Precision is actually one of the criteria used to select an article's title. Note also that all major English-language reference works use the term "oblast" (see, for example, Encyclopedia Britannica). Additionally, since the article about Kaluga Oblast is a part of the series on the Russian oblasts, its title is expected to conform to the same format as the rest of the articles. WP:NCCS is the applicable guideline covering all this, if you are interested in reviewing it.

I hope this has been helpful. I apologize for dumping so much information on you all at once, but since your situation is different from that of a regular editor, I feel certain points should have been touched upon. If you have any further questions or need anything clarified, you are welcome to contact me directly (I've been an English Wikipedia administrator for almost nine years and know how navigate Wikipedia's inner workings fairly well), or, alternatively, you can post an inquiry at WikiProject Russia's talk page. Once again, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 17, 2013; 14:10 (UTC)

Perhaps you misunderstood. I did not mean to accuse you of adding promotional materials (so far I've seen none of that), but merely pointed out that it is a common problem for editors representing an organization, and it is something to keep in mind. Same goes for the conflict of interest.

The paragraph starting with the 14th century, that one I removed for entirely different reasons. Its geographic part mostly duplicates information in the section immediately below and its part dealing with history talks about the entities preceding Kaluga Oblast. That's something that can and should be covered in the History section (which I falsely believed already contained that information), but it's mostly out of place in the lede.

Regarding the population, articles about locations in Russia always include the results of the most recent population census; that's the only way to ensure the numbers reported across various articles are comparable. Census results should never be removed, but it is, of course, OK to include more recent estimates as well. The 2013 estimate you added (and which I removed), however, was not sourced to anything. If you can provide a source, by all means feel free to re-add it (retaining the Census results). Note also that the infobox has two fields for the population: 2010 Census results go onto the "pop_2010census" line, but there is also a "pop_latest" line available for more recent estimates ("pop_latest_date" is the date for which the estimate is given, in this case 2013, and "pop_latest_ref" is where the reference is supposed to go).

As for the the choice of language for our communication, you are more than welcome to use Russian on my talk page, but if you don't mind, I'll still respond in English. But if that's going to be a problem, I can try and do my best to switch to Russian. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); April 19, 2013; 13:44 (UTC)