Talk:Grigore Iunian

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]
	This article is supported by the Politics and government work group.

An appropriate infobox may need to be added to this article, or the current infobox may need to be updated. Please refer to the list of biography infoboxes for further information.

	This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Romania, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Romania-related topics. Please visit the the Wikipedia:WikiProject Romania if you would like to get involved. Happy editing!
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
	edit · history · watch · refresh To-do list for Grigore Iunian:
No to-do list assigned; you can help us in improving the articles in the same category

An entry from Grigore Iunian appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 29 March 2007.

[edit] A few stylistic comments

• "Iunian joined the refuge in Iaşi": I think the word "refuge" is treated a bit differently in English than in Romanian. I would either say "Iunian took refuge in Iaşi" or "Iunian joined the refugees in Iaşi", but maybe there is yet another way to say it...
• The Ceauşescu quote: "took a stand against the aggressive of Nazi Germany" should either be "took a stand against the aggression of Nazi Germany" or "took a stand against the aggressive actions of Nazi Germany" or something like that, but I'm not sure how that is stated in the original. Seems worth double-checking.
• Sorting categories: seems to me the trend is to sort them by relevance, putting first what stands out (eg, profession, accomplishment, etc), then things like places of work, education, and then finally basic bio info (place of birth, cause of death, dates of birth/death, etc), with alphabetical sorting within those subranges. I've used such sorting in many other places (after I saw others doing it, rather consistently -- eg, for mathematicians' bios), but among Romanian biographies this sort of sorting is still rare. How about trying to arrive at a consensus on this matter, and then trying to enforce some kind of more-or-less uniform standards on how categories are sorted? Turgidson 19:38, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

  Thank you. Yes, you are right about both style issues: I'll rephrase the former; the latter was missing a word. About categories: I am open to any model; personally, I always considered the alphabet to be the most objective way of sorting, but I never reverted anyone re-arranging them according to some other criterion. I have only enforced the alphabet where it was already applied, but I can confirm to whatever rational model. Dahn 19:51, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

  I rearranged the cats a bit, by what I suppose is closest to your model. Feel free to order them as you see fit, though. Dahn 19:54, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Order looks good to me -- his activities as lawyer look more substantial than those as human rights activist, while being a leading figure in a major political party trumps both. And, by the way, here is a discussion on this topic that I had a while ago with User:Piccadilly -- he sounded quite convincing, so that's when I started using this sorting scheme, with some modifications when necessary. Turgidson 03:49, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Speaking of categories, I find something like Category:Natives of Oltenia overly broad (though still useful). I would like to have a category like Category:Natives of Gorj County for each county, which would be especially useful for grouping people not born in a major city (not quite the case here, but occuring in many other instances). The historical variations in the names of those counties are a bit daunting, though one could just use current names and boundaries for this purpose, I guess. I'm thinking of making a proposal along these lines -- would the Romanian Wikipedians' notice board (or its talk page) be the place for that? Turgidson 03:29, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

I'd go with "current names and boundaries" as well (so does wikipedia: Fulcher of Chartres is a native of Centre, and Guido Cagnacci is from the Province of Rimini etc.; plus, the categories are to be useful to people living now, not to people living then). I'm with you on this one - we would create a hierarchy from Oltenia to Craiova through counties, and, at the same time, create a category for "People by county in Romania"). We could start work on it, IMO. Dahn 13:00, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh, hold on: for all its ambiguity, the nomenclature preferred is "People from x County" (I have tried to persuade people to change their minds and replace the vague and subjective "people from" to "natives of", but it was an uphill struggle; at the same time, for some reason, they did not change the name of the "Oltenia" cat, even though I asked them to consider it). Dahn 13:10, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

I much prefer "People from ..." to "Natives of ...": the emphasis is slightly better, and it deflects the importance of where people were actually born (could have been on a trip for example, although parents were from somewhere else), to where they were actually from (in terms of living there for most of their youth, say). Although I've seen editors using several places in "People from ..." -- not just place of origin, but also the place where one has spent most of one's life, for example.

At any rate, in terms of concrete organization, I like the way things are done by state in the States (though I'm sure there are other models there, but this is the one I got familiar with). Eg, if one starts at Category:People from New York, then one can get more specific (if more specific info is known), down to Category:People by county in New York, Category:People by city in New York, or even Category:People from Manhattan. I would propose doing something similar for Romania, with a consistent and logical use of terminology, so as to avoid confusion and separate criteria for inclusion. Turgidson 14:08, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, while I do not object to your version, there are two things which would make "Natives of..." slightly better than "People from...". One is that the issue of "the odd trip" is not actually solved, but rather just transfered to the person from the person's parents - I remember when some guy included as "people from" on the page for Craiova everybody famous who ever spend five minutes over there... On the other hand, in a Romanian context, half of the people we have articles on, give or take, are people from Bucharest (gotta love the centralized system); if we support a vague criterion, we risk turning "People from Bucharest" into something utterly meaningless (though I'm aware all such categories are of very limited use in themselves), or spend a lot of time arguing about who thinks whom should be included. But, as I have said, I'm gonna go with whatever model is ultimately endorsed.

My proposal on the issue of categorization is the following: a category equivalent to "people by state" for "people by county", and a parallel subcategorizing of "people from Transylvania/Oltenia etc." into the respective counties ("people from Transylvania"->"people from Cluj County"->"people from Cluj Napoca" with "people by county in Romania"->"people from Cluj County" and "people by city in Romania"->"people from Cluj Napoca" running in parallel). I suppose we therefore agree (though I'm not sure we would/could ever reach the "People from Colentina" level to match "Manhattan"). Dahn 14:35, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Good point about Category:People from Bucharest: if one does not watch closely who gets in there, pretty soon every Tom, Dick and Harry who ever set foot on Romanian soil will be a Bucharester! But I like to think in concrete examples, and go from there. Case in point: as you well know, Vladimir Tismăneanu is listed as being from Category:People from Braşov, though from I gather he's about as much a Bucharester as anyone else in Category:People from Bucharest. And, even more glaringly, Mihai Eminescu is not listed as being from anywhere in the world (!), probably due to the fact that Ipoteşti is too small a town to make it to the list of places people are from. I've been thinking of listing him as being from Botoşani (in fact, he is mentioned there as being a native son, which is not quite 100% accurate, but hey!), but my favorite solution would be to have a Category:People from Botoşani County, and put Eminescu in there. How does that sound? Turgidson 14:52, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

On the basis of residence, one could simply include the cat "Presidents of Romania" into "People from Bucharest" (I kinda did something similar with "Chairpersons of the National Theatre Bucharest", thinking that we would get to discuss the issue from this perspective). In cases like Tismăneanu's, I would go with two cats, for consistency (instead of discussing whether it is relevant where he was born, we could simply include all people who were born in x town who subsequently resided in y town into both x and y, and spare ourselves the complications; not to mention that VT is also from several other places, including Washington, DC). As for Eminescu, I understand that it was actually proposed by many that he was not born in Ipoteşti, but in Botoşani, so that may be the source for the ambiguity (and, yes, your solution would satisfy all sides); I personally tried to stay away from that article - there is simply too much to be added in and subtracted from it to get it in working order. Dahn 15:05, 24 March 2007 (UTC)