Template talk:Lang-ru

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Templates for deletion This template survived a request for deletion. The result of the discussion was keep.

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[edit] purpose

Please stop using this template. It serves absolutely no purpose except to save people the fraction of a second it takes to type a few extra letters. The worst part about it is that calls upon no fewer than three other, fairly complex templates just to produce [[Russian language|Russian]]:.

Peter Isotalo 19:49, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it also marks the text as written in the Russian language, which helps search engines process and index it properly. Same goes for the {{lang-uk}} template.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 21:15, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
See related discussion at template talk:lang-uk. It doesn't matter how many templates of what complexity are used, the result is cached until one of these templates is edited. Michael Z. 2005-10-16 22:29 Z

[edit] Overwikification and transliteration issues

Came here following a recent change of Decembrist revolt using this template as follows:

The Decembrist revolt or the Decembrist uprising (Russian: Восстание декабристов)...

Now that article also includes the following text shortly below where the template was used:

This uprising took place in the Senate Square in St. Petersburg. In 1925, to mark the centenary of the event, it was renamed as Decembrist Square (Ploshchad' Dekabristov, Russian: Площадь Декабристов).

Now if this template is going to be used to the fullest extent, this should have probably been changed as well, to

This uprising took place in the Senate Square in St. Petersburg. In 1925, to mark the centenary of the event, it was renamed as Decembrist Square (Ploshchad' Dekabristov, Russian: Площадь Декабристов).

This would have the following drawbacks though:

  1. Note the over-wikification of the Russian (the WP style is to only wikify the 1st occurence). This is probably just a bug of the template and could be fixed in it, by maintaining a counter.
  2. How to mark up the transliterated text (Ploshchad' Dekabristov)? It's clearly neither properly encoded Russian nor the English language.

BACbKA 20:24, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Vaska! For cases when language specification ("[[Russian language|Russian]]:") is redundant, we have the {{lang}} template. In the second case, the text should have been formatted as follows:
...it was renamed as Decembrist Square (''Ploshchad Dekabristov'', {{lang|ru|Площадь Декабристов}}).
Please also note that Cyrillic text should generally not be italicized.
Hope this helps.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 15:46, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
A good reminder; I always forget about that template.
I would mark the above example up like this: (Площадь Декабристов, Ploshchad' Dekabristov), with the Cyrillic Russian first, implying that the transliteration is derived from it, and with both marked as Russian language. Furthermore, if the transliteration is not confusing or ambiguous, you only need to present the Russian word for all readers, and not its Cyrillic spelling for Russophones, so in most cases (Ploshchad' Dekabristov) would be sufficient. Michael Z. 2006-01-3 17:04 Z

[edit] Italicizing Cyrillic text

This the only template for a language which has the concept of italics where the text is not italicized. On pages where several languages are listed, I understand this is because there is a segment of wikipedia readers who are familiar enough with russian to glean any benefit at all from seeing the word in cyrillic, and yet not familiar enough to read it italicized. It seems exceedingly easy to read the italic text, because the letters are exactly the same, just slightly tilted. Observe:

а б в г д е ё ж з и й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я
а б в г д е ё ж з и й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я

I would like to request a vote on my motion to italicize text displayed with this template.

eae 02:56, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

  • Neutral. The letters look the same in Firefox and Opera, but not in the IE. As the majority of readers use IE, it is a problem for them. I am, however, voting neutral because I don't like how Russian text stands out when this template is used along with other, italicized lang templates.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 03:35, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Object. Under many combinations of resolution/system/font italic Cirillic looks barely readable, not to say ugly. A worse sight I know is only for italicized Chinese hieros. mikka (t) 04:20, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. I don't find the arguments persuasive. What is the practice for Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian lang-templates? --Ghirla -трёп- 10:49, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
    • I believe the current practice is to not italicize the Cyrillic letters at all, regardless of the language.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 14:28, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Oppose as per follows. --Irpen 07:59, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
    • It seems that the current tradition in both UA and RU is not to italicise cyrillic letters but italicise the transliteration that follows. Something like: Russia (Russian: Россия) or the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, Rossiyskaya Federatsiya) is... I suggest to stick to this. --Irpen 07:57, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. For someone who just started learning Russian and can barely decipher non-italicized Cyrillic names, italicized text will most certainly pose a problem. But I rather perceive this as a problem that could be solved on the client side - ideally with like a stylesheet option that permits a user to switch to non-italicized Cyrillic text. Furthermore, such a solution would hopefully be independent of browser and fonts installed. --Nikai 13:05, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
    This solution will not be of much help to first-time or generally new Wikipedia readers who would know nothing of the vast customization options available to them and would just use the default skin/setup.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 14:31, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Oppose as per Mikka. While I have used the Italics in the Russian and Belarusian articles I wrote, I sometimes cannot tell what the letters are, so I think the Cyrillic characters will look better not in Italics. User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) Fair use policy 16:53, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Oppose—this also applies to Belarusian, Ukrainian, and several other languages. Since text in these languages is in the Cyrillic alphabet, it is already visually differentiated enough from the surrounding English, as well as from the usual transliteration which commonly follows it (this follows the editorial practice of some journals). Also, in some browser-font combinations, italicized accented Cyrillic or old Cyrillic characters fail to italicize or fail to display at all. Finally, adding this to the template would break all of the hundreds or thousands of occurrences where an editor has already manually italicized part of the text in the template. Michael Z. 2006-03-15 18:02 Z
  • Oppose as per Mikka. Elk Salmon 19:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

It should be noted that just because italic Cyrillic text appears as an oblique font in your browser-font combination, doesn't mean that it does for others. For example, readers using a serif font would probably see the correct cursive versions of some letters:

а б в г ґ д е є ж з и і ї й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ю я ь ’
а б в г ґ д е є ж з и і ї й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ю я ь ’

On the other hand, I think italicizing is pretty common, and most beginners learn the shapes of hand-written letters. I don't see this as an important reason not to italicize, but there are other much more important reasons (see my vote, above).

Common usage for these templates for Cyrillic-alphabet languages is:

{{lang-uk |Тара́с Шевче́нко, ''Taras Shevchenko''}}
{{lang-ru |Володимеръ . иже кнѧжи в Києвѣ}}

Which yields:

Ukrainian: Тара́с Шевче́нко, Taras Shevchenko
Russian: Володимеръ . иже кнѧжи в Києвѣ

Adding italics to the template would display:

Ukrainian: Тара́с Шевче́нко, Taras Shevchenko
Russian: Володимеръ . иже кнѧжи в Києвѣ

In the last example, my browser (Safari) shows the stress accents as empty boxes after the letters, and doesn't italicize the letters little yus and yat. Michael Z. 2006-03-15 18:02 Z

I'm using Safari 3 and ь, ъ are both italicised. I was going to point out, as has already been done, that those using serif fonts or custom stylesheets will see cursive Cyrillic rather than the standard. Bellito, master of all things Mac-related 00:56, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Protection

Due to vandalism w/ penis images, I have locked the template for editing by new accounts. User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 10:57, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Transliteration

As it seems practically very hard to introduce an automatic transliteration from Russian into English, I removed that part of the template. --Camptown (talk) 10:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Interwiki

{{editprotected}}
Please add mk:Шаблон:Lang-ru interwiki. Thanks. --iNkubusse? 01:10, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Y Done - Nihiltres{t.l} 02:49, 11 April 2008 (UTC)