Talk:Sibiu

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There is a request, submitted by Mocu, for an audio version of this article to be created. See WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia for further information. The rationale behind the request is: "Sibiu is the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2007. I think this is a good reason". See also: Category:Spoken Wikipedia requests and Wikipedia:Spoken articles.

Contents 1 Vandalisms 2 Leaf shaped tower 3 Surface 4 Evangelical Cathedral 5 Germans 6 "Humane and real studies" 7 Not always vandalism 8 FlickR 9 Disputed 10 Graphics over substance 11 The Large Square, The Small Square

[edit] Vandalisms

There are repetead vandalisms from some IP's, generally frustrated students from Sibiu. Please stop!!! Mabye a ban will be necessary. -Orioane 14:16, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Not to be written the Rumanian language nor the English. I am using an automatic translator. Pardon the herrores. Thanks.

The reason for this note is to ask so that they do not mention any the Esperanto language. Sibiu was, and is, very important for the esperantistas. Please they watch the plate of the wall in the photo. Thanks:

http://flickr.com/photos/kresve/38710067/in/set-865637/

[edit] Leaf shaped tower

The phrase "leaf shaped tower on the corners" is sitting here in a context where its meaning is unclear. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:29, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

I meant that the tower has the shape of a leaf(or spade - ♠), and these towers were situated at the corners of the fortifications - that was the main ideea. Concerning the Arts' House, in Romanian it's "Casa Artelor" :D Thx anyway for your modifications!!! --Orioane 12:12, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Ah! We'd say something like "House of the Arts", this one can't really be done with a possessive/genitive in English. On the tower shape, I need to think of the right word, maybe trefoil, but let me think on it. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:00, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Surface

I finaly found the surface in square kilometers on Sibiu's page on the http://www.romaniatourism.com/ website. -Orioane 08:00, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Evangelical Cathedral

I don't know if this is the proper nae for the main saxon cathedral in Sibiu. I think Lutheran Protestant or simply Lutheran would be more apropriate, but the exact Romanian name is Evangelical. Any opinions? -Orioane 10:20, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

It's tricky, because English-speakers who know Central Europe would probably say "Evangelical" when referring to former Austria-Hungary and those thinking in the context of the English-speaking countries would say "Lutheran". I think this can be solved with a parenthetical remark, I'll take a shot. If we ever decide to do an article just on the building—it probably deserves one—I'd put it at Evangelical Cathedral (Sibiu). -- Jmabel | Talk 00:30, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

WHen I lived in Sibiu I and everyone I knew (AMerican and Romanian) referted to it in Romanian as you say, but in english as "Lutheran". Is it actually a Lutheran church? I don't know I just always thought of it as one of those cases where the Languages do not line up. Especially with the more moderan (American/western) uses of the term Evangelical. That said either name is I think ok for an article, even though I don't think of it as Evangelical in the same sense as I use the word, that is the sort of thing the article can deal with. Dalf | Talk 05:42, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Exactly. It's tricky. Here in the US, we have at least half a dozen different synods of Lutherans (at least two of which call themself "Evangelical") and some Lutherans who reject the concept of synods. See (link no longer working and system thinks its spam so i can not post Mariushm 07:48, 8 December 2006 (UTC) ) for more detail than I would have known. Not a topic to take up in a big way in an article about a city. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:21, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Germans

Article Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania states: "Since the year 2000, the DFDR has won offices on both the local and regional levels. In Sibiu (De. Hermannstadt), the DFDR has held the office of mayor since 2000, and in 2004 it gained 60.43% of the vote in elections for the Lokalrat or city parliament. The DFDR holds 16 out of the 23 seats in the Sibiu Lokalrat, which gives it an absolute majority. In the District of Sibiu (around 450,000 residents), the DFDR has 11 of the 33 seats in the Kreisrat, where it is the strongest faction."

So my question is how in city where Germans compromise 1,6% of total population German party wons majority vote?! I hope somebody can clear this up. Luka Jačov 20:36, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Well... the German mayor did a much better job than all the previous mayors and the people decided to vote for a German local council too. :-) bogdan 20:43, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

But how did they vote for German mayor in first place?? Could u check the census data. This is very fishy to me. Luka Jačov 20:56, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

There are very few Germans in Sibiu, as most moved to Germany. I know people living in Sibiu that can confirm that. :-)

It seems that finally people started to vote for a person and not for an ethnicity. And this is not the only case: in Satu Mare, in 2004, for the first time ever, a city with a Romanian majority chose a Hungarian-ethnic mayor. (the Romanian-Hungarian relations are more tense than the Romanian-German relations, as AFAIK, there were never any major disputes between the Romanians and the German minority). bogdan 21:38, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

There is nothing wrong about the census. German inhabitants in Transylvania have a good record and are greatly esteemed by the Romanian population there. You could look out at the article Transylvanian Saxons if you would like to know more about that. I am from Sibiu, and I can tell you that there is a quite small german minority left there after the 1990 when most of them emigrated to Germany due to economic reasons mainly. The ones that still live there have formed a small party to represent their interests named the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania, which besides having a reserved post in the Romanian parliament participated in the elections. Historically Sibiu had a great reputation, and in the last decades of the 20th century it had became an average province town, mainly due to poor administration and bad management. In 2000, there was one of the worst line of candidates from the main Romanian Political Parties one was the ex mayor which had done almost nothing for the city in the public opinion, another was the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (Romania) which deosn't have a good level of suport in the city and the other were quite unknown or with a troubled past and bad reputation to say so. The German's forum, proposed a quite high profile person for a small city like Sibiu a teacher in one of the best highschools in the city and the cheif of the schools administration on the county level, who has had a great level of respect in his branch and was well known. He managed to qualify unexpectedly in the second round of the elections, mostly due to spontaneous votes. In the second round he virtualy crashed the other candidate because poeples weren't verry happy with the other candidate from the party that finaly won the parlamentary elections later that year - so a party with a great level of support on a country wide basis. To conclude, his first election was due to the context. Because he made real improvements to the city and proved to be a good mayor, he was elected for a second term on the first round, and his party also got support on the city-level and county-level elections. He also helped promote mayors to other cities in the county - Cisnădie and Mediaş. That's all. Mihai -^talk 21:33, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Even more remarkable: he was re-elected with 88.7% of the votes -- possibly the largest percentage for any mayor of a large city (at least in Romania). In terms of German-Romanian relations, historically there have been quite good -- not only no major disputes, but also some Germans have supported the rights of Romanians in Transylvania (see Stephan Ludwig Roth). Eugen Ivan 09:04, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Humane and real studies"

A term that absolutely does not exist in English. I'm guessing that "humane studies" intends to say "Humanities", but I don't even have a guess on "real studies". - Jmabel | Talk 03:59, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

The "real studies" refer to a curriculum of hard sciences or exact sciences such as physics, mathematics, chemistry (called also in Romanian ştiinţe exacte). The so-called "humane" studies refer to the soft sciences. Mentatus 08:17, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

So is there any problem changing this to "social sciences" and "sciences", respectively? -- Jmabel | Talk 04:57, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

It sounds good to me. Mentatus 12:00, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Not always vandalism

I realize that someone in Romania who thinks they speak English wrote this page on Sibiu, because certain phrases just don't sound natural. When I tried changing them, someone quickly changed them back! What I mean: The Large Square and The Small Square are terrible translations, that's why I tried to use the word 'plaza' to make it more accessible for English speaking people.

"I realize that someone in Romania who thinks they speak English". That is all I have to say. Dahn 22:38, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, way to just pick out a fragment, of course that doesn't make sense on its own. And even if something is gramatically correct doesn't mean people talk that way.

I have no problem with "plaza" instead of "square", if that usage is sanctioned by anything in particular. It's your other interventions in the text. Dahn 17:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

"Plaza" and "Square" are both common in English. "Square" is more common. But I agree that The Large Square and The Small Square would be unlikely English names. English-speaking cities that have an equivalent of a Piaṭa Mare tend to call it "Central Square", but of course that would be very non-literal. - Jmabel | Talk 19:44, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

The Large Square and The Small Square are word-by-word translations of the romanian names of two squares in Sibiu: "Piaţa Mare" and "Piaţa Mică" (yes, that's how they're called). I will change the names to The "Piaţa Mare" square and The "Piaţa Mică" Square. Also, I am commenting the picture with the footnote Piaţa Mare because it is by no means a good picture for it. All you can see is people drinking at a beer festival(probably). Mariushm 12:24, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

In which case they are "Major Square" and "Minor Square" in English (my mother tongue) as no English speaking person would say The Large Square and The Small Square. Word by word translation is NOT translation. I suggest Romania be more open to "meaning" corrections and not stick to dictionary translation in such a Germanic way. Garigolf Talk 14:26, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FlickR

Why is the Sibiu gallery at www.flickr.com deleted again and again. I've never inserted it (didn't visit this page before) but I can't see why it should not be included. It's relevant and of good quality 62.78.173.36 19:04, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

My impressions:

• Ads, definitely a minus
• 2nd photo there is clearly a copyvio
• 3 of the next four look like "hi, this is me or my friend in front of this famous place"
• Next several look pretty good
• Then we get a bunch of photos of cups of coffee
• Going on: a similar mixture of good photos & self-indulgent crap (about 50-50), the latter mostly from a guy who signs himself "berlinrocks".

In short, I'd say this site is too "polluted" by someone's self-indulgent crap for me to think it is a good link. - Jmabel | Talk 05:17, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure i'd say it's as bad as 50/50, I jsut went through the first 28 pages of it. There is one users who apparently has a coffee fetish and appears to have taken a picture of every cup he has while in romania, but even including those I woudl say its about 70% decent illastrative pictures of Sibiu, and another 10% or so of decent pictures of other Romanian topics. In general do article link to flickr? Dalf | Talk 21:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there is a policy either way on this. I usually don't link to flickr, though when people have given CC permissions I will gladly see those photos added to the Commons. - Jmabel | Talk 03:05, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Disputed

How could something in Europe in 1551 be the world's first experiment with rockets? What about the Chinese? - Jmabel | Talk 18:35, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Graphics over substance

With all due respect, Dahn, I think this edit, removing country names because we have flags went exactly the wrong way. For one thing, any blind person using a voice browser cannot understand the flags at all, so you are making the site less accessible. For another, though, even for normally sighted people, presumably there are many people who would recognize the names of some of these countries but will not recognize there flags. This is a triumph of graphics over substance. - Jmabel | Talk 23:00, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Joe, I'm sorry, but your point seems purely abstract. For one, most of the articles on cities with sister cities pick flags over country names (in fact, I think they chose flags on purpose). In any case, it would be extremely odd to include both, as one of them would have to be superfluous. I think it was me who first introduced flag habits to sister cities for Romanian articles, I only did it because I thought someone would do it eventually and I had nothing else to do at that time; regardless, I have nothing against dropping flags in favour of country names - but both is just too much.

Furthermore, your point about disabled people is empathetic (an empathy which I share), but not necessarily applicable here. Keeping in mind that I could pick countries over flags just as I could pick flags over countries, but that I see no reason for having both, a disabled person will have an initial and hardly surmountable problem: if the cities in question are not in the Anglo-Saxon world, then, except for some cities, the reading instrument used will not necessarily produce an adequate pronunciation. Of course, it seems at first that the user may be helped if he or she would also be given the country name (which works for "Beijing, China"); however, consider that all more obscure cities in Hungary, Romania, etc. - they will be, most likely, mispronounced. This leaves us with two situations: the "Beijing, China" where, even if mispronounced, virtually all of could do without the "China" part to figure it out; the "Badacsonytomaj, Hungary", where understanding what the name actually is could only be done on the basis of prior knowledge.

As for people who do not know the flags and can see them, I have to protest. I am baffled by a recent drive to disregard the very point of what makes the wiki system unique, and instead overwhelm every possible space with information that is already available one click away. See my recent comments on Talk:List of unusual deaths regarding the call to duplicate references present in the articles linked there with references for the list.

Sticking to the subject, I am also puzzled by the recent edits on country articles such as Romania and Moldova, where a user has recently added some sort of tacky template constitutes a [poor] attempt to adequately indicate what countries border the one and question and where. This, despite the fact that wikimedia is burrently over-inflated with maps of all possible styles,periods, and colours, despite the fact that such maps are part of the article or just one click away, and despite the fact that the template cannot be as accurate as any map.

I'm sure this was not the intent of your comment, but, in this particular case, you yourself seem to disregard basic instruments, at the risk of turning a quest for clarity into an over-precaution that could only lead to clogging. Both the flag icons and the link for city names are one click away, and at least one of them will prominently indicate what the country in question is. If the users in question cannot click links in case they want more info, they cannot be helped much; what's more, if we should not expect users to click the links, then we should not be editing in a wiki format.

Let's also note that all the paths explored here involve somebody actually involved in finding out the exact list of exact trivialities for each city. Aside from the fact that I have failed to find this sort of interest in details even with editors, it would seem to me that a person looking as deep into the matter would eventually bump into the articles in question, and not just the links inside a related article. Dahn 00:00, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not going to fight over this, but I am going to guess that (1) you have a high-speed connection, so "one click away" is never a big deal and (2) you never browse through something like telnet or puTTy, using a text-only browser like lynx. These are not universals. - Jmabel | Talk 00:10, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

No to both :). Nevertheless, the actual alternative [if any!], for all of us, is: go to the library, fill the form, look for the book [in case you know which book] or books you think may help in your query, take it from the shelf or wait for them to find it for you, look through it or them, write it down, return the book. (In case you are disabled, ask someone else to do all of this for you). No matter what sort of or browser connection people have, they beat the hell out of that. As we say in Romanian: God will give you stuff, but He will not pack it in your bag.

And this, of course, relies on three a priori grounds: that one actually cares about the particular bit of information, and can actually understand it if it is presented to him or her; the third one is that he or she can actually read or at least understand English. Dahn 00:25, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

It's the English Wikipedia, so the last is an assumption we are allowed to make. - Jmabel | Talk 06:33, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Large Square, The Small Square

A few days ago, I have changed "The Large Square" and "The Small Square" to their names in romanian ("Piaţa Mare" and "Piaţa Mică" squares). "Piaţa" means Square/Market in romanian and Mare=Big/Large , Mică=Small . I believe the direct translation from romanian to english is inadequate and people should stop changing the name in Romanian to silly translations. "Large Square" is a very bad term, as someone else has already mentioned, people may be changing that to "Plaza".

Please tell me what is so wrong in listing the original, romanian names for the squares or stop reverting edits.

Also, the revert caused a picture that I've commented to reappear. The picture was supposed to show Piaţa Mare square but all it showed was a closeup of some people drinking in the square at some beer fest. I've replaced the picture with a picture that shows how large the square actually is and I hope you will all agree it's much better than the old one.

I have requested and obtained a written permission from the author of the site, if that permission needs to be uploaded somewhere for proof, please let me know, I'm only a 1 week old wikipedian. Mariushm 07:48, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

To clarify: I do not disagree with your changes on principl, I just wish you had discussed them first. Ultimately, I have no opinion on this issue, but those who contributed the image and who have provided the translations may. Myself, I see several additional and smallish problems surfacing, that I would have rather dealt with here than copyedit in the text: one being that it is ungrammatical to refer to "Piaţa Mare square" when you use "square" as a translation of "piaţa" ("the Large Square square", so just "Piaţa Mare" will do). I welcome your editing (especially since it seems to me that you are a local, and could bring a lot to this article), but such a large edit in one go risked yielding some problems. Dahn 14:15, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you and I apologize for the tone of the message.

You may be right about the whole naming issue, perhaps the best solution would be to simply drop the final "square" and use directly the translated name.

About the previous picture, I'd like to explain why the previous picture was inadequate. In our country it is a "tradition" to have several parties during the year to celebrate certain events like start of autumn, "beerfests", first day of harvesting grapes for wines and so on. Most likely, the author of the previous picture was at a stand that served beer or wine during a party, asked a friend to take a snapshot and than uploaded it on Wikipedia, to show off. You couldn't even see the square, which was probably the whole ideea (beeing one of the largest squares in Europe). That's why I have requested permission for that picture, obtained it and replaced the inadequate picture with the current one.

If no one else has a problem with replacing "The Large Square" and "The Small Square" with "Piaţa Mare" and "Piaţa Mică", I will change the text (in a few days).

I am a local, I was born in Mediaş, a city near Sibiu, and have visited Sibiu lots of times and know it well. Mariushm 18:41, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd just use Piaţa Mare and Piaţa Mică, possibly with parenthetical translation on first use: Piaţa Mare ("large square") and Piaţa Mică ("small square"). Definitely not Piaţa Mare Square, which, as Dahn correctly says, is effectively "Large Square Square".

By the way, assuming that you mean this photo, I took the photo, and your hypothesis is entirely incorrect: no one I know is in the picture. Since I was alone in a city I had never before visited, I can say this with certainty. I would suggest that you might assume good faith on the part of other contributors.

I happen to prefer the photo I took (which shows something of the life of the city) to yours (which makes the square look bare and abandoned), but I'm not going to fight about it. - Jmabel | Talk 07:57, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

How is it pronounced? According to this article, it's [si'biw], but in Sibiu County it's [si'bju]. Which is correct? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.21.73.121 (talk) 13:04, 24 March 2008 (UTC)