Talk:Uzbekistan

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Contents 1 Military #2 2 National anthem 3 Native name 4 Military 5 2005-05-13 death toll of 1,000 no longer supportable 6 Reasons for POV Check 7 POV concerns, possible solutions 8 Misgivings On History Section 9 doubly landlocked? 10 Weasel words 11 Repository of images 12 Keep the Links Trimmed 13 Borat vandals 14 Tajik Population 15 Origin of the Name Karakul 16 size comparison 17 Literacy rate 18 Name in Cyrillic and in Russian? 19 Uzbekistani? 20 Double landlocked?

[edit] Military #2

According to the CIA factbook, military expenditure is 2% of GDP, not 3.5%.

-G —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.117.158.83 (talk) 02:49, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] National anthem

national anthem info http://www.thenationalanthems.com/country/uzbekistan.htm and http://www.national-anthems.net/~davidk/uz.htm and http://www.abacci.com/atlas/anthem.asp?countryID=355 . maybe I'll add the new page myself. gotta read the stuff on using sources first...

[edit] Native name

O‘zbekiston Respublikasi

O’zbekiston Respublikasi

Should that punctuation mark near the beginning be an apostrophe instead of a single opening quotation mark? —Michael Z. 03:57, 2005 Jan 19 (UTC)

Their government seems to prefer the opening quote [1] --Gene s 05:28, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Neither one. You correctly observe that the mark opens to the right, not to the left. But it is an integral part of the letter oʻ and should be encoded as Unicode character U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA. – Stefan, 8 December 2005

THE TAJIK POPULATION IN UZBEKISTAN IS 5%????? Give me a break. I suppose you meant 55%. http://medlem.spray.se/Samarqand/index.html YOu might want to check the mentioned web site out. Peace!

Re Tajik population. According to the Soviet censuses of 1926, 1959, 1970 and 1979 respectively (found that in a 1983 British book on "Islamic Peoples in the Soviet Union") the Tajik percentage of the population of Uzbekistan (for 1926, excluding the Tajik Autonomous Republic within Uzbekistan, ie modern Tajikistan) was 21%, 23%, 23% and 23%. The Uzbek share of the population of Uzbekistan at these censuses was 66%, 62%, 66% and 69%. So, yeah, unless there's been some really major ethnic cleansing that somehow escaped the world's notice, the Tajik proportion of Uzbekistan's population is way over 5% - though of course nowhere near 55%. Sorry about that. Just noticed I misread my handwritten notes. The 21% - 23% - 23% - 23% line is actually the Uzbek share of the population of Tajikistan, not the other way round. The Tajik share of the population of Uzbekistan was about 4-5% throughout the period involved.

[edit] Military

This sentence:

Uzbekistan has demanded to withdraw the airbases from the territory of the country and now it is due to execution by the U.S. part.

looks like a machine translation. I'm not sure whether or not it is trying to say:

Uzbekistan has demanded that the US remove its airbases from the country and the US is now (October, 2005) in the process of doing so

Also, given that the section refers to a complete article, I don't believe that it is valid to label it as a section stub.

--David Woolley 23:14, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Be reasonable, Mr. Anglo-Saxon, not everybody can speak English like you - especially those who have just begun to actually learn it in the past decade or so. Yes, the mistake about the "section stub" bit needs rectification; it must have been missed. Clever of you to see it! A Central asian 23:23, 6 December 2005.

The alternatives to pointing out the problem with the wording here were to:

• delete the sentence entirely (which could be justified because, as well as not being clear, there was a hint of an anti-American point of view and there was no identified source against which the claim could be checked and corrected);
• substitute my understanding of the meaning, possibly completely mis-representing the intended meaning.

Instead, I put it here, highlighting the problem so that someone who understood Uzbek grammar could work out what was really intended. Of course, obeying the Wikipedia rules and providing a source would have avoided the problem, as I could have checked the source (which ought, except in really exceptional cases, to be in English) and re-written it, based on that source. --David Woolley 10:52, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] 2005-05-13 death toll of 1,000 no longer supportable

It is good that this part of the human right chronology is the one place that actually has sources properly identified, however...

Now that it is clear that the 700 and 1,000 figures for the death toll come from the same source (Radio Free Europe) and the 700 figure postdates the 1,000 figure by one day, I believe that the 1,000 figure is no longer supported by the available citations. Unless someone finds a better source, I propose reducing the upper bound to 700 in all three places where it is quoted. People who believe this is also high might want to search Radio Free Europe to see if they have further revised their estimates downwards.

Although the source for 500 is broken, one of the external links[2] appears to me to be consistent with close to 500 (it reports few survivors from a crowd of 500).

Note that I'm working purely in terms of the sources provided. Wikipedia is supposed to reflect checkable sources which are independent of the contributors. I don't have any first hand knowledge of the country.

--David Woolley 21:54, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm new to Wiki so please forgive me if this is unintentionally embarassing me. It seems that a user with no knowledge of Uzbekistan might be a potent editor for he or she has no biases. On the other hand, there are verifiable human rights issues that make preconveived notions about the enlightened observer realize that Uzbekistan, in its current state, is ruled by a despotic tyrant scared silly that his power might be relinquished via democratic means. If I need to link to more sources than the BBC then so be it. Sufice to say that this was the worst massacre since Tianamen Square and the western counrties have done little in response. The difference between 187, 700 and 1,000 matters little in light of the gestalt: Uz is headed into the arms (pun intended) of Russia's Putin.

Destabilizaion in the region is terribly worrying. Arguing over the numbers obfuscates the bigger, graver concerns. BrainDoc 02:27, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

It's a fundamental principle of Wikipedia that it reflects what is verifiable from reputable sources, and doesn't express any opinion of its own. As explained in the verifiability guideline, that may even mean that it conflicts with objective truth. Wikipedia's failure to conform to these principles is one of its main problems at the moment; some serious academics are advising people to steer well clear of it because it contains too much opinion and unverified fact.

The most that Wikipedia can do is to find the best sources on both sides, and reflect them accurately. It should then be obvious to readers that someone isn't telling the whole truth and they should be able to make judgements about which source they most trust; the editor should not indicate a preference between sources and should not deliberately choose less trustworthy sources for one side or the other.

Wikipedia is not the right place to hold political campaigns.

By the way, your 1,000 citation comes from Radio Free Europe and is earlier than a citation from the same source that gives a lower figure. You need to find a citation from RFE that is later than 2005-06-23, otherwise the presumption has to be that they revised the figures downwards as the facts became more clear.

--David Woolley 13:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

The facts are still not clear because there has never been an independent investigation of the Andijan events. The government of Uzbekistan will not allow one. Witnesses who were there on the day, among them journalists working for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and German broadcaster ARD, have said "hundreds, possibly even thousands" were killed. I refer you to Galima Bukharbaeva, for example, the award-winning journalist and witness from Andijan, who reported for IWPR, the BBC and CNN. She also wrote articles on the events in the Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune. See: Where journalism is branded terrorism, IHT, 21 September 2005 Until an independent investigation occurs, "hundreds, possibly even thousands", is about as good a number as we can get.

[edit] Reasons for POV Check

Following mention of this page on General_complaints, I've looked over it and I get a very strong impression that several sections are written with a strong anti-government bias. This is particularly true of the human rights section, but there are examples elsewhere, e.g. in the recent history and Economy and in the second paragraph of the Demographics section.

The government view is rarely quoted and when it is it is qualified by emotive language. Emotive language is used in other places as well.

With the notable exception of the human rights chronology entry for 2005-05-13, no sources are cited for specific points. Lack of citations seems to be a common problem on Wikipedia. but when making the sorts of accusation made in this article, it is particularly important that every statement is traceable. Many may be covered by the external links, but its not realistic to work out which one relates to which claim. Those sources actually used, should, of course, be in a References section, but I have only just created one.

(I tried to improve the History, but there are still issues that are not properly covered, like competing claims for the nature of the victims, and the timeline is very fragmented, as whilst I straightened the timeline, I didn't fill any gaps.)

I'm marking this as POV-check, rather than POV simply because I'm sufficiently new to Wikipedia to want a second opinion.

--David Woolley 22:25, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Well if you "don't know about the country", don't stick your neb into things you don't know till you find out properly... Your concern surely has filled this page up quite unnecessarily, hasn't it? Central Asian 6 December 2005.

For a non-technical subject, like this, it should not be necessary to know the subject in advance, as the article should quote sources from which all the stated facts can be verified, in particular, this is important for anything vaguely controversial. It is also usually quite easy to see when an article has been writen other than from a neutral point of view, even when it also fails the verifiabilty test.

Knowing the country is actually a disadvantage even for someone editing the article, because it means they are more likely to violate the third of the key principles of Wikipedia and include original research.

Incidentally, the reason I looked at the article was that someone who claimed to have been in the country at the time of the Andijon events wrote a complaint about Wikipedia in Wikipedia:General complaints (probably soon to be archived), basically supporting the government position and claiming that Wikipedia was allowing itself to be used for propaganda. Like most people complaining, they probably didn't think it their responsibility to correct the problem they perceived, and it was also pointed out to them that they risked violating the original research rule.

--David Woolley 13:39, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] POV concerns, possible solutions

There are essentially four basic concerns quoted as the reasons for rasing the POV-check. Let me try to address them one by one.

1. Second paragraph of Demographics section is biased, lacks source references. Agreed. Such a strong claim as "the state deliberately closes Russian-speaking schools" must be supported by some statistics (not examples, which in this case would be inherently POV), or removed. Claim that "the proportion of school-aged persons enrolled has been dropping" is a hearsay, unless supported by reliable statistics. The whole statement about health care is non-informative. I mean, to the very least, reliable life expectancy figures are available for Uzbekistan, say, from the UN (e.g., [3] is one of many available unbiased sources).

Proposal: remove the second paragraph of Demographics section altogether. Mark this section a stub.

2. Economy section is anti-government biased, lacks referencies. To some extent, agreed. Looks like the section was written some time around 2000, or only with the materials up to that year available. Existence of a separate article on Economy in Uzbekistan makes things somewhat better, however.

Proposal: remove the statement about IMF agreement - it's an old story, which, with a hindsight, hardly deserves to be mentioned in a short introductory article on Uzbekistan economy. Remove the last statement of the section - non-informative, obsolete. Add some cold hard numbers from, say, [4], citing the reference. To counterbalance possible POV concerns, add reference to [5], Uzbekistan economy statistics, as official as it gets.

3. Human rights section is biased, POV. I disagree. NPOV policy specifically requires "to fairly represent all sides of a dispute". By all means we should do that. However, in this particular case there seems to be no dispute. The government (silently) maintains that there is no issue with the human rights in Uzbekistan. There seems to be nothing resembling Soviet-style Agitprop, neither by magnitude, nor by quality of responce, within Uzbek counter-propaganda machine, whatever is the reason. I have thoroughly searched the official government site [6], the Uzbekistani National Information Agency site [7] , googled the topic in two languages , and didn't find a single article confronting, say, the Human Rights Watch report [8], Amnesty International report [9], or others. Moreover, to my best knowledge, there is not a single NGO protesting the unfavorable reports. Ergo, there is no dispute. If anybody can prove me wrong, by all means, let's augment the section. The section does lack references, for sure. Moreover, it's badly written and looks more like a stub. However, it has nothing to do with the article overall, or the section being POV.

I was trying to find time to really do justice to commenting on this, but the short version is:

• the language is emotive, not neutral;
• it consumes a disproportionate part of what is supposed to be an overview page (note that the sidebar is part of this section, although someone moved it for presentational reasons - I'm not happy with mis-placing things for such reasons, but couldn't get support for the general principle that it was wrong on Wikipedia:Help desk);
• whilst there may be sources that back the general position, they are not currently listed as references, and in particular, very few of the chronology items have references, even though they are very specific claims;
• it seems very strange to me that the government wouldn't have given some reasons for their policies, or even have denied the facts, but there is no apparenet statement as to the government's position - their position may be lies (e.g. they may be doing it for reasons of personal power), but the Wikipedia rules require reporting of what is documented (including documented speculation), not direct speculation;
• there are now four mentions of the Andijon incident in the article, giving the imprssion that someone wants to rub this in for propaganda reasons, rather than simply report on the facts (and the variation between different sources for those facts).

As background, the way I got into this was that someone complained about the article on Wikipedia:General complaints that the reporting on the Andijon incident was grossly untrue, saying that they were there at the time and they talked to locals, who were in general agreement with the government point of view. I looked at the article and pointed out that there were sources quoted (although not as sources) that did back a significantly higher death toll than the official figures which they quoted. It's alsways possible that the person was an incompetent PR consultant for the government, but it did suggest that there is a real conflicting point of view. I then looked more closely at the article, and concluded that more than half of was written as though by the opposition in exile. I don't know what is true, although it does look to me that a lot is probably true, but what gets written needs to stick to the facts and be written as if by a dis-insterested party. The cases should stand on the quality of the sources, not on the power of the rhetoric.

Things like really carefully looking at the language used are the sorts of things I still need time to do properly.

--David Woolley 23:59, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Proposal: Leave the section be, for now. Perhaps, add a statement that by a recent President's decree the capital punishment in Uzbekistan will be abolished on January 1, 2008 (this is one improvement in human rights amid the unmitigated disaster, after all). Keep in mind the "undue weight" clause of NPOV policy though...

These three proposals are put forward with the assumption that, if there is a consensus about (perhaps, a modified version of) them being enough to address the POV-check concerns, then, when they are implemented and there are no further objections, the POV-check can be removed. If you don't think this is a sound procedure, please make your point.

If we hear no objection in the near future, it goes without saying, as the spirit of Wikipedia dictates, everybody is welcome to implement the proposals, if they feel like it. I'll try my best too, of course.

24.46.225.163 07:02, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

All right, I hear no objections. Implementing the first proposal now, then. 24.45.13.60 22:49, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I presume the discussion is now limited to two topics: Human Rights section and the original complaint about presentation of the Andijon events (that the opinionated people prefer to call Andijon massacre).

The language of the introdutory part of the article does sound somewhat emotive to me. As for the sub-chapter Freedom of expression, it looks pretty factual, if not completely impartial. If there are examples of language in the section that somebody particularly doesn't like, I'd appreciate one.

I completely agree that some referencies should be added for the facts quoted in the section. It's not hard to do and I'll try do it as time allows. I also agree that making the section shorter is desirable.

I do insist that in great majority of cases the government of Uzbekistan prefers not to discuss the accusation of particular human rights violations. This is not very unusual, as the following quote from Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 seems to show: "The topic is still a political taboo in mainland China, where any discussion on it is regarded as inappropriate or risky. The only media coverage is about the Chinese Communist Party's view: that it was a determined action to ensure stability". Now, this does not mean that Uzbekistani government doesn't try to justify its overall policies [[10]]. Moreover, Andijon events is really an exception. I mean, there is a plephora of pro-government descriptions of the events: [[11]],[[12]], and now even results of the trials [[13]]. NPOV policy clearly demands that the government version of Andijon events must be presented in the article (in a sence, it is presented in the sidebar, but in passing and lacks references). I just don't think it should necesserily be done in the Human rights section, where only one, rather carefully worded statement is devoted to Andijon. As for the other facts and tendencies mentioned in the section, I maintain that the government neither disputes them, nor offers an alternative interpretation, but simply dismisses them offhand. Alas, this statement itself is a POV...

The folks who are best situated to respond to this blather are too intimidated to respond. The government will use extreme measures against those who speak against current policy. This includes the above-referenced government versions of events that are well-known to be falsehoods. I've spoken to Uz government officials who have stated, bluntly, that they cannot speak about press releases that have been "authored" by them for fear that their families will suffer great harm; and thus, presenting Wiki's "POV" in this regard is as pointless as the press releases themselves.

I realize that I am not a verifiable source - what undergirds the majority of trustworthy Wiki pieces will not work for a balanced piece about the current government of Uzbekistan, unfortunately, and you'll have to trust this statement as fact. BrainDoc 02:38, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Nevertheless, some time ago I made an effort to rewrite Human Rights and Economy sections, paying special attention to trying to keep it NPOV within reason and providing referencies to many sources, including non-free, government-controlled ones. They may be factually inaccurate; they may be, and often, but not always, are (here I can expres POV, can't I?) sheer fabrications; but they represent the official position of the government. Even the pattern of responces, obvious desire to avoid discussing substance of the matter, is already informative.

Somehow I doubt that even after reading in full the government responce to the confirmed facts of gross violations of human rights, like torture, anybody in his/her right mind would be inclined to beleive it. I think the undue weight principle of NPOV helps here a lot. Because the "factual" POV is held by a majority of observers, it is easy to quote prominent sources. Sources supporting the government point of view are scarce, and simply can't be found outside of Uzbekistan.

With this in mind, I propose that the POV-check should now be removed. 24.184.85.127 07:01, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I'll try to look over the article soon, but the rules of the game are that, if you believe you have fixed this sort of problem, you are allowed to remove the flag yourself. If someone disgrees, they can always put it back on. --David Woolley 18:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

As per user El_C request, I've added extensive (perhaps even ridiculuosly extensive) citations of the used sources so that the addition could be verified. 24.184.85.127 04:48, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Misgivings On History Section

We have this synopsis in the history section:

In the 1300s, Timur (1336 - 1405), known in the west as Tamerlane, overpowered the Mongols and built an empire. In his military campaigns Tamerlane reached as far as the Middle East. He defeated Ottoman Emperor Bayezid I and rescued Europe from Turkish conquest. Tamerlane sought to build a capital of his empire in Samarkand (largely a Tajik-populated city). The imagery of Tamerlane would be used later in history to construct an Uzbekistani national identity.

I'm not comfortable enough with this subject to make the change, but I'm fairly sure that "rescued Europe from Turkish conquest" is POV on several levels. Also, the last line is mysterious to me: who constructed this national identity, what did it consist of, and what sources do we have on that? Also, I've changed "Uzbekistani national identity" to "Uzbek national identity" since I think this sentence refers to the ethnic group, not the nationality. --Mopsy Fairlight 14:02, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] doubly landlocked?

The Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south.

Don't neighbors Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan both have shores on the Caspian Sea? If so, doesn't that mean Uzbekistan is not "doubly landlocked"?

68.156.53.188 15:29, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

This is entirely a matter of definition, but, the one widely accepted, and, in particular, presented in Wikipedia itself is this: A landlocked country is one that has no coastline. A coastline is properly, a line on a map indicating the disposition of a coast. The coast is defined as the part of the land adjoining or near the ocean. Finally, A landlocked country which is surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries may be called a "doubly landlocked" country.. All statements in bold are direct quotes from the corresponding Wikipedia articles. Informally, Caspian sea is considered an inner body of water ("a lake") and doesn't count as having a coastline. If not for existence of Manych Canal, that would simply be a topological fact. As it stands though, we'd just have to agree that the canal is too small (economically and geographically) to count. 24.184.85.127 06:22, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Weasel words

The portion of the article discussing recent activity involving the restriction of US military privileges contains weasel words. Phrases such as "moved into the orbit of ..." and "refused to criticize" are not acceptable per NPOV policy. I urge knowledgeable contributors to address these problems.

Cut the weasel words out, but the old version seems to me to be OK as far as NPOV goes. Dietmar 217.144.98.250 12:42, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

---

TURKAN HATUN?

When i was a little girl i read a book which took place in Khorezm Empire. It's like a fairy tale and cought me with it's magic. Since then i wanted to go to Urganj to see the Tilali Garden (i found out that it's still lies under the ground in Turkmenistan and old palace of Jelal Ed Din is not excavated yet).

I was looking for something about the woman called Turkan Hatun. I wanted to now more about the characters in the book and i learned a lot about Jelal Ed Din, Muhamed II... But data i found about her were very confusing.

According to that book, she was very cruel, ruled the great Khorezm Empire and she was a mother of shah Muhamed II, grand mother of a brave prince Jelal Ed Din but not very fond of him. She promoted the people of Kipchak but majority in Khorezm were Turkmenian. There was also mentioned very brave turkmen hero Kara Konchar and his maid... And that lasted untill Mongols conquered Khorezm 1221.

But now i found the information that she lived centuries ago and she was a wife of Sultan Melikshah who died in 1092.

As my country was under the Osman Empire for 500 years and their language had a great influence, i am aware that Turkan Hatun was not her real name, it's more like Turkish Lady and probably was used to describe more than one woman who had ipmact to the history of muslim people.

I would really apreciate if you know something about the Turkan Hatun who lived in Khorezm or where to find something about her.

Thanks a lot. Boka

[edit] Repository of images

Greetings,

I have made an Asian repository of images, similar to the one that exists for Europe. Please complete the part pertaining to this country as you see fit, preferably similar to those of France, Britain et al:

Wikipedia:List of images/Places/Asia

Thanx.--Zereshk 14:56, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Keep the Links Trimmed

Please, do not add any more links to the article. I trimmed down nearly three quarters of the links placed on the page because they were completely spam. They didn't belong. The external links are meant to be less than a handful of USEFUL links, not every site googled. --Ownlyanangel 12:44, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

(Sorry about vandalism to this page on 02 Nov 2006. Wikipedia was part of a lesson at K12 school, and student vandalized before lesson was completed)

???Lessons??? Hm

[edit] Borat vandals

This article has been subject to a lot of vandalism recently, due to the film "Borat", which makes several negative references to Uzbekistan. Can somebody keep a watch on this or maybe protect the article?

I guess you're hinting that the word "Uzbekistan" isn't really Persian for "Land of the Assholes". Okay, I'll fix that. John Baez 06:44, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Someone else deleted the flag and put "america rules" as the national anthem. Uzbekistan is way more interesting than Kazakhstan will ever be! (think Samarkand, Bokhara, Khiva, Tashkent, Termez etc.) --w2ch00

  Ehm. The sentences "a shit hole in middle east" and "that is full of shit" in the beginning of the article should be removed. /A

[edit] Tajik Population

I was trying to tie up some loose ends over the Tajik population numbers without cites, but my two sources contradict each other. Specifically, 2 million isn't only 4.8% of 25 million. There isn't strong agreement online, so if anyone can find consistent numbers that are true, please adjust the article to reflect them. The Behnam 03:37, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

A found a better source for the pop number. 1 million sounds about right. The Behnam 03:44, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Uzbekistan reluctantly declared independence

Why reluctantly? Did want to stay a part of Russia? Why didn't they just stay?Tourskin 23:26, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Origin of the Name Karakul

Can someone tell me about the origin of the name of the city Karakul in Uzbekistan? My understanding is that it means "black lake." Is this also the origin of the name of karakul sheep? Thanks! Twalls 20:14, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] size comparison

Uzbekistan is approximately the size of Morocco - is this comparison necessary? I think referring to Morocco's size adds no understandability.--212.1.237.41 23:44, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I would agree. HOWEVER I have seen many comparisons made to the U.S., would that be better? I.e. Uzbekistan is approximately the size of California.

-G —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.117.158.83 (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

That would add even less to the article. WTF knows what size California is? It's just part of the US Nil Einne (talk) 04:25, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Literacy rate

From the demographics section: "Uzbekistan has a 99.3% literacy rate among adults older than 15, which is, in part, attributable to the free and universal education system of the Soviet Union."

From the culture section: "Uzbekistan has a high literacy rate with about 88% of adults above the age of 15 being able to read and write."

So which one is it? Can anyone find some recent official sources? Flutefreek 11:59, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Here in the CIA factbook it's written that literacy rate is 99.3%. I believe it's the official Uzbekistani figure as well. Alæxis_¿question? 12:07, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I was too lazy to look it up myself Flutefreek 12:19, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

On a related note, List of countries by literacy rate reproduces the literacy rate table from the UN Development Programme Report 2005, and includes that 99.3% figure. That same report also lists the number of children in education for most countries, but they were unable to get a figure for Uzbekistan. I'm wondering where the ref is for "only 88% of the under 15 population currently enrolled in education". Bazzargh 10:28, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Where's the secion on politics? Practically every other state's article has one. There's already an article about it ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Uzbekistan ), so why isn't there a link here? Or a shorter version thereof? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.59.232.6 (talk) 07:08, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Name in Cyrillic and in Russian?

This seems a little confusing. Cyrillic is the writing system in which Russian as well as other eastern European languages are written. On coins the name is written only in Cyrillic. Perhaps the entry might say something like, "In Roman writing:" and "In Cyrillic writing". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Parmadil (talk • contribs) 03:22, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

In the past week or so, someone has added Russian as an official language. Every source I've seen indicates that Uzbek is the sole official language of Uzbekistan, including this article until late December. I think a citation is needed if something has changed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.202.242.180 (talk) 20:11, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Showing the name in "Uzbek" and "Russian" (as opposed to "Roman text" and "Cyrillic text") is not dependent on whether or not either one is an official language. It's just done this way because those are the two major languages spoken in the country. If whether or a language is official is the benchmark then that would cause problems for a ton of other articles across the Wiki world. For example, if that were the convention then the French Wiki article for the USA would not be able to list the country's name in English since the US doesn't have any official languages. I'm sure you'll agree that this would be pretty absurd! Of course, this is all separate from noting in this article whether or not Russian is an official language of Uzbekistan, which of course we should do accurately. -- Hux (talk) 23:04, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Uzbekistani?

The source cited for the claim that Uzbekistani is the correct demonym and adjective is the CIA World Factbook. A Google Scholar search gives 152 results for "Uzbek economy" and only 5 for "Uzbekistani economy." It may be that this is another one of those -i words, like Afghani for "Afghan," that we've been seeing a lot of in the press, but which are basically mistakes. I'm not sure how much faith to put in the World Factbook, so I'm putting a "verify credibility" tag on it. I can't find Uzbekistani in a dictionary. Maybe somebody else can.Joeldl (talk) 16:55, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Please see the relevant discussion here. Otebig (talk) 22:38, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I replied to your similar question at Talk:Kyrgyzstan#Demonym_Kyrgyzstani and my answer applies to "Uzbekistani" as well, I think. -- Hux (talk) 22:51, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Double landlocked?

Uzbekistan borders, inter alia, on Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, both of which have access to the Caspian Sea. Do Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan qualify as landlocked? If not, then Uzbekistan is not double-landlocked... Can someone clarify?--Zlerman (talk) 09:53, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Uzbekistan also has an access to Aral Sea. This doesn't make it non-landlocked. And Caspian Sea is also technically a lake. Alæxis_¿question? 20:49, 12 May 2008 (UTC)