User talk:Bohdan Leonid Shmorhay

[User bio is in User:Your Name]

Welcome

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun!

You can find some more information about our collaboration groups if you follow this link CZ:Workgroups.You can always ask me on my talk page or others about how to proceed or any other question you might have.

Kind Regards, Robert Tito |  Talk  09:35, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

redirect

Just for your future reference, you can redirect pages by placing #REDIRECT [[pagename]] on the page. In other words, on the Kiev article it just needed the text

#REDIRECT [[Kyiv]]

--Todd Coles 15:45, 16 August 2007 (CDT)

Also, you should be careful about making stubs that are so small, they are subject to deletion. See here for the policy http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Policy_Outline#Stubs --Todd Coles 15:51, 16 August 2007 (CDT)

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Much thanks for the help and advice -- I will be working on the oblast (province) descriptions in a bit, and will beef them up. Geography first, then history, then economics, then culture -- that is the plan for Ukraine. (In my copious spare time of course...) Again, much thanks for the guidance. --Bo Shmorhay 16-Aug-2007 14:00 PST

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Red links

I notice on a recent edit you removed the red links form the geography section of the Ukraine article. Although red links are in some peoples eyes ugly, they are an important part of the wiki. They tell people that there is a page that needs to be writen. Also, when the page is writen, the link is set up automatically without people having to come back an relink the pages again. So you can leave red links in or add red links where you think there should be an article. I don't think we should remove a link just because it is red. Derek Harkness 05:35, 17 August 2007 (CDT)

Agreed -- the reason I am removing the red links from the Ukraine page is that, on further research, I realized that the oblast names now have new spellings, due to the transliteration changes that have occured recently. This business of geographic name spelling is a major problem in both researching and documenting Eastern European history in general. I first became aware of these problems when friends from work kept asking me to help them with their genealogy research -- you won't believe how many different names the city of Lviv has had. When I have my act more together on the naming problem I will be more aggressive about setting up stubs and redirectors to at least get a handle on all this. -- Bo Shmorhay 09:15 17 Aug 2001 (San Diego)

I was refering more to the line that reads "The neighboring countries bordering on Ukraine are Russia, Poland, Belarus, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, and Slovakia." Why leave the link to Poland but remove the links to Russia and Hungary etc. Derek Harkness 02:13, 18 August 2007 (CDT)

Similar reason -- all of these countries, including Poland, have alternative transliterations of their names that might be useful as secondary link-names from this article. For now, I am mostly just focused on Ukraine, since I can read, write, and speak the Ukrainian language, and thus all of my personal notes (some of which I am transcribing for these articles here) are in Ukrainian, thus avoiding any spelling issues. (In Ukrainian, the spelling of Kyiv/Kiev hasn't changed in a millenium.)

I spent the weekend researching Ukrainian geographic names, but need some more info before presenting data to the group. The good news is that this is a finite problem -- a Ukrainian gazetteer would be no larger than a gazetteer of France, since both countries have about the same land area and population. So whatever the upper limit of granularity is for France, we can use the same order-of-magnitude granularity for Ukrainian geography, even if Ukrainian names have multiple transliterations.

Even though I am a native speaker of English (born in the USA) I am a big fan of "World English" which is a bit broader in scope than either American English or British English, and which allows for multiple name transliterations and less spelling rigor in general, thus emphasizing "usability correctness" over formal correctness, as I described in the Citizendium subforum on Article Policy in the thread named "Article name parenthetic aliasing". Gazetteers (and indexes) work best when they list many aliases, although this is definitely labor-intensive.

-- Bo Shmorhay

With respect to the World English, American English or British English, you should look with some haste at [1] as there is only a few hours left for comment. Also see the debate at [2].

As for country names. Usually a country has a English version of it's name. This is often very different form the internal name used within the country. It also frequently differs form transliteration. For instance we use the name China in English but within china they use 中国 which transliterates as zhonggou or translates as Middle Kingdom. Another example would be Germany or Deutschland. Since this is the English language site, it should be the English names China and Germany with the other names within the article. Where we could have a problem is when the English version of a name has change. By which I refer to DPRK or North Korea. Rhodesia or Zimbabwe. Such examples are rare though. So in short, I think the article title need not concern it's self with how to spell Magyarország as the article title, in English, should be 'Republic of Hungary', the spelling of which I don't think is disputed. Derek Harkness 20:21, 20 August 2007 (CDT)

Thanks for the heads-up about the English variants discussion forum -- it looks like the problem is being well-handled. I added a posting pointing out the advantage of relational database publishing for transclusion over the traditional model of hierarchical organization that is used in book publishing. In other words, as our underlying mediawiki software evolves and matures, most of these either/or issues will become moot -- readers will be able to select an English variant "skin" the same way they now can select a different langauge for their software application GUI. --Bo Shmorhay

Vacation Notice

Currently on vacation -- will be back in a bit. --Bo Shmorhay 03-Oct-2007 13:45 San Diego

The San Diego Firestorm of October 2007 has altered my vacation plans -- all is well with me and my family, but various friends need help, so I will be offline for a bit longer. For firestorm details, see the maps and links at the San Diego State University Geography Department GIS Force website, now hosted by CalIT. --Bo Shmorhay 24-Oct-2007 16:45 San Diego

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Party! You're invited!

Hi Bo--hope all is well--are you back online? Yes, it’s a new month, and here’s your friendly reminder that the FEBRUARY PARTY is on, and we’d love to see you there! Come join in the general fun. Aleta Curry 15:26, 6 February 2008 (CST)

nice work

I just noticed your very nice work on the Python page. Thank you! And nice to meet another experience geek in the hood.Pat Palmer 15:18, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

UNRRA

Greetings, Bo, from a fellow San Diegan. Thank you for writing the UNRRA piece. I was surprised to learn that UNRRA had been disbanded as early as 1947. When I was a child we lived in Vienna for a year, 1967-68, and one day while traveling in the countryside I saw a railroad locomotive (actually running, not a disabled one parked on a siding) with "UNRRA" painted on it. I asked my parents if it means "United Nations Rail Road Administration" or something, and they explained to me what UNRRA actually was. But this was 20 years after UNRRA went out of business! Could the locomotive have been bought by some other railroad company, who never bothered to repaint it? Or would the UN have had some other functions in Austria at that time that would have required the use of a locomotive, so they used an old UNRRA one? (Or maybe somebody was filming a movie set in the post-war years and was using it as a prop?) Bruce M. Tindall 21:14, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Not sure how that locomotive came to be labeled that way, but lots of post-WWII material floated around Europe for many years. Thanks for reading! Bo 18:56, 10 November 2010 (UTC)