Derek Ross
Dear Derek, you wrote a Meta-Wiki article, where you (unknowingly,mistakenly) used full names. Please change that to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/H.J.saga (Thank you). H.J. has emailed Jimbo Wales concerning this, due to recent slander attacks by Witkacy.
By the way, if you would look into the articles contributed to years ago, plus a number of other articles, you will find a vast number of later editions, articles and discussions on the supposed English-language Wikipedia, are none-English and are largely input by a group of people, using extreme strong-arm (mafia-like) attack tactics. Anyone getting in the way of their inputting of extreme nationalistic POV is bullied, slandered, ganged up on and worse. One, Caius2ga in particular called everyone Nazi and while banned, he seems to have re-appeared under many equally abusive tactics. You can also find references on User Jim Wales discussion in 'problems on polish wikipedia'.
So please do not believe, that H.J. caused name-calling. She had started years ago with only factual input of history, backed up by vast research and actual records. These were constantly and very methodically removed by a smaller group at that time. H.J. tried to stay factual, but stopped a long time ago to input in Wikipedia, as did a number of other former contributors. Unfortunately extreme onesided POV Wikipedians have highjacked Wikipedia. As User Sca wrote somewhere, they are not bothered by facts and will not let facts get in their way at all. Users Sca, Chris 23, RickK, Adam, Kenney? Piotr,Kpalion are just some who had tried to put some sense and facts back in, to no avail. User Sca, by the way is one of the few, who has English language knowledge of Eastern European history. A US history professor Thomas Reimer tried for a short time to input in Wikipedia 'Pomerania' article. When he was ganged up on with distortions, he stopped very soon. The 'professor' JHK might know a little about Franks, but when asked how many books or factual records she owns or has read on Prussian history, said that she does not have or need a n y. She tried upholding English language against Mruk/Space Cadet and others, but that failed. MTinkler knows a bit about art and religion. However many facts, one of them that Prussia was governed by a bishop, then Teutonic Order, who stood directly under the popes and emperors, baffled him greatly and was completely unknown to him. JHK was t h e history expert touted by JW. JW caters to and got customers for Bomis by Wikipedia, while he let above mentioned strong-arm mafia-like-group take over.
The English Wikipedia distorted articles are also oftentimes copied by the German Wikipedia (which consists largely of very leftist and anarchists, Anti-Deutsche (Anti-Germans), student groups), who tout everything 'American (EN-Wikipedia)' as the latest 'Politically Correct' craze as well.
Nearly every topic, practically every place and every person, in eastern Germany/Europe have in Wikipedia been distorted to near unrecognition. It takes ongoing day by day, minute by minute check-up time to just retain the slightest common sense in those articles, as you can tell from endless endless trolling and vandalizing by said group. These Wikipedia articles are so unfactual and what is worse are copied multiple times by mirror sites. H.J. has therefore stopped a long time ago to input articles in Wikipedia.
Had she known what was to become of Wikipedia, she would have never input to begin with. She believes in submitting factual history and not to have history distorted beyond recognition (called NPOV by JW) by above mentioned group.
This is only written to you, because of the unwarranted unfounded attacks by Witkacy.H.J. had stopped contributing to Wikipedia before Witkacy ever appeared. His attacks therefore prove that he is a sockpuppet, a previous user/vandal under a different name.
Sorry, to take up your time.
At Wikipedia the inmates are in charge of the asylum
- GK (talk • contribs) leaving on 14 January 2005 with a note: "It took me way too long to realize the underlying facts about the way the Wikipedia works. In this libertarian anarchy, any process is only as functional as it's most dysfunctional participant. What that means is that in too many areas the inmates are in charge of the asylum."
VeryVerily experience with Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:VeryVerily) city of Schneidemuehl/Pila and Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=8683571&oldid=8683501
Despite lack of knowledge of the history JHK and D.Parker denied facts, stating that coin of the ruler is untrue, that there could not have been more than one duke at a time in reference to Georg Friedrich of Brandenburg Kulmbach Hohenzollern and that Albrecht Friedrich was the only duke of Prussia: http://www.infowrangler.com/phpwiki/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:David_Parker Georg Friedrich became duke of Prussia on Feb 27 1578 http://www.marlesreuth.de/georg_friedrich_brandenburg_kulmbach1539.html. Wikipedia is full of this.
- Caius Nazi quotes one sample: "(Wikipedia is) Neo-Nazi project ... we will make your servers down" http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Gdansk/archive1&action=history
- Harrasment by Witkacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:HKT
- Troll Vandal/Witkacy/notesik:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Witkacy/notesik
- 17:...I'm still considering opening an RfC against Witkacy (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • logs • filter log • block user • block log • GUC • CA) and possibly against TheUnforgiven (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • logs • filter log • block user • block log • GUC • CA) simultaneously, although TheUnforgiven is so obviously insane that that may be unnecessary. At the same time, I'm thinking maybe I should just stay out of Poland and Polish-related articles, since Troll Witkacy reigns supreme there. The utterly nonsensical "Anti-Polonism" and the unspeakable idiocy brought to the fore during its VfD demonstrate that there are a number of Polish editors whose view of the world is utterly unhinged from reality. I'm not here to snap people out of their fantasies tho. Eventually the rampant insanity will get so out of hand that people with bigger sticks than I will step in to stop it. As it is, I'm thinking perhaps it would just be prudent to warn people not to believe anything about Poland or Poland-related articles on WP and save myself the agony of trying to reason with such obvious incompetence. There are several very good editors involved with those articles, but Troll Witkacy seems to regard any such articles as his personal property, and until he's disabused of that erroneous notion, perhaps I oughtta just stay away. Tomer TALK 03:12, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
- Wikipedia Witkacy, what an unpleasant encounter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Witkacy#what_an_unpleasant_encounter
- Taw defacing article: 'I give up. Taw is willing to deface the page forever to support his view that the name of the city in 1944 was "Gdansk" even though the rulers called it something different. How he thinks this is NPOV is a mystery to me. GregLindahl
City was Gdansk up to 1939, when it was conquered by Nazis. --Taw
Proposal: $history_of_city =~ s/Gdansk|Danzig/the city/g --Taw
Taw -- i don't get the script, so I can't comment on that. But to an English speaker, the city wasn't Gdansk up till 1939. When we read English language history books dealing with that particular city up till 1945, they most often call the city Danzig. It doesn't mean anything as to who the city belonged to -- Most English speakers don't know or care (in the sense that they don't say to themselves "Danzig -- must be German"). Could you just quit for a while and maybe listen to people who know what they're talking about (i.e., native speakers with an education). This is not about Prussia/Poland -- it's about what title works best in an English language encyclopedia.
- Taw's lie-calling attack [1]
JHK and Taw on Silinger in Silesia/Talk:
- Silesia derived its name from the Silinger, a Germanic tribe like the Vandals and the (Celtic) Germanic Lugier or Lygier who all lived south of the Baltic Sea in the Elbe?, Oder, and Vistula river area. It should be noted that there is considerable debate among archaeologists and historians as to whether there is such a thing as a Celtic-Germanic people. Exhibits such as the one in Rosenheim (Bayern) certainly demonstrate that the Celts had an influence on the area; however, the movement of the Celts westward through Europe was such that there is little if any overlap between them and the Germanic tribes.
Are you sure about etymology of name Silesia ?
It seems too similar to its Polish name Śl&aogonek;sk which is of clearly different etymology (from Mount Śl&eogonek'&zdotabove;a)
There are many other geographical Polish names that were latinized with ending -ia, and there was either a short vocative e/i vowel (vocal yer) between first two consonants or second consonant was a vocal l, which sounds like el/il, so s(short i)l(something that sounds like on)sk(short e)/s(short i)l(something that sounds like nasal e)(hard vocative z)- -> silesia seems very likely.
Sorry, but your etymology sounds like some German propaganda. --Taw
Hi Taw -- could you please write out the Polish again in a pronounceable way, so that the rest of us can follow the argument? I reserve judgement on the whole thing, although it does make sense that we have a Latin name after early inhabitants, whatever their ethnicity...JHK
There's little doubt today that the name of Silesia (Polish S'la,sk -- is a palatalised /s/ and <a,> is for nasal /o/) does derive from the Silings, a Vandalic tribe of the Lugian confederation. Lugian territory overlapped most of modern central and southern Poland. Polish scholars have come to terms with these facts (take my word for it, I'm one of them). They should not be treated as German propaganda -- apart from other things, the Silings were not "German" or ancestral to modern Germans but merely linguistically Germanic (so are English-speakers, for example). The formal derivation is entirely unproblematic: the Germanic adjectival formation *siling-iska- 'Silingia(n)' was adopted by the Slavs as *silinz^isk- (<z^> = "zh"), which yields Polish S'la,sk via 100% regular sound changes. The mountain name S'le,z.a ("Slenzha") reflects the same root with a different suffix (*-ja-). Piotr Gasiorowski
Piotrze, what happened to word "Slegwa" which meant "wet" and was used as explanation of name Slask? I accept your explanation, but i wonder what happened to earlier one, which was official not that long ago (and hen was old explanation abandoned? I was reading books from 90s which still had old explanation of name Slask) -szopen
It has simply been abandoned by most experts in favour of one that is formally more convincing and has a plausible historical justification (we know that the Silings originated in the Silesian/Lusatian region). Truth to tell, the old etymology owed its popularity (in Poland rather than anywhere else) mostly to officially encouraged Germanophobia. For the same reason it was vehemently denied that any part of Poland may have been the "homeland" of any Germanic group, as if Germanic and German meant the same thing, or as if the fact that somebody lived somewhere 2000 years ago meant anything today (why, the ancestors of the English lived in Denmark and northern Germany at that time, and the Silings even moved to Spain in their later wanderings!). Autochthony since time out of mind is what you like to believe in if you fear your neighbours. Of course those phobias were partly provoked (I won't say justified) by earlier excesses on the German side -- note the triumphant renaming of Gdynia as Gotenhafen by the Nazis, who tended to appropriate all Germanic traditions (though the German language is more closely related to English or even Icelandic than to Gothic). Piotr Gasiorowski
One of pre-1000 year Slav tribes of Silesia is called /(soft S)L(nasal E)(hard Z)A(soft N)E/, where /-A(soft N)E/ is usual Polish suffix to describe tribes (other Polish-territory tribes were called Polanie, Wis'lanie, Mazowszanie etc.). They were called from mountain that is nowadays called /(soft S)L(nasal E)(hard Z)A/. Later whole Silesia were called /(soft S)L(nasal O)SK/ (but this name has many other changes, like 'Polish umlaut' E->O, lost final yer, and quite complex consonants change (hard Z)<->SK). Anyway because it's accepted without doubt that Polish name of Silesia comes from this tribe, and because name of this tribe changed less, I'll use this name for explanations.
Generally there is no such consonant pair in old Polish as /(soft S)L/. But in Polish 'short soft e/i' and 'short hard e/i' (these two letters exist in Russian spelling as soft yer and hard yer, but they aren't pronounced) become silent in most positions. So it was probably /S(short soft e/i)L(nasal E)(hard Z)-/.
Usual way of latinization at that times were taking local name (which was only spoken, national languages weren't written at that time),write in to be pronounciable in Latin, and append grammatically-correct suffix. This suffix was often '-ia', as in (Mazowsze -> Mazovia, Kalisz -> Kalisia, Warszawa -> Varsovia). Also because Latin had no letter for nasal E and hard Z, they were written as E and S. So natural latinization was 'S?LESIA'.
The last problem is what has happened to short soft e/i. It could be any of E I or nothing. At that time short vowels were pronounced,
so nothig wouldn't be very probabe. I don't know why it became I and not E. That might have been feature of local dialect or something like that.
Anyway 'SILESIA/SELESIA' is clearly Latin encoding of Polish name of this tribe and region.
I've never heard anything about this Silinger tribe. I think that I would if their existence and name were generally accepted, because I live here. --Taw
Thanks, Taw! Here is my guess as to how H.J. came up with the Silinger as the source, based on what I know of name-studies and historiography (which is a good deal more than most people!) -- Silesia is undoubtedly named after the Slezne (correct spelling as needed). German scholars undoubtedly Germanized the Latin name, which is very common. So really, we're talking about the same group. I think (if it isn't already there) that the article should probably refer to the Silesians (what we call the people in English) as Slavs. Does that work for you? Any disagreements?
Just back from more searching...not as simple as it looks -- Catholic Encyclopedia says the Silingii were a really early Germanic people, and that, after they migrated, the name stuck to the area, becoming Polanized -- so the area has really nothing to do with an inherent Germanness -- the Silesians post-Völkerwanderung were in face Slavs, but the name derives from a place-name for a Germanic people. WIll check more. JHK
The Silings are real enough (see my comment above) Piotr Gasiorowski
(Piotr Gasiorowski is very knowledgeble, tried Wikipedia for a while, but soon gave up)
Halibutt, oftentimes pretty sensible, however came up with this: 'Polish name for German cities: Dresden' discussion: [2]
Sca on Flaws and Kpalion on Communist Propaganda in Wikipedia:
- I have debated at length with one of our Polish editors regarding the Polish view of city names in the context of the territorial changes and population expulsions of 1945. In the end one must conclude that Polish people of whatever political stripe tend to be acutely myopic on this issue. To argue that the city was not generally known by its German name for all the centuries it was inhabited (primarily) by Germans, simply because it was founded by Poles (or perhaps, West Slavs) a millenium ago, and because the Poles always have referred to it by its Polish name or some variant thereof, does not strike them as illogical, even though it does not correspond to historical reality. This seems to be the case even though, of course, they may be in general very congenial people in other ways.
I believe the English version of this article should be edited by neither Poles nor Germans, but by native English speakers with a strong background in the relevant historical periods. Failing that, I advise anyone who is interested in this topic to study the history books, not Wikipedia. Wiki is a noble experiment in the marketplace of ideas, but one which is intrinsically flawed by the absence of qualified, disinterested gatekeepers.
User:sca 24nov04'
'It's not myopia, I think. It's decades of Communist propaganda trying to justify the post-war border changes. Remember, according to the Commies, East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia were ancient Slavic, Piast lands, which were brutally occupied by those fascist Germans obsessed with their Drang nach Osten, and which were finally recovered and rejoined with the Motherland, for the sake of historical justice. I'm not trying to defend those of my compatriots who don't want to be taught anything else than they've been already taught at school, but it might be good if others try to understand why some Poles don't want to hear about Gdańsk or Wrocław ever being German cities. --Kpalion 01:49, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)'
My apologies for using full names. I did not intend any offense and am quite happy for the name to be rendered as H.J. As for the rest of your points, I have been working on Wikipedia since 2001, throughout the events that you describe, and so am well aware of the problems which have afflicted, and continue to afflict, the German/Prussian/Polish articles. I realise from personal experience that there are "good" and "bad" people on both sides of the debate and have already formed my opinions on who they might be. In any case I am sorry that H.J. felt that she could no longer usefully contribute since she was a very industrious editor and I never doubted her good intentions. Cheers -- Derek Ross 20:23, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
While there is no need for you to apologise to H.J., it is indeed very much appreciated. It's too bad that most Wikipedia contributors are unlike you. Thank you and cheers or as Old-Prussians say: Milai ginnis kails.
- Proper English Spelling on Wikipedia Pila (Schneidemuehl) Discussion
An attempt at compromise I had a brilliant idea to try and end this ridiculous war with a compromise describing the controversy rather than entering into the controversy. I may not have the facts exactly right, but I hope that some very minor adjustments to what I have written can be mutually agreed here. Please try to chat about the proposal here before getting into a revert war about it in the article.
Additionally, I removed the "wrong name" template, because it's just incorrect. In English, the fancy letter 'l' with a slash through it does not exist, period. Therefore, the proper spelling in English is 'Pila'. We woud not have a similar disclaimer for the name of Tokyo, for example, even though to write it the way the natives do in their own language would require kanji characters. Jimbo Wales 16:37, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I reinserted the "wrong name" template. The fancy letters like ç or é don't exist in English either. Does it mean we have to move Façade to Facade and Café to Cafe? – Kpalion (talk) 13:44, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
This "wrong name" template is a bad execution. It eats up too much space in the critical beginning area, it is worded in a way that gives the wrong first impression. "Technical limitations" is a poor choice of words. This is "making a mountain out of a mole hill". This smacks of resentment that Wiki decided to not allow "special characters" in the titles. Bwood 16:25, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Interesting to note, that Jimbo Wales states (correctly) that 'Pila' is the proper spelling in English, not the slash through, which does not exist in English, period. Supposedly English-Language Wikipedia is however flooded with 1000's of Article Titles using None-English words and letters.
Some people get worked up about it; others don't care. Those of us who don't care leave it to those who do and the result is as you describe. -- Derek Ross 03:27, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Sure Derek
editBut everything I've written it's at m:User:Drini/daylog. There's a lot of information lost (since sometimes I don't have the time to write the details while cleaning up, but I hope that it should give you pleanty of room. drini [es:] [commons:] 14:06, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Superprotect status
editDear Derek Ross, since you are an administrator on a wiki from which no user participated in this discussion, I'd like to make sure you are aware of some recent events which may alter what the Wikimedia Foundation lets you do on your wiki: Superprotect.
- Request for comment: Requests for comment/Superprotect rights
- An open letter about its implementation: Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer