Template talk:Lang-ru

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

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, [Площадь Декабристов] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help)).

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] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), 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] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) would be sufficient. —Michael Z. 2006-01-3 17:04 Z

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)

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:

[Тара́с Шевче́нко, Taras Shevchenko] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help)

Russian: Володимеръ . иже кнѧжи в Києвѣ

Adding italics to the template would display:

[Тара́с Шевче́нко, Taras Shevchenko] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help)

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)

My browser (Firefox 3.0.6 on Mac OS X 10.4.11) shows the stress marks as empty both with and without italics, but as bold capital letters Т when the text is bolded, so the Taras Shevchenko example comes out as "Ukrainian: ТараТс ШевчеТнко, Taras Shevchenko". Without the template there is no problem. A different (and in my eyes less readable) font is used with the template than without, which is because the text is rendered bracketed by <span lang="uk">...</span>. 88.233.196.53 (talk) 21:26, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

please add russian and polish interwiki: ru:Шаблон:Lang-ru, pl:Szablon:Lang-ru ~ Чръный человек (talk) 20:33, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Done.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 20:38, June 19, 2009 (UTC)

Optional arguments

Let's add some optional arguments for transliteration and pronunciation of Russian words. So, that {{lang-ru|Дивногорск|t=Divnogorsk|p=dʲɪvnɐˈgorsk}} would be converted into something like this:

Russian: Дивногорск, tr. Divnogorsk, IPA [dʲɪvnɐˈgorsk]

Hellerick (talk) 04:37, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Is this done for any other template in the lang-xx series? If it is, it'd probably make sense to be consistent across the board and share the same code. Overall, I have no objection to this modification (as long as both the romanization and the IPA parts are indeed kept optional).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:29, November 9, 2009 (UTC)

Here is a test template with this feature:

• {{lang-ru/sandbox|Дивногорск}}

Russian: Дивногорск

• {{lang-ru/sandbox|Дивногорск|Divnogorsk}}

Russian: Дивногорск, romanized: Divnogorsk

• {{lang-ru/sandbox|Дивногорск|Divnogorsk|dʲɪvnɐˈgorsk}}

Russian: Дивногорск, romanized: Divnogorsk, lit. 'dʲɪvnɐˈgorsk'

• {{lang-ru/sandbox|Дивногорск|r=Divnogorsk|p=dʲɪvnɐˈgorsk}}

Russian: Дивногорск

• {{lang-ru/sandbox|Дивногорск|r=Divnogorsk}}

Russian: Дивногорск

• {{lang-ru/sandbox|Дивногорск|p=dʲɪvnɐˈgorsk}}

Russian: Дивногорск

(The argument r stands for romanization, and the argument p for pronunciation. I decided not to use the argument t, because it may be perceived as both "transliteration" and "transcription".)

One of the reasons why I suggest these optional arguments is because I'm fed up with stress signs that so often appear in Russian words in the English Wikipedia. I was trying to remove them, on account of their not being a part of the Russian orthography, and because a regular English reader is not supposed to perceive them correctly, as stress signs. But I was oppose, because what I did it was removing of useful information (about the stress). So, the compromise solution was to provide an IPA transcription, with the explicitly stress shown. My idea is that whenever I see an annoying stress sign in a Russian word, I'll be able to remove it, and provide transcription instead.

As for "sharing the code"... Well, I guess for some languages it would be more useful than for the others. But it would not hurt to have this feature universal. The trouble is the Romanization tables and IPA charts are not and cannot be available for all the languages, and we won't have articles to link "tr." and "IPA" to. Hellerick (talk) 04:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I like this test template in principle, although I am hard pressed to imagine a person who is able to read and understand IPA but doesn't know what a stress mark is. On the other hand, stress marks are indeed often confusing to those who only know the Cyrillic alphabet and not much else, so moving this information into the IPA transcription makes good sense. We will, however, need volunteers to add the IPA transcription to articles, which could be a problem (I, for example, can read IPA, but am not really comfortable adding it on my own).

Another issue is the romanization—the "tr." link leads to the encyclopedic article (and so it should), yet, when this parameter is used, the romanization is going to be WP:RUS (and so it should be, too). Considering how the romanization of Russian article deals with half a dozen different romanization systems, linking to it to explain what is going to be a WP:RUS romanization may be quite confusing, and we can't link to WP:RUS itself because it is not in the article space. Frankly, I don't know how to best go about it. Perhaps we should drop the romanization parameter altogether and just leave IPA? Or do you have any ideas? Thanks.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 14:35, November 10, 2009 (UTC)

Well, first of all I can imagine a person who does not know what a stress mark is. In many languages (such as French) the the accent mark is used for other purposes: to change the phonetic quality of the vowel, to mark the tone, or to disambiguate homophones. The English speakers are not supposed to know anything about the Cyrillic script at all. Even if they are told that the acute sign shows the accentuation, they still probably won't be able to determine where the stress falls in English. These misperceived accentuated spellings pest Wikipedia and now the web in whole (too often with some technical bugs, because in many cases the stress signs can't be processed correctly) — common people don't know what to do with the stress sign.

Yeah, it would be cool to link "tr." to WP:RUS, the trouble is this guideline helps to convert Russian names into the Latin alphabet, and is a little help for the readers.

As for dropping the transliteration part — we could make the transcription the first optional argument, and the transliteration the second optional argument (and yet to have the trasliteration appearing before the transcription) — thus it would be easy to use the template with the transcription even if the transliteration is not given. But I'm not sure whether we should be doing it — it depends on they way what variant of use of this template will be more common. Hellerick (talk) 08:16, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

If an Anglophone doesn't know anything about Cyrillics at all, then surely it doesn't matter whether there is a stress mark or not? And from what I've seen in the Russian-as-a-second-language textbooks, an explanation of what a stress mark is usually follows the introduction of the alphabet somewhere in Lesson 1. Of course, showing stress in IPA is a cleaner solution and one that I 100% support; I just want to point out that showing the stress in the actual word is not as much of a problem as it seems to be on the surface.

On the template, perhaps it would make sense to temporary create something like {{lang-rus}} with the new parameters, insert it in ~100 of more or less high-profile articles, and then check how it goes in a month or two? It's kind of hard to predict how well this template is going to fair with the new parameters; doing an experiment would at least give us an idea of how to proceed.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 14:37, November 12, 2009 (UTC)

Not knowing anything about Cyrillics does not stop them from blind copy-pasting Russian words with accent marks. Sometimes I was trying to correct such spellings, but it's very difficult to convince people that the spellings used in Wikipedia are wrong.

Well, guess it can be temporarily used as {{lang-rus}} — if you know a bot master who can quickly change it to {{lang-ru}} later. Hellerick (talk) 03:48, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I'll take care of changing them back when it comes to that. For now, would you mind adding {{lang-rus}} to articles that currently use {{lang-ru}} from the top of this list? That should give this experiment a good exposure. I'd love to help, but like I said before, I'm not too good with adding IPA. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 04:52, November 13, 2009 (UTC)

Edit request from Cherurbino, 11 February 2011

{{edit protected}}

1. Presently the text is not italicized, unlike in another languages' templates. If there's no special reason for that exclusion, it could be a good idea to return to the common standard
2. Another good idea could be to provide an expanded option set for this and all the other templates, where:
   • NULL argument ({{lang-ru}}) shall generate "[[Russian language|ru]]" (screen output ru), where 'ru' stands for the ISO 639 code;
   • zero-length argument ({{lang-ru|}}) shall generate code [[Russian language|Russian]] (screen output Russian), i.e. the capitalized name of the language without any punctuation marks or spaces

Both additional options may be highly appreciated in body texts and as the arguments in the templates where the link to the relevant article upon the language concerned. Cherurbino (talk) 08:52, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

It was discussed in 2006 and consensus was against italicizing Cyrillic, see above. Chinese isn't italicized, either, and really shouldn't be. The fact that a different writing system is used is typically enough emphasis, so italics are only used for languages that are written in the Latin alphabet. Your second suggestion should probably discussed at one of the more fundamental templates like Template:Language with name or Template:Lang. —Кузьма^討論 10:45, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Comparison to Chinese in the terms of "writing system" (?) looks strange. What matters here, is the outlook of glyphs and the comparative density of the fonts. No doubt: Georgian, Armenian, Arab etc. need no italicizing. But as for Cyrillic, where the font density is same to Latin in all computer typesets, while a dozen of letters are roughly the same — arguments against italicizing look doubtful. Even for a naturally bilingual CYR/LAT reader (russo-spanish, franco-bulgarian etc.) it is not easy to visually cut out cyrillc text out of latin one. This bitty (разношёрстный) sample:

• …corresponds to Czech: hebrejci, Russian: еврей and English: hebrew (cf. Czech: žid, Russian: жид and English: jew)…

demonstrates the breach of internal logic. It may strike even those who do not know the languages in which this string is written. Anyway, thank you for the answer.Cherurbino (talk) 18:34, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

This template does not italicize Cyrillics to stay compliant with the applicable style guidelines (WP:MOSTEXT#Contraindications and WP:MOSTEXT#Foreign terms). You might want to open the discussion there, as it is a more appropriate venue and more people are likely to see it there anyway. Before this template can be changed, the possibility of amending the MOS needs to be discussed. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 11, 2011; 18:54 (UTC)

Thank you very much for these 2 links! I was just searching for traces of these discussions. — Cherurbino (talk) 19:08, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

You are welcome. Although I generally disagree with your proposal that Cyrillic needs to be italicized, the discussion about this took place quite some time ago and could use a fresh look. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); February 11, 2011; 19:17 (UTC)

Re: "I generally disagree with your proposal that Cyrillic needs to be italicized" — well, let's state, that our points of view are different. A matter of habit, you see…

As for me, the first link seems to be irrelevant since it speaks of bolding, not italicizing. As for the second one — statement that "the difference of script suffices to distinguish it on the page" seems to be arguable: Greek is equalled to Cyrillc while the glyph basis is obviously different even ia Arial font. This prohibition seems to be written by people who had at least minor experience in working with 3 languages simultaneously (3rd is English) as well as in polygraphy and WYSIWYG basics. Alas. As for me, I shall better contribute here to the articles, not to discussions. Yet, if anybody shall resume the subject — he may call me — Best regards, Cherurbino (talk) 19:23, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Interwiki

Good morning at all. Can anyone set the interwiki de:Vorlage:RuS? Thanks --Crazy1880 (talk) 09:39, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Done.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 26, 2011; 18:21 (UTC)

Italics

So far I can see that other lang-XX templates use text in italics (German, French, Italian, etc.). Can anybody adjust it with the common standard? Thanks.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 13:38, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Text in languages not using Latin alphabet is not supposed to be italicized as per MOS:Ety.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 15, 2012; 14:21 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 22 February 2022

Please reduce the excess spacing above the heading of section "TemplateData" to default. Hildeoc (talk) 18:27, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

 Not done: that extra whitespace is unavoidable due to optional parameters inserted between two sections in the documentation. Those parser functions cannot be removed and take up a little space whether or not they're used. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 18:45, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

I fixed it with a hack. There may be a better way. It still looks fine at a page that uses that optional section, {{Lang-kmr}}. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:21, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Thought about doing that, but didn't, for the usual reasons. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 19:36, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 2022-12-28

In the See also paragraph, the third bullet point "List of ISO 639-1 codes (language codes)" should be changed to List of ISO 639 language codes. Reason: This is the current lemma of the list of ISO language codes and this wikipage should be directly linked. Background: ISO 639 has been recently reviewed and all parts are now merged into one document. There are no parts 639-1, 639-2, etc. anymore. --Gunnar (talk) 13:22, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

 Not done: {{edit template-protected}} is usually not required for edits to the documentation or categories of templates using a documentation subpage. Use the 'edit' link at the top of the green "Template documentation" box to edit the documentation subpage. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:00, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Parameter for Anglicised needed

On pages with the "Use British English" template, in a result like "Russian: Алексей, romanized: Aleksey", "romanized" looks out of place, because "romanised" is the more commonly seen spelling in British English.

Spel-Punc-Gram (talk) 22:22, 14 March 2022 (UTC)