On 2015-04-23 01:21, Stas Malyshev wrote:
Hi!
Careful, this is one of the most debated and dramatic style issues after citation format! Actual transliteration should clearly follow scientific/ISO standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_transliteration_of_Cyrillic .
Well, "scientific/ISO standards" is in this case at least three different standards, and 11 standards if you include commonly used ones :) E.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian
However the labels and aliases are in languages like "it" and "fr", so they're supposedly translations rather than mere transliterations. This makes things more complex.
Yes. I see that the bot is setting language labels for entities, so for this both language-specific transliterations and common usage can be important. Which for Russian for example can be quite crazy, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q187349%27s last name is "Ватсон" but https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1187613%27s is "Уотсон". And I have no idea what is the correct romanization of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4105300%27s name.
This is what we commonly use at the English Wikipedia for romanization of Russian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Romanization_of_Russian
It was already noted that the Russian Wikipedia uses the reverse order for names (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich), whereas there is no reason to use this order on Wikidata. The reasonable options should be either "Fyodor Dostoyevsky" or (less preferable to me) "Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky".
Cheers Yaroslav