Talk:Brest Region

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders 2004 report on Belarus (from www.c97.org/ on 6 May 2004)includes:

"President Lukashenko thinks the media should help build a 'state ideology'. The regime prevented a dozen independent media from appearing in 2003 using imaginative administrative harassment. A hundred or so journalists staged a 'A Day of Closed Newspapers' on 19 September 2003 to stress their rights, which had been particularly abused during the year. The authorities suspended and punished a dozen newspapers over several months, mostly because they had printed articles from the banned independent newspaper Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta (BDG). Every administrative excuse was used to block publication of the independent press and several printers were punished and some sacked for working with the papers.

The regime also targeted human rights groups and shut down several organisations that gave valuable help to the media. It also refused to cooperate with international organisations which firmly criticised the worsening conditions and did not allow the press freedom representative of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Freimut Duve, into the country in September.

A new press law was drafted in secret and aimed to further reduce press freedom. Registration fees for newspapers and radio and TV stations rose sharply in June. The government presented a new law in mid-December requiring government employees to ask permission before giving any information to the media.

(See http://charter97.org/eng/news/2004/05/06/rwb/)

The region was formed in 1939 after reunification of Western Belarus and the Byelorussian SSR

It's a POV statement. My POV is - the region was occupied by the SU 1939-1941, Germany 1941-1944 and annexed to the Byelorussian SSR. Tens of rhousands of Poles were expelled, deported to Siberia, killed.Xx236 07:57, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Administrative divisions of Belarus which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RM bot 17:30, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

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Requested move 11 December 2024

• Brest Region → Brest region
• Gomel Region → Gomel region
• Grodno Region → Grodno region
• Minsk Region → Minsk region
• Mogilev Region → Mogilev region
• Vitebsk Region → Vitebsk region

– Region is not part of the proper name of regions of Belarus, and is typically lowercase in sources. Dicklyon (talk) 02:24, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• Support Per WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS. Region is a translation of oblast (or voblasts) from the native language, which is not capitalised in that language (ie it is not inherently a proper noun|name). All of these terms are not consistently capped in sources (google scholar and google books) in English language sources either. Cinderella157 (talk) 10:19, 11 December 2024 (UTC)
• Comment Note that the previous RM's consensus specifically called for the capitalized "Region". 162 etc. (talk) 17:19, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

  I wasn't aware of that 2010 discussion based on "OTHERSTUFF". We've fixed some of that other stuff since then. Dicklyon (talk) 06:37, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

  It's interesting that the original proposal there was for lowercase region, per the official Belarus site which still has them all with lowercase region. Dicklyon (talk) 06:41, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

• Support per MOS:CAPS. Theparties (talk)
• Comment. I took a look at Ngrams and lowercase "region" has spiked in the last few years. Any reason why this might be the case? Mellk (talk) 20:21, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:NCCAPS ("Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper name"). "Brest region" is a vicinity of Brest, whereas "Brest Region" is a proper name of the administrative subdivision, just like "Vilnius District Municipality, or Dood Tsagaan Lake, or Kyiv Oblast". By the way, I have no freaking idea why the proper name was translated: there are Kyiv Oblast, Moscow Oblast, but for some idiosyncrasy it is Minsk Region, but I was not losing my sleep over that. --Altenmann >talk 21:39, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

  Sure, that's fine logic, but the official Belarus site contradicts it, so I think it's wrong. Dicklyon (talk) 04:17, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

  If you think Belarus govt webmasters are experts in English, be ready for surprises. The page says "There are 16 areas, 20 towns (3 of them have regional submissions - Brest, Baranovichi, Pinsk)" - I challenge you to figure out what this really means. --Altenmann >talk 05:26, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

  We also use district rather than raion for Russian districts (see list of districts in Russia). But there it is capitalized. Is this not a similar issue? Mellk (talk) 18:55, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

• Comment This situation is an enormous number of cases. River Don, Besh Barmag Mountain, Lake Ontario, Walnut Creek, ... The name of the river is Don, the mountain is Besh Barmag, the lake is Ontario, etc. Why single out poor Belarus? --Altenmann >talk 00:05, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
  • P.S. Not to say that "Brest" is not the name of the subdivision. --Altenmann >talk 00:06, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

  We've been through similar case corrections on regions, subregions, districts, provinces, etc., of numerous countries. This particular discussion is about administrative regions of Belarus. That's not a singling out. Dicklyon (talk) 04:17, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

  "of numerous conutries"? They you sure hell before doing this y'all have to have a centralized discussion somewhere, not in some obscure pages nobody edits. --Altenmann >talk 18:17, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

  Here's a recent one and a cluster of discussions from 2021. There are centrally advertised at WP:RM and WT:MOSCAPS#Current (where you'll find several others currently open), and generally also listed in WikiProject alerts (though the automatic RM alert at Wikipedia:WikiProject Belarus#Move discusions seems to be broken or non-existent):

  • Talk:Adi Keyh Subregion#Requested move 25 November 2024 – Lowercase "subregion", "region", and "administration" in titles for subregions/regions of Eritrea? – Result: Lowercase region etc.
  • Talk:An Giang Province#Requested move 7 November 2021 – Lowercase "province" for that and Yên Bái Province? Result: Yes.
  • Talk:Alborz Province#Requested move 24 January 2022 – Extend downcasing of "Province" to Iran? Result: Yes.
  • Talk:Amnat Charoen Province#Requested move 2 December 2021 – Extend downcasing of "Province" to Thailand? Result: Yes.
  • Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles#Chinese placenames – "province", "district", etc. – stale discussion; downcasing probably needed.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Southeast Asia#Downcasing "Province" – Lowercase like we did for Vietnam provinces? – Yes for Laos, Cambodia, Thailand; include districts; no more countries there.
  • Talk:Adrianople_Vilayet#Requested move 2 February 2022 – How about "vilayet"? Result: Lowercase
    • Yes, that's what I am saying, that's a mess without centralized discussion. Now we have Isfahan province but Isfahan County and none of these are named simply Isfahan, just like the London Bridge is not called "London". And Eiffel Tower is not called Eiffel. --Altenmann >talk 18:51, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
      • OK, it's a mess; feel free to develop a better process. That analogy is not apt, if you look at sources. E.g. London Bridge is always capped, because that's its proper name, while Brest Region appears with lowercase region about half the time. Dicklyon (talk) 19:00, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
        • I do not need to develop a better process and I already suggested one: in order to keep naming consistency. Similarly to yours, ngram for Kyiv Region beats Kyiv Oblast by a wide margin. But before 2000 it was very much vice versa even for a larger margin. Does that mean we have to rename articles every 10 years? --Altenmann >talk 23:01, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
        • The problem with hgram argument is that you cannot tell which usages are about "Brest region" (vicinity of Brest) and which are about "Brest Region" (administrative subdivision). But probably you are right. There is a growing tendency to decap. Also "region" dominates over "oblast"--Altenmann >talk 22:28, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
          • I don't know, I just use the RM process that I know. Other discussions I've tried often attract zero attention, of I do an RFC I get people telling me that's the wrong process. And yes I know that the n-grams stats are limited and need some care to figure out how to interpret them. In this case, I'd look for lowercase "Brest region" in books and see if any significant number of them are not referring to the topic of the article. It's not so easy to tell with some, but they look to me like they mostly do refer to the topic of the article. Dicklyon (talk) 03:50, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
      • For sure, you'd never say "London is a bridge", but "Isfahan is a province", which is what our article says, is pretty conventional. Similarly, "Gomel is a region ..." is found in sources. That's the difference. Dicklyon (talk) 05:01, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
        • The phrase "Isfahan is a province" is not found in artile Isfahan province. "Gomel is a region ..." is an illiterate nonsense. Gomel is a city. --Altenmann >talk 19:20, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
          • Constructions like that are not uncommon in English, where a name refers to a city and to a region (or district, or province, ...) of the same name. On the Isfahan one, sorry, I must have been confused. Dicklyon (talk) 19:29, 14 December 2024 (UTC)