A fact from Dimitrie Ralet appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 28 December 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Dimitrie Ralet, a pioneer Romanian orientalist, commended Ottoman reformers for not "blindly adopting what we in Europe take to mean civilization"?
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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
... that Dimitrie Ralet(pictured), who satirized his fellow Romanian boyars for "doing their best not to stay Romanian", was himself a Phanariote Greek? Source: Quote from Ralet, in the French translation, together with Ralet's ancestry and birth outside Romania/Moldavia in Andrei Pippidi, "Comptes rendus. Dimitrie Ralet, Suvenire și impresii de călătorie în România, Bulgaria, Constantinopole", in Revue des Études Sud-est Européenes, Vol. XVIII, Issue 2, April–June 1980, pp. 390–391. Multiple other sources on the weird tale of Ralet's Greek origin and embrace of Romanian nationalism.
ALT1: ... that Dimitrie Ralet(pictured), a pioneer Romanian orientalist, commended Ottoman reformers for not "blindly adopting what we in Europe take to mean civilization"? Source: Both the pioneering role in orientalism and the quote from Ralet in Pippidi, pp. 392–393.
Interesting substantial biography on fine sources, all in Romanian so accepted AGF. I'd appreciate if the language was specified in the references. The image is licensed and a great illustration! I prefer ALT1 by far, as it says something about what he did. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:37, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
WADR, specifying the language only makes (some) sense when they sources are online, as the reader clicking the link would then know that they're not in any language other than, say, Romanian. The sort of courtesy leftover from when one would open a link to read and discovered it only had content in a language they couldn't speak -- we would've made that statement for them; even this is becoming quite redundant in an age when any online text can be instantly translated. It does not make, and never did make, any editorial sense to specify the language of offline sources, nor to translate their titles -- editors with that kind of curiosity will either already know what the language is, by looking over the title (and will therefore have the language skills to translate the title and seek the source in its print format), or will know that they're in a language they couldn't read themselves (in which case burdening the text by telling them which language it is that they can't read is hardly encyclopedic). Dahn (talk) 14:49, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And their being left uninformed about the exact language of a footnote in a paper source that they cannot read, and which would therefore be even more inaccessible to them? "Dear blind people, Trecute vieți de doamne și domnițe. Vol. III: De la restabilirea domniilor pământene până la Unirea Principatelor is a title in Romanian. Hope you find this information useful, even though you can't speak Romanian, and, if you do, you already know that it is in Romanian. We're not translating the entire book, because it is in copyright form, and you would have to find the legal e-book or illegal PDF to download for you to get the automatic reading, but we thought we would clarify that, if you were to read it, you would have to know it is in Romanian, and not Swahili. You may only speak English, in which case you couldn't care less if it is Romanian or Swahili, or you may already speak Romanian, in which case you already realized it is in Romanian. Also, if you should want to check out the reference for what it being cited here, you would have to find the exact print of the book and go to the exact page -- by getting the reader to also read you the page numbers. Either that, or trust that the text is backed by the reference, which you were most likely to do either way, as are most of our non-blind readers. In any case, you're welcome." Dahn (talk) 16:15, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, but I think we talk about different things. I accept the foreign sources AGF, and said so. I said what I'd like, you said in the explanation "by looking over the title", and I only questioned that part: not verybody can look over the title, some will have it read to them. - I accept your answer. I hope that the bot will still notice that this was approved. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:22, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
To be sure, Gerda: I don't mean to be cruel to the blind, but quite the contrary -- I view this approach as a tad, and unintentionally, cruel towards them. It's reasonable (though tiresome for editors) to add wiki markup for text in Romanian, so that the automated reader will switch top Romanian between the brackets (as with the verse translation, which uses the markup), but simply specifying the language of reference titles does no real service to anyone -- the seeing will presumably have figured it out, though they might not be able to read the book for reasons of monolingualism, while the blind will be reminded that a reference points to a book which they couldn't read even if they had been plurilingual. You write exceptional articles on composers -- imagine, if you will, that you would consider it meaningful to describe to the deaf what the music would sound like if they could hear it (beyond simply showing them the score, or providing some sourced commentary on the characteristics); it would be charitable, but condescending, and borderline cruel.
I thank you for the review, but please note that you need to change the symbol to one of the "approved" marks for the bot to count this nom as approved. Dahn (talk) 06:42, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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Interesting substantial biography on fine sources, all in Romanian so accepted AGF. I'd appreciate if the language was specified in the references. The image is licensed and a great illustration! I prefer ALT1 by far, as it says something about what he did. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:37, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
(sorry, my memory was wrong) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:16, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
