Talk:Bleiburg repatriations

non-English reference metadata

@Phazd why are you changing journal references to link to Croatian metadata pages on Hrčak, instead of continuing to link the English ones? Likewise for references to the name of the publishers, such as Croatian Institute of History. Surely the average English reader who tries to verify these is better served by English, instead of being forced to read foreign language text sooner rather than later? --Joy (talk) 11:36, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

@Joy The pages with Croatian metadata on Hrčak are simply those that are pointed to by the URI, which is, as far as I understand, the more reliable (stable) way to link the pages.

The names of publishers are those that are found on the sources themselves – you can see that in the reference Radelić 2016 I actually replaced the Croatian "Hrvatski institut za povijest" with English "Croatian Institute of History", because it's an English-language journal and on the cover you can see the publisher name both in Croatian and in English (IMO in that case it would be most accurate to provide both variants, but I thought it better to keep the reference simpler).

The point of bibliographic info in references is to help finding the original publication and being sure that's the correct publication that was intended by the writer. In library databases such information is (hopefully) never translated, because translation adds ambiguity to the process. The English speakers will prefer seeing the original name here too, because if provided only with the translated English form they will be left to guess if "Hrvatski institut za povijest" is the actual original name of the publisher which they will want to find in library databases, repositories, etc., and, after all, on the printed publication itself. You yourself recognise that the information should be preserved, because as far as I see you aren't disputing me restoring proper Croatian journal titles ("Pravnik" instead of "Lawyer" - the former exists, the latter doesn't, not to mention it's an incorrect translation), and the publisher name is essentially no different.

The translated info is thus only a surface-level accomodation that in the long run can cause problems both for those who do and who don't know the original language. I've come across (thankfully just) one reference on WP that was fairly bare-bones and so thoroughly translated it was completely impossible to find the original text, even though I know the original language. Besides, imagine a reverse situation: open Croatian or Serbo-Croatian WP, and see a reference to a book published by "Oksfordska sveučilišna naklada", "Pingvin klasici" or something similar - you'd rightfully go crazy! :)

Since this isn't the first time I'm dealing with translated bibliographic info, which as you can see I am strongly against, I am already writing a proposal to address this problem and more explicitly define how the info is to be presented. If you want, I can ping you when I post the proposal so we can discuss it there.

— Phazd (talk|contribs) 18:20, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

There is no ambiguity in linking the publisher information that is in English. If the journal website is providing us with English-language information, we should not bend over backwards to try to avoid it. --Joy (talk) 20:05, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

I agree with Joy's position on this. Tomobe03 (talk) 20:56, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

@Joy @Tomobe03 I'm not 100% sure I get what you're talking about here exactly, apologies if I misunderstand you in the following reply. Wikipedia doesn't link to publisher information. We have to provide publisher information in the reference, not just link to it, and we may link to the published text hosted online, e.g. on Hrčak. If you're talking about the latter, i.e. what we put in the |url= field, again, as far I see what is provided as the URI on Hrčak's pages is the more stable and cleaner way to link to the publication. E.g. I replaced https://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=clanak&id_clanak_jezik=27653&lang=en with https://hrcak.srce.hr/17821 (the different URLs leading to the same text is probably a result of Hrčak undergoing some reorganisation over the years). Every English-language variant of Hrčak pages provides the sort of URI that I used in the article. In fact, I just tested it and it turns out the URI resolves differently depending on your language choice (probably saved as a browser cookie), it can lead either to the Croatian or the English version (the latter ditinguished by the /en/: https://hrcak.srce.hr/en/17821). If you open an English version of a Hrčak page or switch the setting on the top of the page to English, from then on when you click on the sort of URI I provided you'll always land on the English version.

So this is a non-issue. No "bending over backwards" here, no "avoiding" of English versions, these links are actually language-agnostic.

Also, there's an additional problem with the translated versions that I just noticed. It appears that the English versions of the pages were used in the article as the source of bibliographic information; in the above-linked case, the English version claims it's a publication called Anthology of Senj, but such a publication doesn't actually exist, that's just an ad hoc English translation of Senjski zbornik, and it is the latter variant that has to be used in the citation on Wikipedia and which you'll find in library databases. Some editor just copied the English title that doesn't refer to a real journal. So that's one possible argument for linking to specifically Croatian versions of the pages, but as I said the links I provided switch to whatever language you've previously used. (It can also be noted that, in this particular case that I picked, the "English" version of the page is absolutely useless for English speakers anyway, because the article title and summary are still in Croatian.)

— Phazd (talk|contribs) 23:26, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

They are technically agnostic, but making English readers jump through unnecessary hoops is still simply pointless. The idea that they're better served by having to wade through foreign-language titles and websites when English ones are already available is frankly just hostile. Cf. WP:Readers first. --Joy (talk) 10:31, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

You're overestimating both the difficulty these links pose to non-Croatian readers, as well as their usefulness, which is practically nonexistent: the actual source articles are still in Croatian, sometimes even the titles and summaries, as seen above. I doubt non-Croatian readers care about this detail at all (for now this problem has been discussed only by us three speakers of Croatian...). If you so firmly believe we should link to the English versions, I guess it shouldn't matter too much at the end of the day for me to argue against it, as long as other editors don't use the translated bibliographic data down the line. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 06:41, 5 January 2026 (UTC)

This is the second discussion in a relatively short time where you've downplayed the concerns of everyday readers. I again recommend reading the WP:NOTJOURNAL policy, and maybe also the WP:Readers first essay to clarify further. --Joy (talk) 20:32, 6 January 2026 (UTC)

@Joy This response of yours has lowered the level of discussion beyond acceptable levels. The discussion we had on Talk:Gaj's Latin alphabet had next to nothing to do with the concerns of everday readers (the problem of how to interpret and transcribe Slavic palatals is not settled among scholars and the problem has leaked over into academic publications, see Talk:Russian phonology#Retroflexes; the rest of the issue has already been discussed there and you seem to have nothing further to add, so there's no point in mentioning or discussing it any further). As for WP:NOTJOURNAL, I have to find some special term for this sort of behaviour, maybe "WP:-bludgeoning". It is lazy or maybe even dishonest misuse of links to policy pages in an attempt to present your viewpoint as authoritative and supported by WP policy, while the actual pages themselves say nothing relevant about the problem at hand. You've already done that in one of your edit descriptions here (invoking WP:UE), and now with the WP:NOTJOURNAL - this is just a commonsense guideline that is meant to secure readability of the article itself and says absolutely nothing about how references should be formatted. Even if read more broadly, you'd be arguing that linking to https://hrcak.srce.hr/17821 instead of https://hrcak.srce.hr/en/17821 makes the WP article too similar to a scientific journal, which is completely ridiculous.

You appear unable to clearly explain (not just by gesturing at policies) why it would be useful for non-Croatian readers to open the latter but not the former link. Maybe it hasn't been stated clearly enough: both of these links point to the exact same Croatian PDF. If a reader wants to verify WP's claims or read what the source says directly, i.e. make use of the reference, they have to read the text in Croatian either way! Seeing the journal title in English and maybe the title and summary (not always the case on Hrčak) is not useful for that purpose.

In fact, if you can show me a single non-Croatian speaker who can honestly explain why they find the English link more useful than the default, I'll go change the links myself. Either way, this is a small pointless issue that wouldn't have arisen if you didn't revert my corrections to real bibliographic data along with inserting the English links; if you just changed the links alone I probably would've ignored that edit.

— Phazd (talk|contribs) 18:10, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I'm not willing to entertain these long screeds where you completely ignore other people's views and cast aspersions. The assumption of good faith is exhausted. --Joy (talk) 18:34, 10 January 2026 (UTC)