Talk:Makhnovshchina

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Frequently asked questions

Q1: Isn't it called "Free Territory" too?

A1: There is no prominent evidence that the territory ever went by that name. Of the variants that have historical evidence, "Makhnovshchina" was decided as the most fitting, referring to both the people and the occupied land, with little evidence that they treated the land as a named state. All evidence points to "Free Territory" being an anachronism invented and propagated by Wikipedia rather than a name supported by reliable sources. Given the damage Wikipedia has already made to the historical record here, the burden of evidence would have to be quite strong to prove that scholars have all missed the territory's proper name in their decades of publications.

Q2: Why is there no infobox?

A2: A request for comment in 2024 closed with a consensus against including an infobox. The Makhnovshchina was a movement and not a territory or country.

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validity of consensus + settlement infobox?

i looked through the edit history of of the page and counted 3 different editors before me adding an infobox but none responded to the RfC and the snow clause was used only after 5 contributions.

in any case even if the conensus is valid, 2 of the oppose votes in it oppose use of a country infobox and the arugments against an infobox are that makhnovshchina was a movement and not a defined terroitory or country, in that case it was still a settlement with people living on it and treating it as an actual, similarly to CHAZ which does have a infobox despite being much less organized (if at all). ManU9827 (talk) 16:41, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Orangemike, FeRDNYC, Nikkimaria, Czar, Mellk, and Asilvering: Courtesy ping to other RfC participants. I'll give more of a comment when I have more energy, but for now I'll just say I don't think a settlement infobox is appropriate for the Makhnovist movement either. I don't know much about the CHAZ, but bringing it up strikes me as an other stuff exists argument; I think it's irrelevant to whether an infobox is appropriate for this article. --Grnrchst (talk) 17:45, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ManU9827, you're welcome to start another discussion but since it's been less than half a year, without any new rationale, I wouldn't expect different results. There have been many discussions about the Makhnovshchina not being a place (whether a settlement or a country) and the consensus is quite stark that an infobox brings more potential for misrepresenting the topic than benefit to readers. Not every article needs an infobox. czar 22:02, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed - not seeing anything compelling to warrant revisiting the above. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:32, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest, I don't see why CHAZ has one either. It probably shouldn't. -- asilvering (talk) 22:20, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, nonsense like this makes me very dubious regarding the CHAZ infobox...

Government
Designation	Self-declared autonomous zone
Established	June 8, 2020
Disbanded	July 1, 2020
• Type	Consensus decision-making, with daily meeting of protesters

...Government!?!? FeRDNYC (talk) 08:44, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A couple days on, I'm still trying to process how exactly one redefines a mass movement to be under the scope of settlements. I've tried understanding, but I still don't get it. To be honest, it makes me a bit depressed that so many new editors are coming into this article, not to add new information to it, but to repeatedly shove in an infobox that paints a completely misleading picture of the Makhnovshchina. I think it betrays a lack of understanding or care for the topic. I opened the RfC because this back-and-forth was preventing the article from going to GAN, but at this point, I wonder if it's ever going to get there. This has all been very tiring. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:25, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well... infoboxes are a WP:CTOP for a reason. I can easily understand why someone would observe there isn't an infobox in a topic they're passingly familiar with, think "hey, I can help wikipedia!" and add one in. There are user talk templates you can use at WP:CT/CID to notify the new folks who are unaware that they're stepping on an editorial landmine. If you drop one of those on someone and get follow-up questions you're sick of having to answer (I can't blame you), I'm happy to be pinged in to provide gentle explanations and/or scary warnings about arbitration enforcement. I'm sure @czar would volunteer for the same. We're both obviously too partisan (pun intended?) on this issue to do any AE here, but we can take some of the emotionally grinding prelude off your plate. -- asilvering (talk) 18:33, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, there has been a lot of fiddling around with infoboxes in general lately. I think it would help to make it clearer to new editors what the purpose of an infobox is. Mellk (talk) 18:55, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, I was randomly scrolling through my contributions history and found this topic again. Brings back memories lol.

The reason none of the pinged editors showed up is because the ping never worked. I never received a notification.

In my case, it doesn’t matter much as I would have voted oppose anyway. The notion that Makhnovshchina could be called a state simply isn’t backed by reliable sources. And the argument that it could be called a state is very shaky in the first place. 296cherry (talk) 01:11, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Makhnovist movement" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Makhnovist movement has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 March 13 § Makhnovist movement until a consensus is reached. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 17:42, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Makhnovshchina as "Makhno movement"

@Altenmann: Per WP:3RR, I'm bringing this here as I don't want this to turn into an edit war. I reverted your edits because you were making synthetic changes to sourced content, which had consensus across sources, based on an English translation of a single primary source (which I'll note you didn't even cite the first time[1]). Colin Darch translated "Makhnovshchina" as "Makhno movement" (see index page 234); Michael Malet translated "Makhnovshchyna" as "Makhno movement" (see page 9 and index page 223); Victor Peters translated "Makhnovshchina" as "Makhno's movement" (see page 7); Aleksandr Shubin translated "Makhnovshchina" as "Makhno movement" (see page 147); Alexandre Skirda translated "Makhnovshchina" as "Makhnovist movement" (see page 2); and Frank Sysyn translated "Makhnovshchyna" as "Makhno movement" (see page 277). By scholarly consensus, "Makhno movement" is the common translation for "Makhnovshchina". "Makhnovism" is not the common translation, nor is it even commonly used in scholarly sources: out of the above-cited sources, only Peters uses the word "Makhnovism" when quoting the German translation of Arshinov's book; none of the other sources use that word.

I have added "Makhnovism" as an alternate translation to the etymology and orthography section, but you're going to have to do a lot more than citing a translation of a single primary source to convince me it's worth putting in the lead and especially to override content cited to 6 scholarly sources. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:51, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

google ngram shows that in the 21st century the term "Makhnovism" becomes increasingly common and now makes 60% of"Makhnovschina". Therefore addition of it in the article lede is perfectly justifiable.
"Makhnovism" is a literal dictionary translation of the word, according to linguistics, so there is nothing of WP:SYNTH. --Altenmann >talk 16:03, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Most of the sources for "Makhnovism" in that Ngram search don't even use the term, which you can attribute to its flawed OCR software. (See here) Of the sources it does correctly identify: none of them are reliable secondary sources about the Makhnovshchina itself; a couple are Perlman's translations of Arshinov and Volin; some are blatantly unreliable, self-published works or include basic mistakes. In many, it's not clear what is being referred to by "Makhnovism", with some using it for the movement and others an ideology. Furthermore, Ngrams gives far more results for "Makhnovist movement" (See here). It still seems to me that using "Makhnovism" in the lead would be undue, absent any strong evidence in its favour from literature on the subject, but I'm more than happy to welcome a third opinion on the matter if you insist.
- "-ism" is one of the many possible dictionary translations of "-щина", and it's heavily context dependent. In any case, its translation in the dictionary wasn't the synth issue: what was synth was to disregard scholarly consensus on the translation as something that "can be interpreted", based on a possible interpretation of a dictionary translation, and to instead regard the possible interpretation of a dictionary translation as a "literal translation" (diff). Again, happy to welcome a third opinion if you disagree.
--Grnrchst (talk) 17:11, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- I am fine with what we have now. --Altenmann >talk 17:14, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]