Talk:Białystok/Archive 1

Lithuanian or Yotvingian name

A suggestion only - Given that the extent of Baltic hydronyms (river names) extends southwards to the Pripet marshes, one could accept a Baltic (Jotvingian) derivation along the lines of Balstoge < bala "swamp/marsh" + stoge "shelter" ie., ultimately from a phrasal construction meaning "guarding the swamps/marshes", analogous to pastoge "home, shelter". Likewise Panevežys is transparently Baltic. [dictionary - Piersarskas & Svecevičius, 1963, "Lietuvių-Anglų Kalbų Žodyna", Viva, Chicago]. Dr. E. Reilly, Australia.

I wonder, why do we need Lithuanian translation of the city name here ? Does it have any significant Lithuanian minority, or other similar reason ? Lysy 20:36, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well, Panevežys doesn't has nor ever had significant Polish minority either, but yet you advocated the mention of Polish name based on the fact that Lithuania and Poland had common history. Therefore Balstogė should also be mentioned then, especially as it is unique name, not just Polish name with Lithuanian ending ("Bialystokas"). And I am not sure here, but does Bialystok means the same in Polish? Cause if it doesn't, then that would mean the name itself came from Lithuanian.DeirYassin 15:43, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

OK, so it's in retaliation then ? ;-) I don't mind it, I just wondered why.

Białystok means "white slope" in Polish. I would rather expect Belarusian origin of the name, not Lithuanian. Lysy 16:04, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You're right. --Monkbel 10:50, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I was under the impression that the "stok" in the city's name actually referred to falling water of some sort (i.e., "staczający się strumień"). That's what I seem to remember, and that's what the official site claims. Granted, you shouldn't trust everything you read online, but I currently don't have a better source at hand.

____ Yotvingian Hydronym __________

The " -stok " suffix as a second element of a hydronym is from a West Baltic Language source, shortened from " - są - taka " which translates as " together-flowing " or a confluence. According to the Linguist Nepokupnyj ( 1971 ) names of this type are localized in the basin of the upper Narew - and in all number about 32.

In other words, the name Białystok is neither Slavic or Lithuanian, but rather Yotvingian ( Sūdovian )

Reference work - Nepokupnyj, A. P. 1971 " Z movnoji spadščyny jatvjahiv " Movoznavatvo 5, No. 6.18-25

South of Białystok is the Nurzec river, giving insight into location of the Neuri of Herodotas

Check it out. --Sudowite 11:50, 15 Jan 2010 (UTC)

German name

I am not sure how seriously to take edits by User:Chris 73. They are so unreasonable as to seem to be some kind of a joke, or a case of making silly edits to make a point.

But anyway, here is the short response:

1. German Bialystok is just the German form of Polish name Białystok without diacritics. Hence I see no reason to list it separately.

2. Bialystok was in Prussia from 1795 to 1807. This was a very violatile period when borders changed frequently. For example, France at the time owned much of Western Europe. Should we list French names for all cities which were part of the Napoleonic Empire at that time?

Actually, we do list French names for Mainz, Trier, and possibly some other German cities. For many cities in the Napoleonic Empire, the French and English names are the same - Florence, Rome, and Cologne, for instance. john k 16:01, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

3. The mention of German occupation in years 1941-1944 as a reason to include the German name is just plain incendiary. Try doing the same edit for articles about other European cities and watch the reaction :).

Balcer 17:20, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Besdies that quibble, I agree with Balcer's points - this is absurd, especially since the German name isn't actually different from the Polish name. john k 16:01, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

The "German name" is no German name. Białystok is a good example of a city, which was never "German" and thus got no German name (another reason could be, that the spelling Bialystok is no problem for the German tongue, but this is just a theory by me). By the way: What does the name mean? I guess, it derived from the Bialka river? -- Arne List 13:17, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

That's not complete so by far!

Germans played a very important role in the industrial development of Białystok, when many German textile manufacturers - among them my ancestors - settled down in Białystok, in order to bypass the strong Russian customs boundary shortly west of Białystok.

At that time the number of Germans, inhabiting their own quarter of the town, grew. Some came from German states, but the majority likely from the surroundigs, where also Germans had settled down and cultivated uninhabitated swampland backwards.

Finally a German newspaper was published in Białystok. (To my knowledge long before the first newspaper in Polish language was published in Białystok.) The problem was, that they had no print letter for "ł" in Białystok and so they used a "l" The spelling "Bialystok" became the usual spelling among the German speaking population in the area, while the Russian and the Jew population used their own letters too! --Henrig (talk) 13:22, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Belarusian Relevance

I seem to be having a bit of a quarrel with using Białystok vs Belostok in Belarus-relevant articles. --Kuban kazak 14:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Country clarification

I just want to clarify that I understand the article. Bialystok was in Prussia from 1795 to 1807. Bialystok was in Russia from 1807 to 1915. Is that correct? -- Reinyday, 16:28, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, funny thing is the Russians did not annex it in 1945 AGAIN (like all Kresy) like they liked to do.

Bialka River

"Bialka river" link leads to page about river in southern Poland. Bialystok, as you can see on the map, is in the north-east part of Poland.during world war two bialystok was almost germany

Reference to Bialystock in Command & Conquer removed from article

I've removed the following line from the 'cultural referenes' section of the article: "*In the 1995 computer game Command & Conquer, the Brotherhood of Nod manipulates the global media into believing that Bialystok and all of its inhabitants were slaughtered by GDI forces. The city was spelled "Byelistok" in the game." I removed it for two reasons. Firstly, it's not an entirely accurate description of events in the game; if you play the GDI campaign, you learn (or at least it is strongly implied) that the GDI was actually complicit in having the global media give a false report that they were responsible for the attack on Byelistok; there's a cutscene where you're told 'Commander, you've been hustled. The UN wasn't against me... but we had to play that game to lure NOD into a false sense of security.' I infer from this that the media in the game were actually aware the story they were running was false, but had been asked by high-ranking members of the UN and GDI to run it anyway as part of a strategy to deceive NOD while the GDI secretly built up new forces. Secondly, the news report in the game refers to Byelistok as a 'simple hamlet' and a 'happy farming town of peace-loving peasants', while Bialystock in real life is a large city. Thus it is highly like that the game designers simply made up a foreign-sounding place name which happened to sound the same as Bialystok. Even if they stole the name from the real Bialystok, clearly Byelistok in the game isn't actually meant to be the real Bialystok (heck, you see it from a plane in one of the GDI cutscenes, and the place has about 5 houses). So the reference is out. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.1.130.180 (talk) 15:40, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Peer review

Various thoughts, with the help of the peer reviewer script:

• Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at Wikipedia:Lead. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.
• Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.
• Avoid including galleries in articles, as per Wikipedia:Galleries. Common solutions to this problem include moving the gallery to wikicommons or integrating images with the text.
• Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 52 meters, use 52 meters, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 52&nbsp;meters.
• Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), please spell out source units of measurements in text; for example, the Moon is 380,000 kilometres (240,000 mi) from Earth. Specifically, an example is 779 ha.
• Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings), avoid using special characters (ex: &+{}[]) in headings.
• Per WP:WIAFA, this article's table of contents (ToC) may be too long – consider shrinking it down by merging short sections or using a proper system of daughter pages as per Wikipedia:Summary style.
• The script has spotted the following contractions: won't, if these are outside of quotations, they should be expanded.
• As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]
• Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.

That's the script. As far as I am concerned:

• History - try to expand, too many short, single-sentence paras, some sentences (paras) are unreferenced
• Demographics is unreferenced, it seems to totally omit the fact that most inhabitants are Polish...
• Governance - not a single ref
• Education - ditto, and a section-stub to boot
• Geography and climate - expand with text, compare to GA Kraków
• Culture / Parks - lose the word Parks in the heading; another heavily under-referenced section
• Economy - section missing, should incorporate Industry, which needs to have more text
• Monuments - merge to culture, try to transform the list into paras of text
• overall, the article needs many more inline citations, remember: every sentence that provides non-obvious information should have a reference (perhaps not for a B-class, but for a GA-class - yes)
• also, see Kraków for how a city article should look as a GA

This article has potential, but there is work needed for B-class (and I suggest aiming for a GA anyway). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:39, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

I think the article is getting closer to better shape

Sections I think are in need of some work -

• History has been spawned off to a separate article, but need to finish a summary para
• Governance has a series of refs and subs, but might need to be spawned
• Economy has had a few sections merged into it and needs to be spawned
• Culture/Parks still needs work, Monuments has been merged into it, the whole thing needs to be spawned
• Districts is good, the subs article needs some polishing

Sections I think are in reasonable shape -

• Article Lede has been fleshed out from just a bare summary
• Notable Persons has been cleaned up and spawned off
• Transport has been cleaned up and spawned off
• Geography & Climate was merged & simplified per Paris & London
• Education has a new summary and improvements have been made to the subs article
• Demographics is spawned off, but has a rather good summary in the main & subs articles

Again, looking for comments. Ajh1492 (talk) 15:57, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

ANOTHER REVIEW

• Article Lede: should not cointain unique information, only summarize - so please copy information on the green lungs to the text. Cite for populace is not needed in the lead, it should be moved to main body (or just removed if it is already present somewhere else).
• Etymology: requested citations for claims that I'd like to see cited
• History: needs citations! This could be further expanded, I will say it is ok for B-class but will need to be doubled if not tripled for a GA-class (see Kraków, a GA)
• Geography: will need more citations for GA. Kraków has more info on its own geography, if possible, this should be expanded for a GA
• City Districts and Metropolitan Region - one uncited sentence will need a citation for a GA
• Demographics - same as above
• Governance - would be nice to see all sentences referenced for GA, but key facts seem to have a ref already
• Military Units - unreferenced, stub section, needs expansion (a little more on the unit, history of units in B-stok). Perhaps this seciton could be incorporated into another one. While I note that Kraków doesn't have such a section, I think it is a worthwile addition to an article, and somebody should add it to Kraków :)
• Economy - first para is unreferenced, for GA this section will needs to have most if not all sentences ref-ed. I'd really like to see information on: notable companies that originated there or are major employers, unemployment rate, FDI (foreign direct investment), city budget and sources of revenue, living costs, income per capita. I will however note that this wish-list is closer to a FA level then even a GA-level (Kraków mentions only about half of those), and is not really a B-class requirement.
• Culture - I added a key ref needed, more will be needed for a GA. "It works in the" - grammar? What Museum (link, expand name)? Then the sentence lists some unlinked museums later, this is confusing. "province of Podlaskie" - what province? Region, or voivodeship? We don't use the province word in Poland context much...
• Sports - more refs for individual sentences needed for GA. Any non-football notable teams?
• Religion - as sports. I'd expand by naming most important churches (buildings, notable, should be linked - just like stadiums for sport)
• Media - unreferenced! Also, name local newspapers, radio/tv stations and such (they are all notable and should be linked)
• Transport - unreferenced! A map of public transport would be useful, if not here, then for a subarticle (while this is not a strictly FA criterion even, when I travel, wiki description of public transportation are quite useful)
• Education - unreferenced!
• Notable residents - unreferenced
• Cultural references - bullet points BAD, reads like WP:TRIVIA. Either merge into the article, or expand into "Białystok in popular culture" section or such.
• See also - a good rule of thumb is that as the article improves in quality, see also list should go down to 0, as all links are incorporated. Exceptions are of course permitted, but looking at current SAs, only The University of Bialystok Foundation doesn't have a clear fit, and I am sure with a little thought it could be included somewhere
• References - there is a number of bare urls. Add (in Polish) to all Polish-language sources. For GA, ensure that citation style is standardized.

Please note that after those issues are addressed, the article will be very close to GA as well. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:46, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

• Almost done Ajh1492 (talk) 02:13, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
• It's down to just the Culture section. Ajh1492 (talk) 18:50, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Bialy origin?

I'd like to see a citation for the assertion that the bialy originated in Białystok; the word "bialy" simply means "white" (which a bialy is, sort of). Wi2g 21:19, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Done. Ajh1492 (talk) 16:06, 28 January 2011 (UTC)