Wikipedia:WikiProject Ukraine/Subdivisions

Welcome to the Ukrainian subdivisions WikiProject!

Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize information in articles related to Ukrainian subdivisions. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.

Scope

Map of the Administrative divisions of Ukraine.

This WikiProject on Ukrainian subdivisions initially aims to organize and structure articles on Administrative divisions of Ukraine.

It touches on, and could expand to include other topics in modern and historic Ukrainian political geography: Ukraine and Ukrainian historical regions, oblasts, cities (list), Autonomous Republic of Crimea, raions (list), towns (list), and villages.

Parentage

The parent of this WikiProject is WikiProject Countries. See also WikiProject Cities.

Descendant WikiProjects

No descendant WikiProjects have been defined.

Similar WikiProjects

Similar WikiProjects are:

• WikiProject Russian federal subjects
• WikiProject Polish Voivodships

Participants

• Aleksandr Grigoryev (talk · contribs)
• AlexPU (talk · contribs) (inactive)
• Asparagirl (talk · contribs) (working on cleaning up the oblasts and raions in western Ukraine (former parts of Galicia)
• Barrettsprivateers (talk · contribs)
• Genyo (talk · contribs) (inactive)
• Mzajac (talk · contribs) (inactive)
• DDima (talk · contribs)
• Tufkaa (talk · contribs) (inactive)
• MapLover (talk · contribs) (inactive)
• Shwabb1 (talk · contribs) (working on fixing spelling and adding hromadas to infoboxes)
• Steschke (talk · contribs) (contributed a political map)
• Saukkomies (talk · contribs)
• TidalTreka (talk · contribs)
• UA0Volodymyr (talk · contribs)

Goals

1. Complete the article Administrative divisions of Ukraine
2. Template infobox for each oblast', city and Krym
3. Collect vital statistics for each

General strategy and discussion forums

Main discussion: talk page of the project

Links

General

Verkhovna Rada — Regions of Ukraine and their divisions Ukrainian Census 2001 — Census statistics for the 2001 census Coats of arms Commons:Category:Coats of arms of Ukraine vector-images.com — Flags and coats of arms of Ukraine heraldy.com.ua — Ukrainian heraldy geraldika.ru — Ukrainian heraldy Geographical location fallinggrain.com — Geographical locations of locations in Ukraine

maps.vlasenko.net — Topographical maps of locations in Ukraine Image sources Commons:Category:Ukraine and all its subcategories List of image sources Wikipedia Administrative divisions of Ukraine — details about the administrative divisions List of cities in Ukraine — list of all the cities and their statistics Raions of Ukraine — list of all the raions, their administrative centers, and statistics List of urban-type settlements in Ukraine by subdivision — list of all the urban-type settlements and their statistics Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Ukrainian places) – Describes Wikipedia conventions on naming Ukrainian places Romanization of Ukrainian — the simplified Ukrainian National system is used for transliterating place names in Wikipedia articles; see also WP:UKR.

Article structure

Oblasts

• Introduction: should contain the significance, location, name of the oblast in English, and Ukrainian (with translit.), and other vital statistics.
• Geography: overview section should give information on the following items: area, location, border information (border length, list of federal subjects with common border, list of bordered foreign countries, list of bordered seas/lakes), the highest point and lowest points, maximum N→S distance, maximum E→W distance, and the average elevation. It should also contain notable features such as mountains, rivers, natural resources, etc.
  • Climate: subsection should contain information about the climate and the temperature ranges for various times of the year.
  • Vegetation: subsection should contain information about the vegetation native to the region and other relevant information.
• An administrative Map of the oblast should be included with at the largest settlements (i.e. cities) indicated.
• History: should include descriptions of historical events related to the oblast, even if they occurred before the oblast's establishment.
• Administrative subdivisions: should provide an overview of the oblast's administrative structure; further subsections should include a list of raions and a list of major settlements with their status (city, town, village, etc.).
• Demographics: should contain information on the population (number of people, urban/rural population, male/female population, number of females per 1,000 males, average age, households statistical information, average life expectancy, etc.). Most of the information is available from the Ukrainian Census, 2001 data.^[1]
• Economy: should be an overview of the oblast's economy.
  • Industry: subsection should contain information on the major industries of the oblast, the number of industrial enterprises, the main types of natural resources of the oblast, and other relevant information.
  • Agriculture: subsection should contain information on the agriculture of the oblast, the number of agricultural institutions, the main agricultural exports/inports of the oblast, and other relevant information.
  • Transportation subsection should contain information on the railroads and automobile road lengths, main airports, ports, etc.
• Tourism: should contain any relevant information on tourism in the oblast; points of interest, historic monuments, etc.
• Culture and religion: should contain any relevant cultural and religious information.
• Education: should have educational information, a list of higher institutions and universities, etc.
• See also: should contain relevant links to other articles, namely Administrative divisions of Ukraine. But it's preferable to provide the relevant links within the main text.
• References:
• External links: should contain a list of websites related to the oblast (including the official website). Each link should have a note on which language the website is in (for instance: {{uk icon}}). Always give links to the English sites (or versions) first, then to Ukrainian/Russian sites.
• Templates: should contain the corresponding {{oblast}} template and {{Administrative divisions of Ukraine}} template.
• Categories and interwiki links: should contain relevant categories, and all interwiki links, escpecially Ukrainian ones.

Raions

• Essentially similar to oblast (above).

Villages, Towns, Cities

Creating Wikipedia articles about Ukrainian villages, towns and cities presents several complexities for editors.

Warning: A standard naming convention has been adopted by the Ukrainian WikiProject for creating names/titles for new articles about Ukrainian geographical locations, and includes instances when there are locations that share the same name. Please adhere to this standard in creating a new article. If an article is created that is given a name that is in violation of this standard, then it will be changed, which requires a lot of extra work and time that could be used more constructively. If you have a disagreement with the application of this standard, please bring it up in the WikiProject:Ukraine talk page, but do not just go ahead and name your article by whatever name you want, since if it violates the standard accepted by the Ukraine WikiProject, it will get changed.

This is a guide to help people with this process. For additional information about creating and editing articles about Ukrainian geographical locations, refer to other sections in this page and the main Wikipedia:WikiProject Ukraine page. If there are still questions regarding creating or editing articles, please post them to the WikiProject:Ukraine talk page, where someone will respond quickly to any queries. Remember that it is complicated to change the name of an article after it has been created, so before creating a new article, please insure that its name will conform to accepted protocol.

To create the name for a new article about a Ukrainian settlement (village, town or city), please follow these steps:

Step One: Make certain that you have the correct Ukrainian and romanized forms of the name. This is complicated, due to the fact that there are locations that have well-established romanized spellings that have become built into the general knowledge of the English-speaking world, but are not in accord with the more recent romanized transliteration guidelines that were accepted after an independent Ukraine joined the United Nations in the 1990s. For a discussion of romanization of Ukrainian place names, see Wikipedia:Romanization of Ukrainian. For most new articles about villages, towns and cities, use the National Transliteration Table. However, to use that table, you first must find the correct Ukrainian Cyrillic spelling of the name of the place. Since it will also be necessary to include the Ukrainian Cyrillic name in the article, this needs to be done anyway, so now is as good a time as any to do this.

If you need to find the correct Ukrainian form of Cyrillic spelling of a place, there are several ways to do this:

a) Search in the Ukrainian language Wikipedia at uk.wikipedia.org.

b) Use the option of opening the text editor feature in Wikipedia, and then click the drop-down menu included below the "Save page" "Show preview" "Show changes" buttons towards the bottom of the page. One of the options in the drop-down menu includes a Cyrillic alphabet (which includes Ukrainian Cyrillic characters). Clicking on these characters will place them in the text editor box, where they may be copied and pasted elsewhere for searching.

c) If you don't have access to a Cyrillic font, you may go to an online Ukrainian/English translator, such as the World Star service (www.stars21.com/translator/ukrainian_to_english.html). There is a box at that site that you may click on to open a small window where you may type in Ukrainian Cyrillic. You may then copy and paste what you typed into another window, such as the Search text box located in the Ukrainian Wikipedia.

d) Look for the village, town or city in Google Earth (earth.google.com). This is also a great site to find the settlement's coordinates (which you'll need to add to the article). Google Earth will have the correct Ukrainian Cyrillic spelling of the location, however, it often does not have the correct romanized spelling in Latin script.

Once you have the official Ukrainian Cyrillic form of the name, then you can use the above-mentioned National Transliteration Table to romanize it into the Latin alphabet. Remember, though, that this is still not necessarily the correct name of the village, town or city, since (as mentioned earlier) there are a number of Ukrainian place-names in common usage in English that have older forms of transliteration. However, it is still necessary to have this romanized form of the name, since it will be needed to be included in the article, regardless of whether an older form of the name is given as the title or not (and as a possible redirect link).

At this point, you should now have: 1) the official Ukrainian Cyrillic spelling of the name, and 2) the romanized name, using the National Transliteration Table. Now you're ready to search with these two forms of the name.

Step Two: Search in Wikipedia for a pre-existing article. This, too can be complicated. First, use the two forms of the name you obtained in Step One to search with. If you find a pre-existing article, and if you wish, you may contribute to it; do not create a new article about the same location.

If you cannot find a pre-existing article using the two forms of the name from Step One, then you still need to do some more searching to be absolutely certain that such an article does not exist before you create a new article about an identical location. The reason why there may still be a pre-existing Wikipedia article that was not found by using the two names from Step One is due to how there are many alternate transliterations and spellings of Ukrainian place names in English. There may be an existing article in Wikipedia, but it uses an older transliteration style, and a simple search would not readily locate it. However, there are several methods to use to discover whether there are alternate spellings of Ukrainian place names for Wikipedia articles:

1) Perform a search in Google or another web searching service, using both of the names from Step One (perform searches using both names separately and together).

2) You may also search in Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) for published academic material that mentions the name of the location. This is a good idea to do anyway, since it is a good place to find solid references for your article.

3) Along with Google Scholar, you may also search in Google Docs (docs.google.com) for government publications, Google Maps (maps.google.com) for location names, and WorldCat (www.worldcat.org) for published books using the location names.

4) Search the Ukrainian language Wikipedia (using the Ukrainian Cyrillic form of the place name) to see whether there are forms of the name given in other languages.

5) Use Google Earth to find possible alternate transliterations of the name of the location (search Google Earth using the Ukrainian Cyrillic form of the name).

If you still cannot find an alternate spelling of the location's name, and if there are no Wikipedia articles about that village, town or city, then you may skip the rest of these steps, and proceed to use the romanized transliteration of the name that you created with the National Transliteration Table mentioned above. However, it may be useful to read through the rest of these steps.

If, however, you did find an alternate romanized transliterated spelling of the location's name, use that form of the name to search for pre-existing articles in Wikipedia. If there were more than one alternate spellings, use each one to search with. If you find a pre-existing Wikipedia article of the location, and you're certain (see Step Three) that it is the specific location you are concerned with, then feel free to contribute to the article; do not create another article about the same location, even if it is spelled in a different way than what you came up with in using the National Transliteration Table.

If a pre-existing Wikipedia article does not already mention National Transliteration Table's variant of the name in its introductory paragraph, please add it. An example of how this is done may be seen in the article about the city of Cherkasy. Here is the first sentence of that article (note the inclusion of the "transliterated" form of the name):

•example:   Cherkasy (Ukrainian: Черкаси, romanized: Čerkasy [tʃerˈkɑsɪ]) is a city in central Ukraine.

In addition to including the National Transliteration Table's form of the name in the introductory paragraph, you may also create a redirect link to the existing Wikipedia article, using the National Transliteration Table's form of the name. This will insure that any user searching for this location by different variants of the name will find the correct article in Wikipedia.

Step Three: One of the difficulties in creating articles in Wikipedia for Ukrainian locations is the fact that there are many instances where different villages, towns and cities will have exactly the same name. So, after completing Step Two, if you have found a pre-existing Wikipedia article about a Ukrainian village, town or city that has the name of the one you are concerned with, do not assume that it is necessarily the same place. Use the following steps to help determine this:

1) First, you need to determine the precise geographical coordinates where your village, town or city is located. If you do not already have these (or to double-check accuracy), there are two methods:

1-a) Find the article for your village, town or city in the Ukrainian language Wikipedia, where the geographical coordinates will almost always be listed.

1-b) Use Google Earth to locate your village, town or city; the geographical coordinates will be displayed at the bottom of the screen for wherever on the satellite imagery the mouse's cursor is held.

1-c) Use the Falling Grain web site for locating places in Ukraine.

Make a note of the coordinates, they will be used later.

2) You then need to determine which Raion and Olast your village, town or city belongs to. If you have difficulty with this, refer to the article about the Administrative divisions of Ukraine. Again, there are several methods for determining this:

2-a) Search the Ukrainian language Wikipedia. If you're uncertain about the name of a raion or oblast, copy it from the Ukrainian Wikipedia and paste it into the English Wikipedia search box, which will then give you the transliterated name (note: even though not all of the Ukrainian raions have their own unique Wikipedia page yet, the name will still be listed).

2-b) Use Google Earth, which usually lists the raion and oblast for every settlement.

2-c) Use Falling Grain web site.

3) Armed with the information for your location's geographical coordinates, raion and oblast, look at the pre-existin English Wikipedia article to determine whether it is the same village, town or city. If it is the same, then you may proceed to contribute to the existing article. If it is not the same, then you have discovered one of those instances where there are multiple Ukrainian locations with the same name. If this latter is the case, then you may feel free at this point to proceed to create a new article. However, before doing so, you need to go through Step Four first.

Step Four: If there is no pre-existing English Wikipedia article about the village, town or city that you are concerned with, AND if there is no existing English Wikipedia article about a different village, town or city that has the same name as yours, then you may skip this step.

If there is another English Wikipedia article about a village, town or city that shares the same name as the one you are concerned with, then you need to complete this step before creating the article and giving it a name/title.

Here is the standard:

· 1: If there is no pre-existing English Wikipedia article about your Ukrainian location, give it the name of the village, town or city as the title of the new article.

· 2: If there is a pre-existing English Wikipedia article about your Ukrainian location, list the name of the village, town or ciy, followed by the name of its raion in parentheses. Example: Berezivka (Troyitskyi) (referring to the village of Berezivka, in the Yemilchyne raion).

· 3: Then create (if it hasn't been done already) a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name of the village, town or city. Add all instances of its recurrence to this list. See the link above for details about how this is done. Be sure to also include a redirect link at the top of the article to the disambiguation page, in order to quickly refer users to the other articles in Wikipedia that share the same name.

To clarify this, here is an example of a possible use of this naming standard. There are over a dozen villages and towns scattered across Ukraine with the name Berezivka. Let us suppose that you want to create a page for one of these villages, located in the Troyitskyi raion, within the Luhansk oblast. Upon investigation, you discover that there already exists an English Wikipedia article about another village named Berezivka, located somewhere in the Odessa oblast. However, there are no other villages with that name listed yet, just the one. Here's what you do:

• First, create a new article, and name it Berezivka (Troyitskyi). Do not include the word "raion" in the name. Make sure to put the name of the raion in parentheses after the name of the village, as the title/name of the article you're creating.

• Then, create a disambiguation page (refer to the disambiguation page on how to do this).

• In the disambiguation page, list all of the English Wikipedia articles that might be referred to by the name Berezivka. Make a brief note after each of these for its location. Here's an example of what this might look like:

Berezivka may refer to:

Berezivka (a village in the Odessa Oblast)

Berezivka (a village in the Troyotskyi Raion)

Step Five: At this point, you're ready to start working on your article. Refer to other useful links and advice in the Ukraine WikiProject to assist, including lists of templates and infoboxes that will help create a nice article.

Infoboxes

• See also Wikipedia:Infobox.

Raions

• Infobox for raions: Template:Infobox settlement(edit talk links history) (see example at Boryspil Raion and Pechersk, Kiev)

Cities, towns, villages, etc

• Infobox for cities: Template:Infobox settlement(edit talk links history) (see examples at Khmelnytskyi, Sumy, and Yalta)

Templates

• Template:Administrative divisions of Ukraine(edit talk links history) - links to all the oblasti, municipalities and Krym. Placed at the end of an article.
• Template:Oblast(edit talk links history) - serves as a "form" to be used for all oblast navigational templates. Placed at the end of an article, but above the {{Administrative divisions of Ukraine}} template if such is presented.

Note: Insert a template by placing its name in double braces: {{ }}. Link to a template normally, using double brackets: [[ ]].

See also: Category:Ukrainian navigational boxes for the list of Ukrainian navigational templates.

Ukraine's subdivision template

• {{Administrative divisions of Ukraine}}

Ukrainian oblast navigational boxes

• {{Cherkasy Oblast}} {{Chernihiv Oblast}} {{Chernivtsi Oblast}} {{Dnipropetrovsk Oblast}} {{Donetsk Oblast}} {{Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast}} {{Kharkiv Oblast}} {{Kherson Oblast}} {{Khmelnytskyi Oblast}} {{Kirovohrad Oblast}} {{Luhansk Oblast}} {{Lviv Oblast}} {{Mykolaiv Oblast}} {{Odesa Oblast}} {{Poltava Oblast}} {{Rivne Oblast}} {{Sumy Oblast}} {{Sumy Oblast}} {{Vinnytsia Oblast}} {{Volyn Oblast}} {{Zakarpattia Oblast}} {{Zaporizhia Oblast}} {{Zhytomyr Oblast}} {{Subdivisions of Crimea}} {{Subdivisions of Kyiv}} {{Sevastopol}}
• Example: {{Subdivisions of Kyiv}}