Category talk:Russian people

The scope of this category

Let's clarify the scope of this category. There are two possible interpretations of "Russian people": citizens of Russia (Russian: россияне) and ethnic Russians (Russian: русские). I'm quite sure that this category should be restricted to the first meaning. It is, after all, a subcategory of Category:People by nationality. If anyone needs to emphasize the ethnicity, there are categories like Category:Russian-Americans.

A trickier question is whether Soviet people should be categorized here. My opinion is that they shouldn't; USSR and Russia are different countries, and Category:Soviet people should be used for those who lived most of their life in the Soviet Union.

What do people think? Conscious 04:41, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Btw, I also think that if we decide not to put Soviet people in this category, we should neither put them into the categories of other Soviet republics. Conscious 04:53, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Ethnicity is out of question. The whole cathegory is about nationality. A technical question: What about those born before / died after 1922 and born before / died after 1992? Shouldn't they be cathegorized as both Russian and Soviet people? I am a bit puzzled about which part of life should be considered most. Should we decide this arithmetically? Alexei Kouprianov 07:08, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

That's easy. If a person has done something significant in their area during the time period, they should be in the corresponding category. Kasparov, for example, is a Soviet and Russian chess player, but I see no need to categorize Detsl (born in 1983) as Soviet rapper :) Conscious 09:46, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I personally think that this category and the likes (American people, Irish people...) should be deleted. When you read an article about some Russian scientist, for example, it already says in the article that he is Russian. I don't really see any sense in having such categories. KNewman 08:09, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I, for one, find "occupations by nationality" categories very useful. One can see, for example, the coverage of Russian poets on Wikipedia. Where else would one find it? Conscious 09:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I think that since there are categories for english, scottish, welsh and british people, the people who belong to both Russian (or other nationalities) and soviet categories, should remain in both of them. User:Mistico

"The Peoples of Russia" (or formerly, "The Peoples of the Soviet Union") would indicate multiple ethnicities within the Russian territory (realizing of course that the territories of Russia and the Soviet Union are not the same, it's only that citing the Soviet Union makes the "Peoples of" a bit clearer). "The Russian People" on the other hand refers to a mono-ethnic nation/culture without regard to specific borders. If the vote is is for the former meaning, then perhaps a slight renaming would clarify it for all. Pēters J. Vecrumba 02:11, 20 September 2006 (UTC)