Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Serbian surnames

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. JForget 00:07, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Serbian surnames

The whole article is a joke, because most of that what the article claims to be "serbian only" isn't really serbian alone. The whole article has a great pro-serbian-bias! Cantabo07 (talk) 05:12, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, of course... Serbian surnames are more often than not completely indiscernible from Croatian, Bosniak and/or Montenegrin surnames - and vice versa. This article labels surnames as "Serbian" without any real source, and imposes the idea that people with this surnames must be "Serbian". In short, these are not Serbian surnames - they are just as much Serbian, Croatian or Montenegrin. Some of the names on this list are certainly identified as Serbian, as someone's bound to point out, but this is still not necessarily so! How do we draw the line? The article is a fictitious list of arbitrarily selected names and smells a lot like Serbian nationalist POV-pushing, its not for an encyclopedia. --DIREKTOR ^(TALK) 06:41, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete, without prejudice for recreation. Direktor is not entirely correct when saying "usually no different from Croatian..." -- in some cases they're usually discernible, yet in others they aren't; but the article even fails to mention that. But the difference is like saying that the glass is half empty or half full. While I think that there exists serious ethnological and genealogical research behind the issue (roughly summarized in references such as [1], [2]), the article now serves just as a phone book, and that long list is a meaningless, vain, original research. Should someone recreate the article with encyclopedic contents about the main origins of the surnames, I'd be fine. But we should be better off starting from clean slate. The article is garbage. No such user (talk) 08:48, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The bottom line is: we have no objective method or (non-biased) source that we can use to discern between the "totally Serbian", the "not-necessarily-Serbian", and the "completely ambiguous" surnames. Who can say he has an objective encyclopedic method of differentiating between Serbian, Croatian, and particularly Montenegrin surnames? How do we draw the line? The discussions on this can be both endless and pointless. Sometimes, upon hearing a surname, people from around here can assume they know the nationality of the person, but this is not something to use as a criteria upon which to base an encyclopedia article. How do we recreate an article we cannot objectively write?

I invite all native Serbo-Croatian speakers to just browse through the names, the absurdity can be found on every letter. Why should "Adžić" not be Bosniak, why should "Anđelković" not be Croatian or Montenegrin? "Brković", "Brnović", "Brstina"? Why are these necessarily Serbian? The list goes on and on... I personally know a lot of people with surnames from this list, most of them Croats - imagine their surprise when they find out Wikipedia says they have Serbian surnames(!) --DIREKTOR ^(TALK) 10:13, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I said that "in some cases they're discernible"; a Jovanović, Ilić or Milošević is quite likely a Serb, or of Serb origin. But as you say, the line between Montenergin surnames is totally blurry, and between Bosniak and Croatian ones is often so; it's dangerous to say "X is a Serbian surname" in most cases. What I said was that it's possible to write an article along the lines of "Serbian surnames are most often patronymic [examples], especially so in Central Serbia where they were stabilized in 19th Century by order of Prince Miloš. In Vojvodina they are often in form of possessive [examples] because of [history]... while "funny" surnames [examples] often come from Lika because [history]... They are also shared with Montenegrin [examples] and somewhat less with Croatian [examples] stock..., while there also surnames of Hungarian [examples], Vlach [examples] origin.". See the reference [3] for a reasonable outline, i.e. a broad overview. But not anything resembling the current "article". No such user (talk) 10:38, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete And don't forget Filthirić, Sevenyearić, Đigađić and Withoutahić. It's essentially an indiscriminate list of names. Even if it were made useful (such as the etymology of a name-- what's the origin of the name "Milošević"?), it would still violate the rule of Wikipedia not being a directory. It's not much different than a list of "Jewish names" or "Anglo-Saxon names", and I don't see any use for it. Mandsford (talk) 13:22, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete We have enough users trying to lay cause for driving a chisel through the different peoples of the former FROY, causing more friction than needed. Though there are some names which may be to some degree discernible on paper, this does not necessarily make them either Croat or Serb or Bosniak live and in person. Vukovic on the list huh? We can tell that to my family members from Gospic. Nathraq (talk) 17:23, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete because there are probably thousands of last names missing. Serbian last names are quite diverse. Yes there are nations that have about 100 last names and they can be listed but it's not the case here. If the author can assemble them then OK but as it is now it's not a worthy article. And what exists is wrong too. Whoever changed -ca ending to -ća was wrong so we have Koprivića, Koštunića, Bajalića, Govedarića etc. which is total nonsense.--Avala (talk) 18:06, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. No references, no rationale, nothing to say why these are Serbian rather than (for example) Croatian family names, nothing more than "these are surnames found in Serbia". As an example, what if we had an unreferenced England equivalent with "Smith, Jones, Brown..." then the bloodbath over whether Jones was English or Welsh would be fearful, as would be that over the additions of Singh and O'Reilly. Be gone. AlasdairGreen27 (talk) 23:23, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

We have a consensus, then? --DIREKTOR ^(TALK) 15:43, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Seems so Nathraq (talk) 20:46, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.