On 2015-04-23 01:21, Stas Malyshev wrote:

Hi!

Careful, this is one of the most debated and dramatic style issues after
citation format!
Actual transliteration should clearly follow scientific/ISO standards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_transliteration_of_Cyrillic .

Well, "scientific/ISO standards" is in this case at least three
different standards, and 11 standards if you include commonly used ones
:) E.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian

However the labels and aliases are in languages like "it" and "fr", so
they're supposedly translations rather than mere transliterations. This
makes things more complex.

Yes. I see that the bot is setting language labels for entities, so for
this both language-specific transliterations and common usage can be
important. Which for Russian for example can be quite crazy,
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q187349's last name is "Ватсон" but
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1187613's is "Уотсон". And I have no idea
what is the correct romanization of
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4105300's name.

This is what we commonly use at the English Wikipedia for romanization of Russian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Romanization_of_Russian

It was already noted that the Russian Wikipedia uses the reverse order for names (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich), whereas there is no reason to use this order on Wikidata. The reasonable options should be either "Fyodor Dostoyevsky" or (less preferable to me) "Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky".

Cheers
Yaroslav

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