Talk:Tisza

Retitle

I believe this page should be retitled "River Tisza":

1. Tisza is the name most often used in present-day English-language sources -- see this example
2. the German name is the least appropriate one to use, given that the river flows through no German-speaking countries
   1. ... apart from small parts of Germany and Austria where they happen to speak german, actually. :-)) Accidentally its origin happen to be in Germany as well. As a Hungarian I titled my original article "tisza river" but well, let the native english language people decide. --grin ✎ 09:42, 2004 May 11 (UTC)

-- 217.44.142.112 13:51, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Google finds 4,660 English pages for Theiss river, 13,000 English pages for Tisza river, and 5,820 English pages for Tisa river. I wondered if perhaps the name Theiss may have seniority in English, but dict.org can't find it in any of its dictionaries. --Shallot 14:43, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Both Tisza and Theiss are the official English names of the river, I do not know why. Theiss seems to have been prefered in the past. Both can be troven in large (paper) dictionaries. By the way, Google is not the right source to solve such problems (neither in this case, nor in other such cases) - reasons: not representative, not expert texts, one does not know how many of the pages are truly "English", contains many errors etc.... --Juro 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Sure, it's heuristic, but it's indicative enough in this case... I don't think that its false hit rate for English vs. Hungarian etc could ever approach this ratio (2.8), and note that I used the word "river" in the search to help it. Theoretically it's possible that Theiss is universally used by English geographers, but I doubt it. --Shallot 17:50, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Encyclopedia Britannica (Concise) has "Tisza River", with "Tisa River" as alternative, the name Theiss isn't even mentioned. Probably Theiss was more in use in the 19th century. So I guess Tisza is better than Theiss. EB also has "Mures River" , "Timis River", "Somes River". Time to make things a bit more consequent, I'll start moving things. Markussep 12:28, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Move Theiss River to Tisza

From Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

Could someone please move Theiss River to Tisza? Theiss is the not so current name for the river Tisza, which flows in Romania, Ukraine, Hungary and Serbia. Theiss is the old German name, but for instance in Encyclopedia Britannica the Hungarian name Tisza is used. The reason a simple move doesn't work is that there is already some history on Tisza. Right now it's a redirect to Theiss River, but it used to be a stub saying "this is the Hungarian name of Theiss". --12:40, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There's been discussion on the talk page, and no-one seems to object, so I've gone and moved Theiss River to Tisza, and changed the (quite numerous) redirects. zoney ♣ talk 22:27, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

control?

I think "control of the Tisza" ("a Tisza szabályozása") should be written as "regulation of the Tisza"

So do I. 'Control' is just a bade equivalent for 'szabályozás'. I'll change it to 'regulation'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.24.43.52 (talk) 10:57, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Length (and other hydrological characteristics) of the Tisza, and the Refimprove tag

The length given in the geobox before my revision, 1358 km, is neither the “old” value of 1419 km nor the “new” value of 966 km. None of these three numbers appear with any specific reference, and one must assume they were taken from one of the two (but we don't know which) Romanian sources listed. I see that there was an attempt, back in 2006, to set the geobox value to 966 km; the edit was promptly reverted on the grounds of failure to cite reliable sources—a complaint that is both odd (since the 966 km figure was given in the article itself) as well as kind of hypocritical (since the reverter did not supply a specific reference either).

Surely, the length of the river in the geobox should be the curent length, which the article itself gives as 966 km; Britannica gives 966 km, too. The book Rivers of Europe gives the length as 965 km. Now we can argue whether it's 966 or 965, but it is definitely 960-970 km, and not 1350-1450 km. Therefore I'm changing the data on the length (as well as on the drainage area and the discharge rate) to reflect the most recent reputable source I found, namely the aforementioned book Rivers of Europe. Incidentally, that book thereby becomes the very first reference in this article. True, there are two “sources” listed, but they are not easily accessible; and are in Romanian; and at least one of them is quite dated, from 1971; and one does not know which information in the article comes from which of the two. Thus the Refimprove tag. Reuqr (talk) 05:58, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Navigability

If someone knows (and can cite a source) on just how much of it is navigable, I think that would be an excellent addition of the article. It was one of the main things I was curious about when I looked it up. Tyrannophobe (talk) 18:55, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was no move. Cúchullain ^t/c 19:33, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

---

Tisza → Tisa – Tisa is most common name in English. In google search, there are 10,500,000 hits for Tisa and 6,050,000 for Tisza. AstaAsta2012 (talk) 11:33, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

• Your Google hits are a bit disingenuous. None of the hits on your first page for "Tisa" are for the river except the one for the Wikipedia article, which of course is currently titled "Tisza". The story is nearly the same for Google.com hits. —  AjaxSmack  21:07, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
• Agree per real ghits. Tisa 1,020,000 Tisza 755,000 Next to this, Tisa is common name for this. --WhiteWriter^speaks 09:20, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
• Support - It is more probably to have more hits with the name Tisa than Tisza because in most common languages for this river (Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Romanian, Slovakian, Ukrainian) this version is being used. Only nation that uses the current name Tisza are the Hungarians. For this reasons I believe this page should be renamed according to the majority of this languages over a singe one.Adrian (talk) 13:39, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
• The proposal is inherently flawed because raw google searches aren't conclusive - compare about 26,500 book hits for tisa river -tisza and about 181,000 book hits for tisza river -tisa. Since neither name is actually English, I'd say the WP:WikiProject Rivers naming criteria have to be consulted instead. IIRC the length and basin are largest in Hungary, so it makes sense to use their name. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 14:09, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
•  Disagree - The user making the proposal has been blocked on grounds of sockpuppetry and harassment (probably due to the fact that it's a sockpuppet of an indefed user), so I think that the proposal has lost its purpose (moreover as per the banning policy this content would even have to be removed), so I propose canceling this vote altogether. -- CoolKoon (talk) 22:20, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

This is true, about a banned user, but arguments are much more important because if this request fails just because of this, any of us may restart this request and count by arguments. Adrian (talk) 20:21, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

You're right, the request could be restarted based on the banned user's initiative alone. But arguing with Google search results is VERY bad science, especially in cases like this. You see the river does NOT have a widely accepted/used English name, hence the search has to be appropriately adopted to account for this. Thus I've searched for "Tisza river" and "Tisa river" (yes, both terms encased in quotes), and the result's almost a 50-fold difference (in favor of Tisza). And this is not counting the Google Books search results... -- CoolKoon (talk) 23:49, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

You ought not to disparage people who make bad google searches while at the same time demonstrating the same problem yourself :) Your second search has a crapload of excess parameters that affect it, and neither of them have the pws=0 parameter. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:03, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

My Google and Bing searches were performed without logging into my acc --> same as &pws=0 Csendesmark (talk) 18:24, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Ok, be it. This time I've made sure I'm not logged in, appended the pws=0 parameter and even made sure to perform a "separate" search for the second term. The results? ~165k results for "Tisza river" vs. ~33k results for "Tisa river". That's still a 5-fold difference in favor of Tisza..... -- CoolKoon (talk) 17:21, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

•  Disagree -- A lot of notable sources names this river as "Tisza" CIA - The World Factbook Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Requesting article rename based on Google hits is really nonsense! Csendesmark (talk) 19:41, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Actually per WP:GOOGLE , google hits are quite important. Adrian (talk) 20:19, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but Google searches should be used very carefully, since they could easily lead to false conclusions. KœrteFa {ταλκ} 20:52, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

"Notability

Raw "hit" (search result) count is a very crude measure of importance. Some unimportant subjects have many "hits", some notable ones have few or none, for reasons discussed further down this page.

Hit count numbers alone can only rarely "prove" anything about notability, without further discussion of the type of hits, what's been searched for, how it was searched, and what interpretation to give the results. On the other hand, examining the types of hit arising (or their lack) often does provide useful information related to notability.

Additionally, search engines do not disambiguate, and tend to match partial searches. While Madonna of the Rocks is certainly an encyclopedic and notable entry, it's not a pop culture icon. However, due to Madonna matching as a partial match, as well as other Madonna references not related to the painting, the results of a Google or Bing search result count will be disproportionate as compared to any equally notable Renaissance painting."

Bing: +Tisza (also wrote Do you mean "tisza river" -tisza?) -> 38,000 results, +Tisa -> 9,600 results

Google: "Tisza river" -tisa -> 172 000 hits, "Tisa river -tisza" -> 27 900 hit

KœrteFa {ταλκ}, think it again, you have to use the correct words to measure relevant hits. Following WP:GOOGLE, thanx for the link Adrian.

Csendesmark (talk) 21:33, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

• Agree with Adrian and WhiteWriter. --Omen1229 (talk) 18:10, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Any reasons WHY you agree with any of them? Any arguments you could present at all? -- CoolKoon (talk) 23:39, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

•  Disagree -- simply, because "Tisza" is the most widely used name by English sources, as it was demonstrated by Joy [1] [2]. Simply searching for the word "Tisa" without the word "river" is *very* misleading, since it also gives hits such as "TISA - Tax Incentivised Savings Association", "TISA - Traveller Information Services Association", "TISA - The International School of Azerbaijan" and so on. These have, of course, nothing to do with the river... KœrteFa {ταλκ} 20:46, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
•  Disagree Besides the above, I note the "Integrated Tisza River Basin Management Plan (ITRBM Plan) is based on data provided by... Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia." from the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River. (which I can't figure out how to link to) Rmhermen (talk) 01:26, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. The basic Google search is useless in this case and Wikipedia doesn't base usage on the majority of foreign-language names. —  AjaxSmack  20:49, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.