[tryauuum]

Not change to "Russia", change to "Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic"

If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period

I understand invading countries is not cool, but you cannot fix crimes of USSR by retroactively renaming places

[Teever]

Most countries never recognized the Soviet annexation de jure, and under the legal-continuity doctrine Estonia remained an independent state under occupation throughout 1940–1991.

I wonder if French people born in Vichy France should have their Wikipedia entries changed to say that they were born in the French State and not the French Republic.

[tryauuum]

the "other countries recognition" is a valid point which I missed

Still, it kind of feels weird if (I assume) for 40 years everyone had "Estonian SSR" stamped in their birth certificates / passports, and then we say "actually they were born in Republic of Estonia (occupied)"

[mopsi]

  > If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period

"Estonia" is a distinct geographic and cultural region, the same way "Norway" is. Nobody refers to people born in Oslo during the German occupation in WWII as having been born in "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" or whatever name the Nazis invented, despite the fact that Norwegians were unable to govern their country at the time.

The same applies to Estonia. Anyone born in the geographic region of Estonia is referred to as having been born in Estonia, regardless of whether that occurred during the German occupation in World War II when German forces advanced east, or later during the Soviet occupation, which lasted until the fall of communism.

Last year, a page hidden deep in talk pages held a vote on how to name birthplaces of Estonians. 20 regular Wikipedia users participated in the vote. 12 of them voted in favor of a fringe naming convention that emphasizes the internationally unrecognized Soviet-installed authorities. Wikipedia now refers to this as a sitewide "consensus" that cannot be overturned.

The user who initiated the vote (Glebushko0703) was a Russian troll who later got banned for attempting to organize a harassment campaign against a journalist who covered the story, but the "consensus" remains. A handful of powerful administrators continue to protect an utterly fringe naming convention. Their only argument is the "consensus" itself.

Overall, the push is a very characteristic example of a Russian assault on indigenous identities. Every opportunity is used to replace ethnic naming conventions with Russian imperial designations. "Estonian" writers and artists become "Soviet-Estonian", or better yet, simply "Soviet". The more they manage to litter Russian imperial language everywhere, the more likely LLMs are to use it for describing persons and events. It's the good old keyword spam in a new dressing, and Wikipedia is bogged down by administrators who are average Joes, often from the other side of the planet and with very little first-hand knowledge, who try to play "reasonable impartial observers" in situations where a subject-matter expert would immediately recognize partisan astroturfing and nuke it.

[tryauuum]

Thank you for the context

I personally would prefer "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" and "Estonian SSR" right on the person's page in wikipedia. Then I don't have to navigate to another page to learn who was in power that time.

[mopsi]

That leads to absurd situations where three brothers born in the same maternity ward, one year apart, are listed as having been born in the "Republic of Estonia" (1939), the "Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union" (1940), and the "Reichskommissariat Ostland, Germany" (1941).

In general-purpose biographies written for a global audience, this level of detail is unnecessarily confusing. "Estonia" itself is obscure enough.

If one certainly wants to emphasize the fact that Estonia was occupied at the time, a reasonable short-form compromise is something like "Estonia (then under Soviet occupation)". Russian trolls on Wikipedia are categorically against it, because their aim is to obscure the fact of occupation and foreign rule, not to emphasize it.