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Summary of Military history WikiProject open tasks watch · edit · full list News and announcements The May newsletter is now available. Editors are advised that Featured Articles promoted before 2016 are in need of review, if you had an article promoted to Featured status on or before 2016 please check and update your article before they are listed at FAR/C. Current discussions No major discussions are open at the moment Featured article candidates Turabay dynasty • Thomas Neville (died 1460) • Yugoslav submarine Mališan • Shigi Qutuqu • John Savage (soldier) • Tetricus I Featured article review Byzantine Empire • Battle of Red Cliffs • Edward I of England • Northrop YF-23 Featured picture candidates Thorsten Nordenfelt A-Class review Henry Biard • Battle of Saipan • Fort Corcoran • Sihanouk Trail • Battle of La Haye-du-Puits • Battle of Tinian • Henry Macandrew • Boot Monument • HMS Sardonyx (1919) • CSS General Earl Van Dorn • Miyoshi Nagayoshi Peer reviews Muckrach Castle • Regency of Algiers • Wolfgang Larrazábal Good article nominees Nazran uprising • Abu'l-Fath Khan Javanshir • Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1401–1403) • Aérospatiale SA 330 Puma • Khalji Revolution • 1864 Washington Arsenal explosion • Antoine Hamilton • George II of Greece • Roswell incident • Podgorica Assembly • Masopha • Sam Bahadur (film) • Maximiliano Hernández Martínez • Mohammad Shah Qajar • Battle of Meligalas • Zeppelin-Staaken L • Gubir shootdown • The Defence of Duffer's Drift • Chestertown Armory • Mariano R. Vázquez • Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk • Gotha WD.7 • Cultybraggan Camp • Constantine II (emperor) • First Hunnic War • HMS Menace (1915) • Japanese destroyer Natsuzuki • Ernest J. King • CSS General Polk • Battle of Lewisburg • Bill Crawford-Compton • HMS Glenmore (1796) • British nuclear weapons and the Falklands War • First Qarmatian invasion of Egypt Good article reassessments Lockheed YF-22 • Galatian War Articles that need... work on referencing and citation (147,426) • only work on referencing and citation (43,155) • work on coverage and accuracy (122,548) • only work on coverage and accuracy (19,653) • work on structure (31,791) • only work on structure (357) • work on grammar (8,183) • only work on grammar (45) • work on supporting materials (32,757) • only work on supporting materials (1,336) • assessment (9) • assessment as lists (115) • project tags fixed (7) • assessment checklists added (12) • assessment checklists completed (32) • task forces added (284) • attention to task force coverage (658)

Requested move at Talk:Tel al-Sultan airstikes#Requested move 27 May 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Tel al-Sultan airstikes#Requested move 27 May 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 05:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

Auxiliary warships

Following The AfD discussion about whether or not the French ship Gapeau (B284) article should be deleted or not (closed as no consensus to delete after more than 6 weeks discussion and deletion review), I would like to raise the issue of auxiliary warships for discussion.

The auxiliary warships are mostly, but not limited to, Naval Trawlers / Kriegfischkutters /Vorpostenboote of WWI and WWII. Wikipedia has pretty good coverage of the larger naval vessels of this period, but not so good coverage of the smaller vessels. Attempts to cover them are met with some resistance from editors such as Fram, who nominate them for deletion with little success.

One big advantage of Wikipedia is we are not a paper encyclopedia. We are able to cover many more subjects than any printed encyclopedia, including this subject. Gapeau served as a commissioned vessel with two navies, and is, in my opinion, more than notable enough to sustain an article. The ed17 raised WP:SIGCOV in the Gapeau AfD discussion. Once an article has been created, it can always be added to when further information comes to light. Again, this is another big advantage of Wikipedia, the ability to update and expand articles.

It is accepted that some vessels had more exciting careers than others, but a comprehensive approach to a subject is better than a patchy approach. So, do we hold that auxiliary naval vessels are generally going to be notable enough to sustain articles given book sources such as Colbert and Gröner, fleshed out with Lloyd's register? Mjroots (talk) 09:20, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

• I don't think that it can be assumed that auxiliaries are notable, largely as they're so diverse. The sources reflect this. For instance, prior to a commercialisation program in the 1990s, the Royal Australian Navy's auxiliaries included several very simple unpowered barges that were used as platforms to paint other ships. These barges appeared in various listing type books (Jane's Fighting Ships, etc), but always in passing so wouldn't be notable. More broadly, Wikipedia as a whole is less tolerant these days of claims that entire types of things are automatically notable due to the problems associated with this in the past (e.g. the nonsense around porn stars and obscure academics being declared notable on criteria other than the availability of reliable sources). Nick-D (talk) 10:37, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
• You're going to have a hard time making broad judgements like this, in large part because of what Nick highlighted above (the era of saying "notable because WP:SOLDIER" is over). But even in cases where a ship is notable, it may not make sense to create an article for it. A good example of this are SMS Rhein and SMS Mosel. Both pass the SIGCOV bar comfortably, but they did so little during their careers (and typically did so in the same place) that it makes more sense to discuss them at Rhein-class monitor instead of at two articles that would be 95% identical (if not more).
• That being said, in the case of first-German, then-French vessels like Gapeau that are covered by Gröner and Roche, those are probably always going to be notable. Gröner counts as SIGCOV, and though I have not read Roche, I'd assume that his stuff is similar, based on how I've seen people cite it. Parsecboy (talk) 12:17, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Roche is a dictionary similar to Colledge Lyndaship (talk) 12:30, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
    • Ah, so pretty thin on details then - I guess that invalidates my point above about counting it toward SIGCOV. Parsecboy (talk) 12:55, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
• THis is why we have GNG, if an auxiliary is notable, it would have received significant coverage in RS. If it has not, it is not. Slatersteven (talk) 12:25, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
  • If you look at the List of Vorpostenboote in World War II you will see that V 203 Heinrich Buermann isn't redlinked. This is because I've been unable to find out anything much about the ship. If I recall correctly, with V 215 Hela I've not been able to pin down which Hela became the vorpostenboot. There are a few others like that. Mjroots (talk) 13:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
    • Something to be noted about a lot of these minor warships is they were flotilla vessels that didn't operate independently, and often don't get written about individually in any detail, with what little coverage about the activities concentrating on the unit rather than the ships. These sorts of ships tend to be skirting around the edges of notability. There will be hundreds of trawlers etc serving in major navies in wartime that just don't have enough written specifically about the individual ships to sustain an article. The same thing can apply to a lot of smaller active warships like motor minesweepers.Nigel Ish (talk) 21:05, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
• With a few specific exceptions that don't apply here, we measure notability based on the availability of sources, not intrinsic properties of any subject... So for an auxiliary warships to merit its own article, it must meet WP:SIGCOV by being covered in multiple reliable sources that treat the ship in detail. Sources like Lloyd's or, for most small ships, Conway's don't meet that bar. See WP:N#cite_note-1, "directories and databases [...] are all examples of coverage that may not actually support notability when examined, despite their existence as reliable sources." For Gapeau, I !voted delete because I only saw one source that likely had significant coverage. My suspicion is that many of these small warships should be part of wider-scoped lists per WP:CSC, point #2, and that they could be merged without AfDs. If more sources come to light we can start a new article at that time, which is indeed a benefit of being an online and not paper encyclopedia. Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 21:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
• I really suspect a lot of auxillaries and minor warships aren't going to be notable, not just the vorpostenboote. See, for instance, things such as USS W. W. Burns or USS Nathaniel Taylor. Both are 19th-century US naval vessels purchased solely for use as blockships. I haven't done a thorough look for coverage of these vessels' civilian careers, but I don't see any way in which either of those could be considered to be notable simply from their military service. I agree with Ed17 that a list would be a good housing place for many of these auxillaries or minor warships, but I don't know that things like Nathaniel Taylor even need to be mentioned anywhere. Hog Farm _Talk 23:57, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
  • @Hog Farm: - with USS Nathaniel Taylor, I'd say that more sources need to be explored, such as American newspapers which are accessible via the Library of Congress. May be possible to expand the ship's history that way. Mjroots (talk) 07:04, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Our List of requisitioned trawlers of the Royal Navy (WWII) includes several stub-articles of a only a couple of lines for unremarkable vessels, but the most famous RN trawler of the war, HMT Ayrshire (or HMS Ayrshire (FY 225)) of Convoy PQ 17, is not one of them. Alansplodge (talk) 17:16, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Map of NATO discussed at Talk:Second Cold War

Link: Talk:Second Cold War#Map of NATO. George Ho (talk) 20:00, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

Military Missions

there are a lot of pages about military missions (personnel sent to a country to help train another nations military) yet the page about military advisors is threadbare. it would be difficult to accurately list all military missions, so i suggest the following:

i propose a new category called "military advisors" be created, under which military missions pages, and pages on notable people who took part in these, so its properly organised. Bird244 (talk) 20:45, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Do you mean Category:Military advisors, with the subcategory Category:Military advisory groups? Buckshot06 (talk) 07:01, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Operation Hurry question

Does anyone know why the wl in the lead of Operation Hurry are causing dupe wl warnings in the text? Thanks Keith-264 (talk) 22:31, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

• Maybe duplicate Regia links in the Infobox and Lead text is all I can guess. -Fnlayson (talk) 22:48, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

I've had a look but the infobox wl aren't showing as dupes. Regards Keith-264 (talk) 22:52, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Fort Capuzzo is doing the same. Could the dupe wl scanner be defective? Keith-264 (talk) 21:56, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Anyone? Keith-264 (talk) 15:30, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Looking more closely, all the flagged duplicate links in the Operation Hurry article are linked in the Infobox, Lead text, and in main link templates. I had not used the Highlight duplicate links feature in the left sidebar before (other than maybe tests). The settings or sensitivity for this could have changed recently. Regards -Fnlayson (talk) 15:49, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Words of estimative probability#Requested move 25 May 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Words of estimative probability#Requested move 25 May 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 00:10, 2 June 2024 (UTC)