Talk:Casualty recording

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	This article was accepted from this draft on 31 October 2019 by reviewer Bkissin (talk · contribs).

Terminology battle[edit]

Unless there are good sources to establish standard terminology, we are probably going to have to shift to descriptive titles to distinguish:

casualty recording versus
casualty estimation.

The estimations are partly based on evidence of individual deaths, and the "casualty recording" does include statistical extrapolations - as in the Iraq war case - and errors in obtaining, verifying and transmitting the information on individual deaths mean that the "records" of individual deaths are, in the ordinary scientific sense of the word, also "estimates", based on Bayesian probabilities of the credibility of the information at different steps in the chain.

It's clear to me that there are opposing goals between military and civilian casualty recording/estimates: the military want to reduce their liability to (individual) war crimes prosecution and (collective) political costs; civilians want to try to stop a war and/or increase the likelihood of war crimes trials in order that victims' families feel "closure" and to discourage future war crimes. So a descriptive division that may be reasonable would be:

since in both cases, these are forms of empirical research. Boud (talk) 19:22, 24 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Removing the "Lead too long" tag[edit]

The currently present "lead too long" tag was added on 11/3/2020, when the lead was approximately 260 words long. The current lead is under 40 words long, so I've taken the liberty of removing the tag as clearly outdated. -Ljleppan (talk) 11:10, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]