Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Archive 11

Misinformation on the The Battle page?

Military history is not a strong point of mine, but there were a couple of items on the Battle page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle) that looked, well, wrong, to me. Two points from the "Aerial Battles Throughout History" section: First of all, as far as jets in ww2 - weren't they experimental oddities that didn't see action? Second, I thought a Russian invented the helicopter, not the Japanese. I could be wrong. Even if I am mistaken on these particulars, the article is pretty sloppy and could use a rewrite. I might try to go ahead and research for this article, but maybe not, so I wanted to bring it to the attention of the group in case some one else wants to do it.

Warbox?

I've just finished creating Anglo-Soviet invasion of Persia and am considering putting a warbox in. But seeing as I couldn't provide details for strengths, casualties, 2 out of 3 commanders or even a picture, would it just be waste of space? Opinions appreciated, cheers --Loopy 22:41, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Only "date", "place" and "result" are mandatory. The rest can be left out. You might want to include desirable fields for which you have incomplete data to encourage others to fill in the blanks. Geoff/Gsl 23:03, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Bear River Expedition

Would the Bear River Expedition be the same as the Bear River Massacre? Just want to know before I try and create the former.--Kross | Talk 00:06, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

No, my friend, both events are different. I'll make a stub for the Expedition asap. Phaedriel 21:44, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Infobox military unit

I have drafted an initial infobox called Template:Infobox Military Unit that anyone should feel free to review and edit. Note there are several fields that only appear if they are used, including image, whether it's part of a larger unit, date it was disbanded (if relevant). --Leifern 03:13, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Interesting; I like this draft. I'll throw out three initial questions for discussion:

1. "Country" will only work for regular national units. What can we do for (a) irregular units and (b) mercenary/unaligned units?
2. Do we want numerical data (e.g. peak strength, composition, etc.) in the infobox?
3. How do we deal with units (regiments, for example) that were part of multiple larger units over their lifetimes?

And finally, a more procedural comment: there are at least two other projects (Polish and British army, although they may no longer be active) that may want their own infoboxes. Do we want to have custom per-nation templates or a single template with optional parameters made for different nations by request? —Kirill Lokshin 03:29, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Great points, Kirill. I agree that "Country" could be an issue; particularly in the kind of work I've been doing. Just about every battle I've written takes place within Japan, and is fought between the feudal armies of different lords, not between nations. Of course, on the other hand, I've always just put "forces of so-and-so" under "participants", so regardless of whether we call it "country" or "participant", I don't think it matters much, so long as it looks good in the final page.

As for your second and third suggestions, I can see how those could be quite useful. But I think it should be somehow optional or something. The vast majority of pre-20th century battles, I believe, either were not fought with the kind of intense organization we see today (regiments, etc) or we simply don't have the information. Basically what I'm getting at is I think that info on regiments and the like is 'cruft'. It's unnecessary and extra, and only interesting or valuable for the most die-hard military historians.

The final question is a good one, too. I think our best bet is to come up with some standard infobox and then just modify it as different countries demand it. The whole point of an infobox is for consistency and standardization. Right? Thanks, Kirill. LordAmeth 03:41, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Great points Kirill, and great idea Leifern. I made a Template:Infobox British Army regiment a while back, and there is also a Template:Swedish regiment. I think Leifern's infobox could be used for units of armies/nations that probably won't warrant their own distinct infobox (for an example, the Jamaica Regiment). LordAmeth, assuming the regiments being 'cruft' refers to actual articles, I have to disagree. Ok, I'm biased - I do write a lot of articles on regiments - but nearly all have had an important role in the tapestry of history, for better or worse. It's at least true to regiments in the British Army. Yes, many are obscure, but that shouldn't lessen their notability or worthiness compared to higher formations. Sorry about that, LordAmeth! SoLando (Talk) 12:45, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

SoLando, sorry if I wasn't quite clear on my meaning. By all means, I do think that having articles on individual regiments is interesting and valuable. What I meant when I was talking about "cruft" was when, in a battle article, someone goes into deep detail of which regiments were present and at what strengths within the Infobox. It just looks crowded and confusing to me.

My thoughts exactly.

Most of the articles I work on could be divided up this way, but for the most part, instead of saying "300 on the right flank, 200 on the left, 300 in reserve and 500 in the center" I just write "1300" in the Infobox for "strength". I often do put more detailed descriptions of the individual groupings, regiments, armies or flanks in the text of the article. LordAmeth 20:19, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Precisely. The battlebox is a place for aggregate numbers, not Orders of Battle. People can't seem to tell the two apart (PS: Leifern – very good idea). Albrecht 21:08, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Just to clarify, when I was referring to unit strength in the infobox, I meant the unit infobox rather than the battle infobox. (This is rather confusing. Can we just call it the unitbox?) —Kirill Lokshin 22:07, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Ahhh sorry, LordAmeth. Now I agree with you ;-) Kirill, I have to disagree about numerical paramaters being included in the unit infobox. Unless the unit existed for a comparatively short period of time, I feel that such information wouldn't really add anything to the infobox. SoLando (Talk) 22:37, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I think a great many units did, particularly German and Soviet ones. In any case, we can have the parameter be optional, of course; it may only be useful on some articles, but we can just omit it where it isn't appropriate.

On a side note, I'm assuming from the response here that there aren't any major objections to us "adopting" a second infobox template? —Kirill Lokshin 22:49, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

The technology allows us to include any number of optional fields, but if we're to come up with one standard box (which would provide some nice consistency both in terms of information and visual impact), we need to make sure we understand what all those are. So, for example, instead of country we can use a term such as "regime" that would include non-state entities (e.g.. feudal lords). Please continue with requirements and I'll see if I can design one that accomodates everyone's needs. Or at least 90% of them. --Leifern 14:02, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

OK, I've moved this discussion to Template talk:Infobox Military Unit See you there. --Leifern 14:50, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

See a sample of the template at User:Leifern/Sandbox - pardon any inaccuracies in the example. --Leifern 03:29, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

A few comments on the example:

• Having both country and allegiance looks somewhat strange. Should we use both, or only one at a time?
• Should every field be split at the same point (i.e. have the column break continue all the way down)?
• Maybe change "Active years" to "Active"—there are likely a few WWII units that existed for less than a year.

Other than that, looks fine to me. Perhaps someone who spends more time with unit articles will be able to provide more feedback. —Kirill Lokshin 03:39, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

The infobox looks fantastic, Leifern! I have to say that I do now prefer discarding country-specific infoboxes in favour of this new infobox, obviously with country-specific syntax placed in its talk page. May I suggest the additional parameters of Honorary Colonel (called Colonel-of-the-Regiment in the British Army) and Anniversaries.

Using the country and allegiance parameters together will probably only be relevant to a unit whose service was limited to a civil war, etc. For an example, the 20th Maine would have Country: United States and Allegiance: Union. SoLando (Talk) 17:41, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I've created an initial draft of some usage guidelines at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Unitbox. I'll be adding to them over the next few days, but I would be very grateful for any help on documenting the usage of each parameter.

If anyone has any more ideas for parameters, they can be easily added at this point. Also up for grabs are the order of the rows (somewhat random at this point) as well as the color of the box (do we want gray, or lightsteel blue like the warbox?). Any comments are welcome! —Kirill Lokshin 23:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Citation deletion

Citation information was recently deleted from Battle of Singapore (diff). You may be interested in Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#Citation format poll: Format of citations and WP:V examples, and WP:FN. (SEWilco 08:22, 15 December 2005 (UTC))

Category guidelines

I've attempted to condense the mess of category diagrams and guidelines on the project page into a more concise form. Any comments would be very appreciated! —Kirill Lokshin 01:25, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Battle of Vaslui

Hey, is the article on the Battle of Vaslui good enough to be considered for being featured article? Thanks. --Anittas 01:28, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Very good job! You've made many improvements on it, and with a few minor tweaks I would have no problems supporting it this time.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 12:22, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

WWI Fighter Aircraft

Hi, new MH user. I put up a few articles on WWI Albatros fighters. Hope they're ok. I'll be working on adding more in the future, extending to other nations and air forces. Should I finish that I'll move on to WWII.

Cheers, Guapovia 19:40, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

They look fine :-) Some pictures would be great, but I'm not sure how difficult they would be to obtain. —Kirill Lokshin 19:53, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Template:Campaign

Just to keep everyone in the loop...

Due to a number of circumstances (increased server load, for one), the policy of avoiding meta-templates has become more actively enforced. According to this list, {{campaign}} (which is used to maintain a common layout on all of the campaignboxes) is the seventh-place most used meta-template; since it is primarily used to for the sake of appearance rather than functionality, this makes it a potential early victim of subst'ing.

While there has been no request to discontinue its use at this point, I think it is important to consider whether, should such a request be made, the present appearance is one we would want to maintain, at least in the near future.

So... anyone have any objections/suggestions/comments/etc. concerning the appearance of {{campaign}}? —Kirill Lokshin 02:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I like it just fine the way it is. In fact, I love the idea of it. The real question, unless I'm missing something, is what we could do to replace it if it were to be discontinued. I know very little about programming templates and such, but I'd imagine that this would have to be done as it is, as a sub-template, in order to work the way it currently does. Only other option would be to have it as a separate template that everyone has to manually call just after their Infoboxes. LordAmeth 03:14, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

There are actually two levels of nesting here: the warbox calls a campaignbox to include the campaign table, and the campaignbox calls campaign to set its appearance. Removing the first nesting would be very difficult, and would involve replacing the templates with something. The second nesting, however, is purely aesthetic; removing it would merely involve hard-coding the appearance of campaignboxes.

It's this second nesting that I suspect we may be asked to get rid of. —Kirill Lokshin 03:18, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I have only two suggestions.

• Categories were designed to replace this sort of function. Template:Campaign's derivative templates could be replaced with categories.
• Turn the Campaignbox templates into footers and insert them directly into the related articles. For larger wars, many related templates (all the American Revolution ones, for example) could be rolled into one footer.

-- Netoholic @ 05:15, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

• • Footer templates are possible, of course, but are something of a last resort—I think it would be better to have separate templates immediately following the infobox, if we need to eliminate that nested call. We could do this if we could figure out a way to keep the width of the two boxes consistent.
  • As far as categories go, they're not at all equivalent, unfortunately—the campaignboxes are ordered by date rather than by name. —Kirill Lokshin 13:45, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

A more coherent proposal

After some further thought, I think it would be possible to avoid meta-templates entirely by having two contiguous boxes. In other words, rather than having

{{Warbox
...
|campaign=Foo
...
}}

we would use

{{Warbox
...
}}
{{Campaignbox Foo}}

If we are to convert to this format, we should do it as soon as possible, since the incomplete battlebox→warbox migration gives us an excellent way to keep track of which articles have been updated. The process would be as follows:

1. Keep {{campaign}} nested for the time being.
2. Place the separate campaignbox call on all articles using {{warbox}} (less than 200 at this point).
3. Remove the campaign parameter from {{warbox}} to prevent its use.
4. Replace all remaining uses of {{battlebox}} with {{warbox}} + separate campaignbox (about 1200 articles).
5. Once we have settled on a good campaignbox width (see below), subst: {{campaign}} into each of the campaignbox templates (around 250).

As the final step, we would need to synchronize the width of the campaignbox and the warbox—they should each be (slightly) wider than the standard image width to make sure they align. Something like 310–320px would be good; I'm not sure if a width in em would be preferable.

This scheme results in (1) no more meta-template use and (2) no more battlebox use, killing two birds with one stone.

In case the numbers scare anyone off, I'll be the first to volunteer to actually do this, provided we can agree on this scheme within a week or so. I think it would be best to do this on our own initiative rather than waiting for the developers to drop the hammer on us and force us into a much tighter schedule. —Kirill Lokshin 15:27, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I'll do my utmost to help. Kirill, you could have at least omitted just how many battleboxes there are! I've been working under the intentional illusion that there aren't 'many' left to convert ;-) SoLando (Talk) 16:55, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Hehe, sorry about that ;-) You might as well not bother doing any more conversions until we decide what we're going to do about the campaignboxes; otherwise we may need to go over the articles twice. —Kirill Lokshin 17:00, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't know, I don't particularly like using subst:. Many warboxes are incomplete, as are many campaignboxes, and campaignboxes need to be uniform for all articles in that box. Subst:-ing them would make them difficult to work with. Do we need to subst: them to reduce server load, or what? -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 21:26, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry if I wasn't clear. We are not going to subst the actual warboxes/campaignboxes into articles. We are going to (a) subst {{campaign}} into each campaignbox, and (b) call the campaignbox directly from the article rather than through the warbox. Both the warbox and the campaignbox will remain templates themselves. The only major difference will be the new way of including the campaignbox in an article.

And yes, this is mainly about server load. You can wade through the discussions at WP:AUM (and a number of related pages) if you'd like the full story. Suffice it to say that {{if}} was "killed with a stick" yesterday, and it's likely other meta-templates will follow. —Kirill Lokshin 00:32, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Oh, OK, as long as it doesn't make it any more difficult to use I'm fine with it. -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 00:48, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I am afraid I won't have much (read: any) free time to help out with the conversion for the next couple of weeks, but, for what it's worth to say it, I support what's being proposed. LordAmeth 16:53, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

A demonstration of what the warbox + campaignbox combination will look like after the conversion is complete is at right. Both are set to a width of 25em, which is (I think) slightly larger than the 300px image. —Kirill Lokshin 14:14, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Looks good. If you need help, tell me. -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 22:07, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

World War II is on the Article Improvement Drive

Just a heads up. Oberiko 04:32, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Main Page

As another heads up, R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine)'s excellent FA on the WW2 general Richard O'Connor will be on the main page on Boxing Day (26th December). If people could put it on their watchlists to help combat the inevitable torrent of vandalism that would be great. Leithp (talk) 18:27, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

infobox on the korean war article

Anyone want to try and replace that bloated box with a one of the more conventional boxes? I tried and it didn't work all that well.--Kross | Talk 12:38, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

I would wait before the meta-template mess (see above) is sorted out before replacing any more boxes. —Kirill Lokshin 14:26, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

proposal about ranks

In many battles positions and ranks are constantly described, but not wikified. It may sometimes be overwhelming for the reader, especially if they are continously abbreviated, not formalised and if the reader isn't particularly knowledgable about military ranks in general. I propose that like dates, mention of military ranks should be wikified....even to the extent of re-wikifying it if the rank is mentioned again, but that could be considered a separate, optional manner. For example, Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, rather than just. Lt. Gen Arthur Percival. Natalinasmpf 11:58, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

It seems reasonable to wikify ranks (although dates are increasingly de-wikified—this is probably a poor comparison). On the other hand, we shouldn't over-wikify; an article like Battle of Gettysburg will mention dozens of generals, so there's no need to wikify the same rank on each of them. —Kirill Lokshin 15:50, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps the first instance could be wikified and formalised (Lieutenant General Arthur Percival) and then everything after that abbreviated and unwikified (Lt. Gen Arthur Percival)? --Loopy 21:11, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Both ways are fine, although I think the reader might be confused if he or she skips over the first mention of the link. Anyhow, yes, it's a current habit for people not to wikify the links for ranks, so I am proposing this be a standardised guideline. -- Natalinasmpf 13:10, 25 December 2005 (UTC) 13:09, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Category:Causes of War

Given that we already have Category:Aftermath of War, I'm populating a new category, Category:Causes of War, with a few articles that I found with a quick search. I figure the category can cover articles on the causes of specific wars as well as articles on general causes of war.

This move is partially motivated by a desire to better categorize International crisis, but I think it makes sense anyway. Melchoir 11:34, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Dang, I've just noticed that both categories are incorrectly capitalized; they should be "X of war", not "X of War". I'll fix them tomorrow. Melchoir 12:01, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Deleting categories?

Excuse my ignorance but I've just finished sorting the battles all lumped together in Category:Boer War battles into Category:Battles of the First Boer War and Category:Battles of the Second Boer War and now the original one needs to be deleted. Where should I be heading to get that done? Cheers, --Loopy 22:31, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Here you go. Fantastic work, by the way! SoLando (Talk) 23:04, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, just added it to the list. The Boer War articles were horribly disorganised so I've also created Template:Campaignbox First Boer War and Template:Campaignbox Second Boer War to make life easier for anyone trying to understand the wars... Loopy 23:32, 22 December 2005 (UTC)