Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Archive 51

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"Soldiers" categories

Back to the question of Category:Soldiers and its kin: since the attempt at renaming these has met with massive opposition, I think we need to figure out what the best option for these is. There are, as I can see, several basic approaches:

Consider "soldiers" to cover all personnel in the ground forces.
Consider "soldiers" to cover all non-officer personnel in the ground forces.
Consider "soldiers" to cover all non-officer personnel. (This is the one that was just objected to.)

Option 1 would thus create a structure like:

Soldiers of the British Army
- Officers of the British Army
  - Generals of the British Army

Option 2 would instead have:

Military personnel of the British Army
- Soldiers of the British Army
- Officers of the British Army
  - Generals of the British Army

If we go with either of the first two options, we can place the soldiers categories under Category:Military personnel by branch, either as a sub-category of Category:Army personnel (if we use option 2) or as a replacement for it (if we use option 1).

A related issue if we go with option 1 would be the naming. Would we want to:

Rename "soldiers" to "army personnel"?
Rename "navy personnel" and "air force personnel" to "sailors" and "airmen"?
Retain the differently structured names?
Some combination of the above?

One of the objections was that "personnel" didn't really lend itself to being used for ancient warfare, so it may be worthwhile to retain the "soldiers" designation; but that means we need to consider the consistency issue.

Any comments, ideas, criticisms, etc. would be very welcome! Kirill Lokshin 17:27, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

We currently have:

Royal Navy personnel
- Royal Navy officers
  - Royal Navy admirals
- Royal Navy sailors

Royal Air Force personnel
- Royal Air Force officers
  - Royal Air Force air marshals
- Royal Air Force airmen

Mirroring that structure for the British Army would give:

British Army personnel
- British Army officers
  - British Army generals
- British Army soldiers

The Royal Marines could be treated similarly. Greenshed 17:38, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

That looks good for cases where each service branch has a set of categories, but what do we do in cases where there's only a single isolated "soldiers" category (e.g. Category:Eritrean soldiers)? Kirill Lokshin 17:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

If there is just one kind we have no chance to disambiguate, but generally we should disambiguate as far as possible using the least ambiguous descriptions. Wandalstouring 18:59, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

In the case of countries with only a single isolated "soldiers" category such as Eritrea, we should rename Category:Eritrean soldiers to Category:Eritrean military personnel. Incidentially, I had a look in the Eritrean soldiers cat and it contains an air force officer (Mussie Lebassi) - although I'm not sure if the Eritrean Air Force is an independent service. Anyway, on this renaming we would then get:

Eritrean military personnel
British military personnel
- Royal Navy personnel
  - Royal Navy officers
    - Royal Navy admirals
  - Royal Navy sailors
- British Army personnel
  - British Army officers
    - British Army generals
  - British Army soldiers
- Royal Air Force personnel
  - Royal Air Force officers
    - Royal Air Force air marshals
  - Royal Air Force airmen

If it was appropriate, the Eritrean military personnel cat could be broken down into Eritrean Army personnel, Eritrean Air Force personnel, etc. Greenshed 22:28, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I would also suggest keeping the category system flexible enough to cope with differences in terminology. As long as the category is recognisable as a military personnel category, you don't have to use terms like 'personnel' and 'enlisted'. Terms like 'sailor', 'soldier', 'marine', 'officer', 'general', etc, should be used, as people will be looking for terms they recognise. Also, don't forget to come up with something for the historical categories (eg. keep the Roman soldiers one as soldiers). Oh, and I think some or all of the categories still have the renaming tags of them, despite the nomination being withdrawn. Carcharoth 02:36, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem isn't terminology (although it is very useful to have a more-or-less consistent naming scheme) so much as definition of scope; when multiple, similarly named categories are present, we have to come up with some halfway-decent way of deciding which one any particular article should actually be in. This tends to become very confusing if, for example, one "X Army soldiers" category is used for something completely different from another "X Army soldiers" category.

(And, yes, I haven't removed the tags yet. I'll try to get to that soon.) Kirill Lokshin 02:58, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

And the tags are gone! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 03:14, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Good point. If it weren't for the questions concerning the terminology of warfare in antiquity I would say that the term "soldiers" should not be used to describe all members of an army. Not because it is incorrect per se, but because, at least in modern times, the term "army personnel" clearly encompasses all members of an army. Ie we would not use:

Fooian Army soldiers
- Fooian Army officers
- Fooian Army enlisted

Instead, we would use:

Fooian Army personnel (no flexibility in terminology here)
- Fooian Army officers (if needed and we could be flexible on terminology here as per Carcharoth's point)
- Fooian Army soldiers (if needed and we could be flexible on terminology here as per Carcharoth's point)

I'm not an expert on warfare in the classical age. Do we describe members of classical navies (eg Greek, Persian etc) as soldiers? Greenshed 12:06, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

"Fooian Army enlisted" I beleive the term "enlisted" is a regional thing. I am not aware of it being used outside of the US military. -- MCG 04:20, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

We can use alternative names, but army personnel or military personnel are possibly the best choices with an indivdual subdivision depending on the specific structure. One point could be to make a difference between the professional forces and the militia. Second point is mounted unmounted and among the infantry light and heavy troops. And naturally there is the navy, although navy and army tend to overlap into some kind of marines. Wandalstouring 14:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I would just want to bear in mind that although the term "army" can, in some countries, refer to any armed force, it is more commonly used only to refer to a land force of the military. Greenshed 17:48, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Whilst I'm thinking generally, I would suggest that it is better to have cats which use the name of the armed service, rather than just the nationality. For example Category:British Army personnel is clearer than Category:British soldiers, not just because of the different uses of the term soldier, but also because someone who is British might serve in the French Foreign Legion etc - they might or might not be included in the British soldiers cat, but they would not belong in the British Army personnel cat. Greenshed 18:05, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Not that clear besides these branches are a relatively new inventions. Wandalstouring 05:28, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Yep. And we'll have problems with armed services that changed names; would we need to create separate categories for each "incarnation" of a country's army?

I wonder if it might not be better to have a clumped category scheme. In other words:

Fooian military personnel
- Fooian soldiers - top-level category for all army personnel, regardless of rank; non-officer ranks would be placed directly into it
  - Fooian officers - sub-category for officers

This would allow us to use the somewhat more natural "soldiers" terminology for pre-modern personnel. Kirill Lokshin 05:38, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Navies are not a new invention and although it not 100% sure, my feeling is that in classical times members of navies are not normally described as soldiers. In which case, we would need, for example, a "military people of Ancient Greece" (if indeed the adjective "military" can apply to members of a classical navy) category to contain both soldiers and sailors.

Under the scheme proposed above, there is no explicitly named "other ranks"/"enlisted" category - is that what you intend (and what you mean by "clumped")? I would venture to suggest that the "other ranks"/"enlisted" categories are useful and that merging them into more general categories may meet some opposition.

Whilst I still think that there are some advantages to using the term "army personel" in preference to "soldiers" for all land forces personnel in the modern era, in order to get consistency across the ages we might need to take the term soldiers in its wider sense (encompassing officers and men).

Finally, I think that military personnel/people need to be categorized in (at least) two different ways. First, by organisation (eg. Navy, Army, Air Force - possibly including subdivisions such as regiments) and secondly by nationality and probably sub-national identity. For example we have categories for Scottish military personnel (Scotland does not have its own army) and these cats contain some British military units associated with Scotland and some pre-Act of Union elements which were not British. Another example is the discussion of the Military of Cornwall (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_December_3#Category:Military_of_Cornwall for more). Greenshed 18:12, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

That really goes back to the question of whether the nationality categories are meant to classify people as being from a country (and in the military) or in a country's military. (In other words, how does an Italian in the French army get categorized?) It's not clear what the current system is really doing; the convention for classifying people is generally the "from" option, but the argument has been made that military personnel are more like political office-holders, and are associated with the country of service rather than the country of birth. (This becomes enormously unpleasant in the case of, say, mercenaries that served a dozen different countries, not having been born in any of them.)

As a general solution, it may be useful to create two separate category trees: "Military personnel of Foo", which would classify by country of service, and "Fooian people in the military", which would classify by country of birth. ("Fooian military personnel" is, unfortunately, ambiguous in this regard.) So we'd have, for example, "Soldiers of the British Army" as a sub-category of "Soldiers of the United Kingdom", and then "Scottish soldiers of the British Army" as a sub-category of that and of "Scottish people in the military". (We could, in fact, go one step further and have the intermediate "Scottish soldiers", which would be for soldiers born in Scotland, and "Soldiers of Scotland", which would be for soldiers serving the independent Scottish state.) Kirill Lokshin 18:40, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

<RESTART INDENTS> In essence I agree; "Fooian military personnel" is ambiguous and we should use two trees. We could go for:

Armed Forces of Foo personnel
- Fooian Navy sailors
  - Fooian Navy officers
    - Fooian Navy admirals
  - Fooian Navy enlisted - this presents a problem in terminology - a solution could be to use "enlisted" for USA and "ratings" for UK
- Fooian Army soldiers
  - Fooian Army officers
    - Fooian Army generals
  - Fooian Army enlisted - this presents a problem in terminology - a solution could be to use "enlisted" for USA and "other ranks" for UK
- Fooian Air Force airmen - or should it be Fooian Air Force airmen and airwomen? (Another reason why I prefer personnel)
  - Fooian Air Force officers
    - Fooian Air Force generals - or Fooian Air Force air marshals (depending on rank structure)
  - Fooian Air Force enlisted - as above

and

Fooian people in the military
- Fooian sailors / navy personnel (better as it excludes civilian sailors)
- Fooian soldiers / army personnel
- Fooian airmen / airmen and airwomen / air force personnel (the last one is my favoured option)

In the above, I have put the "soldiers" choice before the "army personnel" choice. I hope that you can see that in order to come up with a consistent scheme, the "soldiers" choice leads to other problems. Perhaps we should classify ancient and modern military personnel in a different way. PS This is becoming the most complex categorization problem I've looked at to date. Greenshed 20:19, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that's going to work too well for periods before the formal Army/Navy/Air Force division is implemented, or for countries that have had multiple distinct services. I would instead suggest reversing the naming order for the first set:

Military personnel of Foo
- Soldiers of Foo
  - Officers of Foo

...

Or, for a more concrete example of how this might play out:

Military personnel of Germany
- Soldiers of Germany
  - Soldiers of the Wehrmacht
  - Soldiers of the Reichswehr

...

German people in the military
- German soldiers

This allows both a (subtle, admittedly) mnemonic for determining if a category is for people from a country or those serving it by looking at the order of the name, and expansion for a country having soldiers serving it without a formal armed service, or through multiple armed services. Kirill Lokshin 20:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Or, alternately,

Personnel of the German military
- Soldiers of the German military
  - Soldiers of the Wehrmacht
...

(Although this may be mildly unpleasant in cases where the country doesn't have a good adjective; we'll get grammatical messes like "Soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire military" and such.) Kirill Lokshin 20:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you should remember that the Vikings can neither be classified as land or navy forces because they were both. Similar is the problem for all the penteconter crews. No strict guideline on branching gives us much more freedom for an individually appropriate form. What needs to be strictly kept apart is soldier from somewhere and soldier of something. Within we can branch in any way we like. The Holy Roman Empire had no navy, so soldiers of the HRE is presumably enough.Wandalstouring 20:47, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, would that actually be a problem? Could we get away with having, say, Category:Viking soldiers? (Or even Category:Viking warriors, if we want to just use that as an alternate term for exclusively pre-modern groups without a formal military?) I don't see any reqirement to split everything by land/navy lines in any of the proposals above; the possibility exists, but the top-level country/group categories are still there. Kirill Lokshin 21:03, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Viking itself is the job name, like pirate. Wandalstouring 21:21, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, ok; that's not necessarily a problem, then. All conventions have exceptions; and, since the scope is quite narrow, we won't have to worry about it breaking the intersection category naming conventions too much. (But I was under the impression that "Viking" was typically applied to all members of "Viking" society, including those who weren't actually involved in fighting. Is this not the case?) Kirill Lokshin 21:26, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Expanding on Wandalstouring's comment, I think this particular category would be something like Category:Vikings or, more specifically, Category:Danish vikings and so on. Carom 21:25, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

That's an interesting idea; what if we were to consider "viking" to be a type of person rather than a true nationality? Then, we'd have "Danish vikings" as a counterpart to "Danish soldiers", etc. Kirill Lokshin 21:28, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm becoming more convinced that we need to categorize on a case-by-case basis for pre-modern military / quasi-military forces. On the viking question, the COD says "any of the Scandinavian seafaring pirates and traders ..." and quite a lot has been written about how the vikings weren't just out for rape and pillage. My point is that prior to the establishment of modern military forces things get complicated which makes it difficult to apply a consistent scheme across all ages.

Another thought about the categorization of ancient military people: There is a danger of getting into edit war territory over which modern nation "owns" the ancient warriors. For example should Alexander the Great belong in a sub-sub-sub-category of Military personnel of Greece or Military personnel of Macedonia. Just one to watch out for (as if we didn't have enough to think about). Greenshed 22:06, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

That's not an issue unique to people. The solution for, say, battles has been to enforce a fairly strict separation among distinct historical states below the "Military history of ..." level; thus, Alexander's campaigns are placed into Category:Battles involving Macedon rather than Category:Battles involving Greece or Category:Battles involving Macedonia.

The same could easily be applied to the country of service portion of the categorization above; e.g. Alexander would be in Category:Military leaders of Macedon. But the country of birth part will, as you say, be somewhat messier; we'd have to do something like Category:Ancient Macedonian soldiers. (But even that won't help with other scenarios; how do we deal with "Chinese" or "German", for example?) Kirill Lokshin 22:18, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

(for Viking see definition in the article, there has been a shift in understanding them as a job, not a people, within the recent years) The very problem is with Germans and Dutch. If using historic correct English you have to refer with Dutch to both of them until the independence of the Netherlands. More so one has to remember that what is today German began to develop through assimilation of different peoples of Germanic, Romano-Celtic and Slavic origin and some remains of the process like the Sorbs still exist. Perhaps using generally HRE or in more specific cases smaller subunits (=the "tribes") like Bohemia, Luxemburg, Swabia, Saxony, Bavaria, etc. would help with the early HRE. In later times with the ongoing assimilation we have three main groups in the region, upper and lower Germany and the Slavic Poland/Bohemia/Moravia that all contributed to groups such as the Landsknechte. We could label them as a mixture of Central European people and put the Holy Roman Empire as place of origin. However, we try to avoid the English term like hell until we have the Dutch independence and the word German gets used for the main population of the HRE which by now has significantly lost its tribal character. For the Roman times it has been more and more in use to label the inhabitants as Germanic tribes, while in older literature solely the term German is used. There is currently no consensus in English literature and it can happen that books constantly switch between Germanic and German. The Chinese population is usually disambiguated by their tribal origin in early times and later by the ruling dynasty until the Han. Afterwards factors such as religion contribute (Hui-Chinese). One may add that there are some discussed ethnic groups such as the Mongols, Manchu, Tibetans, Uighurs and in medieval China the Thai that according to modern definition of the PRC are Chinese and national minorities(in case they are not independent. In Chinese legislature a distinction is made between them and Han-Chinese who alone are faced with population control measures, but also are solely allowed in the armed forces of the PRC. This definition of Chinese is disputed by several independence movements and small states such as Mongolia, making the issue a nice minefield.Wandalstouring 23:16, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

That's why I find it easy to categorize on the basis of military branch / organization and difficult on the basis of nationality. I really don't know where we are going to end up with all this, but I very much hope that at the end of all this I will be able to look at categories which however they're described contain military personnel who served, for example, in the British Army, the United States Navy, the Indian Air Force, etc. Greenshed 00:08, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

One other point. I know I started off talking about Fooian military personnel, but sometimes in the examples it isn't clear whether by Foo one means the country or the military branch. As you know I consider this an important distinction and I would be greatful if fellow editors could take extra steps to make it clear (I'm already finding this pretty complex). Greenshed 00:13, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Strategy for solving this problem

We decide on the category structure we want. This means working out the tree structure and what belongs in each category in the tree. In order to keep tabs on the structure we will need to use temporary category names in the discussion. These temporary names may or may not be used to actually create the real categories in the end and should not be understood as the most likely choices.
Next we decide on final category names. As I've just stated, the earlier choice of temporary category names should not prejudice the discussion.
Then we work out which categories in current use need to be renamed, merged or split up into the final category names we just chosen.
We make our proposal on Wikipedia:Categories for discussion.

Please let everyone know if you agree with the proposed strategy.Greenshed 19:52, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

That seems like a sensible way of moving forward. (The alternative would be trying to do each "branch" of the category tree piecemeal; this would allow for more self-contained CFD noms, but may be more confusing.)

It'll take a lot of work to sort everything out, obviously. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 20:07, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I would be happy to take on one "branch" of the tree at a time and then do steps 2, 3 and 4 for each branch. It might be the way to go as when we get to CFD, a huge and complex change is likely to bamboozle editors who have not followed this discussion closely. Even then it's going to be tricky. Greenshed 22:54, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Just create somewhere overviews of the branching and give access to each respective overview from each category within. Wandalstouring 23:30, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Top-level tree for military personnel

Ok, as a starting point, a (very) rough sketch of what the top level of the tree (under Category:Military personnel) might look like:

The obvious branches: these mirror the categorization scheme for units; I don't really see any reason why the same idea shouldn't carry over to personnel. The major structural question remaining here is whether we need one set of by-country categories or two (to deal with the country of birth/country of service issue).

By country
- By branch of service
By era
- By war

The somewhat obvious branches:

By rank (e.g. generals, admirals, officers, non-officers, etc.) - this seems useful and easily doable, but it's unclear how to deal with the non-officers
By "occupation" (e.g. pilots, engineers, medics, snipers, etc.) - no idea what a good term would be here; this basically builds from Category:Military occupations

The strange branches:

By award (e.g. recipients of the VC, etc.) - we have a whole bunch of categories for recipients of specific awards already, but there's no clear parent for them
By "fate" (e.g. KIAs, MIAs, POWs, etc.) - somewhat useful, but not at all clear what this might encompass; also a variety of things like Category:Assassinated military personnel that could wind up here

Miscellaneous: a bunch of categories that don't seem to fit in cleanly to the other branches

I've probably missed a few here; please feel free to add any that I overlooked.

Comments/criticisms/ideas? Kirill Lokshin 04:30, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I think that's a good summary of where we are and our next steps. Working from the top down, we do as Kirill Lokshin says, need to resolve the major structural question of whether we need one set of by-country categories or two (to deal with the country of birth/country of service issue). I suggest we deal with this first. Greenshed 13:26, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Rapid repair work

Yikes - any chance some of you brainiacs here can do a repair job on T-34 in under a few days? <grin> [1] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:21, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It needs a bit of cleanup, admittedly; but I'm not sure why the referencing itself would be a major issue. It has ~50 inline citations; while this isn't as many as more recent articles, I wouldn't think that it would garner substantial complaint, at this point. Kirill Lokshin 21:36, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

oh, for gosh sakes - had again. At this stage of game, you'd think I'd remember to look for inline rather than cite.php citations. Sorry for the false alarm on the cites; other points still valid. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:26, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Still needed

The article was peppered with {{fact}} templates during its main page stay. These still need prompt fixing.Circeus

The guys putting this article on the main page didn't seem to check it beforehand. So as long as someone hasn't exhaustive literature on tanks around it won't be fixed, but you can make an FAR. Wandalstouring 18:24, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

My suspicion is that 90% of these statements are easily sourced from the original sources (or are common knowledge for specialists), but those who tagged didn't know that.Circeus 15:28, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

WP:ACID#Castle

The Castle article has been nominated for an Article Improvement Drive by Dweller. As the main article for the related Castles WikiProject, and a key article for this project, I would encourage people to get involved. --Grimhelm 14:31, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Page links to Crusaders

Believe it or not, rather then linking here or to a separate article about the participants of the Crusades, this un-ambiguated titled actually goes to an article about a Rugby team. Now unfortunately this means that many of the 200+ links that are actually meant to go to the Crusades article are linking there. Now there is a page move request to move the Rugby team article to one that actually makes a link of sense and to have the Crusaders redirect here but assuming that doesn't go through, it might be helpful to have some folks take a look at these misdirected links so we can get them pointing to a more appropriate article. 205.157.110.11 15:10, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

A possible move was discussed in Talk:Crusaders#Requested move. There seems to be no supportive majority, but the rugby lobby is accused of a rallying campaign. Anyone who wants to give his opinion on the subject can drop by. Wandalstouring

The page has been changed now to point to "Crusades". --Petercorless 19:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Southeast Asian task force

There was brief discussion a month or two back about starting a Southeast Asian task force... I'd be happy to head the thing as much as anyone heads any task force, and to do the grunt work of actually creating the page, though I do suppose we'd need some sort of discussion as to what to use as a project banner icon. So - shall we start a vote/discussion here to ask for support? Is there any particular number of supporters we need in order to start it? Or shall I simply go ahead and make the page, and we'll go from there even with only 2-5 members? LordAmeth 14:01, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Creating a page isn't a problem (I can probably do the whole process in 20 minutes or so), and we can just use a map as an icon until a better one is found; the reall issue is whether there are any interested members. Ideally, I'd like to see at least a few people actually say that they'd be willing to participate before creating the whole massive infrastructure. Kirill Lokshin 14:07, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Alright. Makes sense. Thanks, Kirill. The map could work fine, though could be quite unrecognizable shrunk down. We could use the flag of SEATO or ASEAN as the logo (I think the SEATO one is prettier), simply for convenience of the fact that these countries don't have that much in common that any single picture of a weapon or a Chinese character or the Sanskrit word for "southeast" would likely work. 'Course, both those organizations are exceedingly modern, not reflecting the long history of the region... But, yeah, let's see if there's any more interest beyond me and Okkar. LordAmeth 14:10, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Harvard references versus footnotes

Seeing some of the reactions to T-34, which is on the Main Page right now—in particular, people not noticing the Harvard-style citations at all—I wonder if it might not be a good idea to recommend the use of footnotes in our citations guidelines. I don't think that Harvard-style should be prohibited, but I'd like to see footnotes encouraged in cases where people don't have a set preference, since they're likely to be more familiar to readers of historical articles, and tend to be more convenient for the sort of extensive citation that's becoming typical now. Comments? Kirill Lokshin 17:34, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

(The article has now wound up on FAR, incidentally, mostly over citation concerns; if anyone feels like dropping in a few dozen footnotes, please feel free! :-) Kirill Lokshin 17:49, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the Harvard style is beautiful. Wandalstouring 20:51, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I have toyed with the Harvard style and I seriously think about switching from footnote to Harvard. Especially if you have all these references to primary sources the Harvard style looks much better. Footnotes are good when you have secondary work which often tend to contain disputes of different scholars. The advantage is that you can add a bit more info on them in the form of comments.Wandalstouring 13:39, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

If you're citing primary sources, wouldn't you just use in-text references rather than true Harvard style? Compare "according to Livy (VII:107), he ..." with "He ... (Livy:4 BC)", in other words. Kirill Lokshin 13:43, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

One trick is that this Harvard style provides a link to a note at the bottom where you can provide further links for the reader to check it immediately. If you have a constant use it might get somehow tireseome to read and Livy says and Polybius says and Appian says and Livy says and Justin says and Nepos says and Polybius says. Turning them into Harvard style puts them better into the context without disturbing the flow too much. Wandalstouring 15:37, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, fair enough; but the situation with primary sources seems something of a special case. Does the same reasoning apply to heavy citations of secondary sources (particularly several secondary sources at a time)? In other words, can we come up with some recommendations on when each citation style may be more appropriate? Kirill Lokshin 15:55, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Primary sources are quite widespread in our project. As I said a few lines above footnote style has also advantages and is essentially useful for secondary works and complictaed citations of differing POV of secondary works. And I do agree with ALR that in technical context Harvard style isn't always that useful. The problem for example with this article is that it isn't always clear what is a reference and what is info in parentheses. Wandalstouring 16:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I think, as with everything, it depends on context. Harvard style is useful in some areas but can become more clumsy in technical articles where there is a need for more extensive foot-noting. I find that footnotes are easier to integrate but I'd steer away from mandating one way or the other.ALR 15:50, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Eh, fair enough; status quo it is, then. :-) Kirill Lokshin 16:00, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Not quite. Give a short warning about the problems one should consider with Harvard - nothing else in parentheses. That is usus for Harvard in literature, but I don't know if anyone already mentioned it somewhere. Wandalstouring 16:07, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Good point; would rewriting the last paragraph as

In general, an article may use either footnotes or Harvard-style references; footnotes may be more convenient when the level of citation is very dense, or where the citations include additional commentary. Harvard-style references generally should not be used if the article has a significant number of other items in parentheses; however, the final choice of which style to follow is left to the discretion of an article's editors.

work? Kirill Lokshin 16:17, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes. Works. Wandalstouring 17:17, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Military related articles at the Article Creation and Improvement Drive

Just wanted to add the Greek War of Independence is also there. Kyriakos 06:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

These articles are all hopeless candidates. As long as citations are missing someone has to be interested in the topic and needs quite a lot of knowledge to improve them(adding complete citations). For this reason translations from the German wiki suck because even high quality articles(FA and lesenswerte) lack them. A possible reason may be the different social climate and milieu. Wandalstouring 14:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

If memory serves, common practice on de.wp is/was to cite sources in the edit summary when you contributed a section, rather than leaving them in the final article. Hence the apparent lack of sourcing... Shimgray | talk | 19:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

It should be, but the Germans are too lazy. Wandalstouring 23:34, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Castle is also nominated. --Dweller 23:41, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Congradulations everybody

I'm a newcomer, started in December 06. I'm learning how to get around in the Wiki environment. One thing I've noticed, is despite some conflicts and namecalling at times, this project is overall really well organized, and I recommend other editors to come here to look around. I'll be pitching in as I get more skills coming up on line. Richiar 23:58, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Welcome, Richiar. Feel free to be jump into editing and be bold — we'll beat up on you whenever you make mistakes! ;-) Askari Mark (Talk) 00:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to the project. If you browse around Wikipedia you'll find that there is much less "warring" in the war articles than there is in many other areas of the encyclopedia. Irony? Cla68 03:49, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Bios

I couldn't find much on our project page on bios. Do we (or do we need) standards on infoboxes, ranks capitalized or not, topical organization, treatment of awards and honors, etc.? I'm helping with the bio of Wesley Clark, and trying to figure out the best way to go. Also, it has become rather a long article that needs some trimming. There is a short list of key awards at the end of the text, and a fuller treatment in a separate list. Which is preferred — and if only "notable" awards should be included, what might those be? TIA, Askari Mark (Talk) 04:40, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, off the top of my head:

Yes, the WP:MILHIST#Article structure section is missing a suggested structure for a military figure; anybody feel like drafting one up? (Ideally someone who's actually written some biographical articles, and knows what works and what doesn't in practice.)
Infoboxes are good! That's pretty much a project-wide thing. (But on biogaphies, {{Infobox Military Person}} is just one of the options; if other box types, such as politicians, royalty, etc. are more useful, then they can be used instead.)
Rank capitalization follows the MoS. If I recall correctly, they're capitalized when appearing as a title (e.g. "Marshal of the Soviet Union", "General of the Armies"), or with a name (e.g. "General Clark"), but not as generic terms (e.g. "the general", "a colonel"); but you might want to check that.
For the other structural stuff (awards, etc.), I don't think there's any point to trying to come up with a rigid guideline; every article is somewhat different. Going with whatever seems to make the article better-written is the best approach; it may be useful, in this regard, to look at how some similar FAs do things. (For example, Aleksandr Vasilevsky includes awards in the infobox and in a section of the article. I'm not aware of any other FAs that have a completely separate list of awards, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try it, if that seems to be the best approach.)

Kirill Lokshin 05:02, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Infoboxes are good? Meh. :-) Carcharoth 01:50, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, more precisely, they're the default (as in "unless you really make an effort to keep them off the article, someone will put one there eventually; so you might as well do it right off the bat"). ;-) Kirill Lokshin 02:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Need help with problem with Turkish Air Force page...

Hoping to avoid making WP:LAME here...another user keeps removing the infobox from the Turkish Air Force page claiming that it's "ugly" and sarcastically referring to it as "very important", reverting it to a rather disorganised version (with the Turkish Armed Forces navbar at the top of the page not the bottom) to make it "in line with other branches..."; and also saying "don't use my pictures in it" - which were uploaded under a relase-all-rights license (and (at least) one of them by a sock puppet). - Aerobird ^{Target locked - Fox One!} 21:19, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Having a horizontal navbar at the top is a bad idea, obviously; it basically breaks up the flow of the article completely. He does have a point about the alignment, though; I'd move the seal into the infobox and then flip margins on the next few images. You need to make sure you don't have a right-floated image anywhere close to the bottom of the infobox, or you'll get a big gap in the text on narrower resolutions.

Have you tried pointing out the other Air Force pages that have the infobox to him, incidentally?

(As an aside: we should probably generalize the "commanders" fields on the infobox to just allow for an arbitrary set of commanders. People are getting the same layout by using the overrideable labels, but, from a long-term semantics point of view, having the Chief of the General Staff in the "Colonel of the Regiment" field isn't a good idea.) Kirill Lokshin 21:38, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Well I kept mentioning "per WP:MILHIST..." when reverting the infobox back in...

Thanks for the tips and the help. - Aerobird ^{Target locked - Fox One!} 00:47, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I've redesigned {{Turkish Armed Forces}} so that it can now function as a "top of the page at right" navbox. It now appears at top right on all the pages it links, so people can click between the different articles quickly and easily. I prefer things this way (try it for yourself). But I can also see why some people like to have links like this available at the end of an article, instead of the top. Ideally, it would be a floating box that you could click on anytime you wanted, at the beginning, middle or end of an article. But that would be like a website with frames... Carcharoth 02:21, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Photos of US Navy officers

I've picked up some nice references on the US Naval administration in American Samoa and am looking to write some articles on the missing ones (see Edwin Taylor Pollock for one I'm just about done with). The big thing I'm missing is photographs. I found a handful, but relatively few on US Navy sources, so copyright status is unclear. Is there any really good reference book or yearbook or similar that you can recommend where I can find photographs of these people? (I'm taking WWI figures mostly, so I recognize that references may be difficult.) I've found some in old newspapers, but the archives online tend to destroy the pictures. JRP 02:43, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Try the Graphic Lab or else in our request department. Wandalstouring

IP assessor

While I normally work with WP:AIR, I have edited a number of other types of articles. Recently, the anon IP User:203.10.224.60 has been assesing arttcles for the MilHist Project. On Nov. 27, 2006, his methods were called into queston on his talk page, but he never answered the issues addressed.

However, his assessment of the Ticonderoga class aircraft carrier came to my attention, assed he assessed it as a "B" class article. However, I merged that article with the Essex class aircraft carrier almost four months ago. Makes it kind of obvious he is not even bothering to read the articles. I have posted a note pointing this out to him (her?) on his talk page. I just wanted to make the project aware of what he did on this page. Thanks from WP:AIR. - BillCJ 04:46, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Probably one of our regulars not logged in; I rather doubt a random anon would decide to start assessing our articles for no apparent reason.

As for the Ticonderoga, there's actually a perfectly obvious explanation:

Editor reaches the talk page (which isn't redirected) from the unassessed backlog list.
Editor opens the "article" tab in a new window.
Editor reads the article, but neglects to notice the little "Redirected from ..." text at the top.
Editor goes back to the other window (the redirect's talk page) and adds the article's assessment.

I know I've done something like that a couple of times myself. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 04:51, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Ok, now that makes a little more sense. I have seen this IP assess other articles before, primarily helicopter pages, if my memory serves correctly. As the one who merged the page, I negelcted to merge the talk page also, as I was still fairly new at the time. I've converted the talk page to a redirct now. THanks for the explanation. - BillCJ 05:14, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Project banner size & appearance

Just to keep everyone in the loop: there are a number of ideas being discussed here regarding the size and appearance of WikiProject banners, and different options for controlling the proliferation of various talk-page templates (of which said project banners are a major part). Things haven't really settled down yet, but there are a number of interesting possibilities being considered; for example:

I'll make an announcement if/when something's actually decided that would need to be implemented with regards to {{WPMILHIST}}; but, in the meantime, if anyone has any ideas regarding this, please feel free to wander over to the discussion and throw in your two cents! :-) Kirill Lokshin 06:13, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

And, incidentally, a way to have the banner collapse to a single line on a per-page basis, which we may want to implement regardless of anything else. Kirill Lokshin 07:17, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've added (mostly as an experiment) a hide= parameter to {{WPMILHIST}}; if set to "yes", it will cause the banner to display in a collapsed form with a show/hide button. Testing and feedback would be very welcome! Kirill Lokshin 23:04, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Very nice. It doesn't seem to be causing any problems, at least as far as I can tell. Although, it's of somewhat limited utility by itself...Carom 04:06, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

GA nomination

I think that the Big Red One (1st Infantry Division) article should be reviewed for GA status. I think that if we improve it, it will be a great FA.--Pupster21 14:57, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Bleh, GAs again. ;-)

(Typically A-Class is a better place to aim for, if you're intending to go to FA eventually.) Kirill Lokshin 16:31, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't like GA too much. I just thought that may work better and not take too long. A-class is fine. I need help on doing it though.--Pupster21 16:55, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I have nominated it for A-class. Please join in and back me.--Pupster21 17:18, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Peer review was probably a better option before going direct to A-Class. Just a thought....--Looper5920 07:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Move of 27th Engineer Battalion (United states)

I moved that to 27th Engineer Battalion (United States) because of capitalization. --Pupster21 16:57, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Ok. (You don't have to leave notes for the project on such issues, though; there isn't really anything that needs attention or discussion here. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 17:03, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

lol--Pupster21 17:07, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Assessments and articlehistory

I noticed a completed {{ArticleHistory}} template for a Good Article had its current status parameter changed to A-class, based on a MilHist assessment. In the past—with all the templates cluttering talk pages—it wasn't possible to incorrectly change a GA template. Now it is possible to incorrectly enter A-class into the "current status" field on articlehistory. Just wanted to call this to folks' attention, so that when assessments are upgraded to A-class, the articlehistory template stays at GA. Talk:T-26 (now corrected). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:44, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the note. Wandalstouring 01:54, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Coordinator elections: voting open!

Just to let anyone that misses the various messages elsewhere know: we will be selecting seven coordinators to serve for the next six months from a pool of sixteen candidates. Please vote here by February 25! Kirill Lokshin 00:01, 12 February 2007 (UTC)