Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Worklist

Campaigns

What about a campaign category? Leithp 19:18, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Add them to "Battles", perhaps? Otherwise, we'll need to get into questions of where Battle of Normandy belongs and such. —Kirill Lokshin 19:21, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Would I put Burma Campaign in the battles category? I had been planning to add Battle of Imphal and Battle of Kohima as well. Leithp 19:26, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

No reason why not ;-) We can always create a separate table later if any problems come up. —Kirill Lokshin 19:27, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Colors

Do we want to keep the Chemistry colors? Maybe a spectrum-like scheme (similar to the Babel boxes) would work better? —Kirill Lokshin 19:26, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I like the colors. Keep 'em. I've run through a few of the articles, added remarks. Will change a few things in relevant articles. Guapovia 23:15, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

The 12 Biggest Wars in History

In case there's ever a need to prioritize the wars on the worklist, here's one view of what constitutes the biggest wars in history. From Appendix A of Niall Ferguson's The Cash Nexus, here are the 12 "biggest wars in history", as determined by the number of "war dead as a percentage of world population":

1. World War II
2. World War I
3. Thirty Years' War
4. Napoleonic Wars
5. War of the Spanish Succession
6. Seven Years' War
7. War of the League of Augsburg
8. French Revolutionary Wars
9. Dutch War of Louis XIV (1672-78) (i.e. Third Anglo-Dutch War)
10. Ottoman War (1682-99) (i.e. what Wikipedia calls the second Great Turkish War)
11. War of the Austrian Succession
12. Korean War

--Kevin Myers | (complaint dept.) 21:22, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

The Ten Greatest Generals

Here are the ten greatest generals in history, according to The Reader's Companion to Military History (Cowley & Parker, eds., 1996), which they list in chronological order:

• Alexander the Great
• Hannibal
• Saladin
• Ghengis Khan
• Oda Nobunaga
• Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
• Napoleon Bonaparte
• Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
• William T. Sherman
• William Slim

--Kevin Myers | (complaint dept.) 15:27, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I added in Moltke, who was the only one missing. I'm not sure about that list though. I'm a big admirer of Bill Slim's accomplishments, but why was he in there and not John Churchill? Or Scipio Africanus Major, or Belisarius, or...... Leithp 16:55, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Generating classification tables

How are you guys generating these? By hand? With automation? Wikipedia:WikiProject The Beatles/Article Classification has similar tables that we are just getting started with. We have a lot less articles but even that's a bit daunting. I did the first two tables from the category list (copying the text off a category page, that was icky), and the second two from WP:AWB generated list of articles in the category. But is that how you guys did it? Also, how do you handle category overlap? And how did you decide which articles to rate (out of a claimed 15K worth!) Any best practices appreciated. Thanks and happy editing! (PS, "imagine there's no countries... nothing to kill or die for...") ++Lar: t/c 04:57, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

They're being done by hand, basically. We started out with some "X Most Important Battles"-type lists (probably not an option for you) and went from there, with project members adding articles from areas they work on. The same principle applies to rating them (most articles are rated by the person who adds them). It's still a work-in-progress, obviously; but, given the extreme number of articles, we're mostly getting ones that are "important" or high-quality at this point.

As far as categories are concerned, my suggestion would be to abandon the standard Wikipedia categories if they cause any trouble and just use whatever sections are convenient. This would be particularly true if you have a complicated category tree to deal with.

Hope that helps! —Kirill Lokshin 05:03, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Helps loads. Thanks! Next question, then, your article class templates... they're just "sub files"? We've been using raw formatting but the templates are much better, less typing, less fiddlyness. We think we might need one more though, for "AfD".. some of what we're coming across isn't worth keeping, we don't think. I guess we'd just copy them over and go from there? (if not copied to a subpage, their invokation syntax has to be fully spelt out, not so good for ease of use!) ++Lar: t/c 05:19, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, just copying the contents would probably be easiest. We don't have a dedicated AFD template (deleteable stuff usually doesn't last long enough to get noticed and listed here), but I can see where you might need one if you're going to automate or semi-automate the list generation. —Kirill Lokshin 05:22, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Worklist templates?

Is is possible to make the individual lists templates? This would allow the lists to be embedded in other pages as well. While this might make editing the lists a little tricker, an "edit link" could be made part of the table.

This could be advantagous for wars and battles. Wars could be broken up according to the task force they are a assigned to (with a "general" category for orphan wars?). Battles could be broken up by war. The lists would be centrally managed (in the template page), but could be embedded in the task force pages (or anywhere else) as well. - Vedexent 00:21, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

It's a clever idea, but unfortunately we have (or will shortly have) overlapping task forces. For example, the Battle of Grunwald is both Middle Ages and Polish military history; which template would it be listed on. Having a separate template for every war would be rather unmaintainable, in my opinion. —Kirill Lokshin 00:31, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Darn. It would be nice to be able to list the relevant wars and battles for the task forces, in a work list format, but I don't think it is workable to have two such lists - you'd have problems with them getting out of sync and not being able to tell which one was right for a given article. Anyone have any ideas how this could be done? - Vedexent 00:34, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

RSTA

Would anyone mind taking a look into this article? There's plenty of information on the web about it, and it'd be a very easy improve. ⇒ SWATJester ^Ready Aim _Fire! 22:47, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Update to colors

I've updated the colors to match the spectrum used by the main 1.0 scheme a bit more closely (with some differences in shade and so forth, made purely on aesthetic grounds). Any objections to the new set? Kirill Lokshin 03:41, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

For reference the colors used in WP:Beatles have been changed: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject The Beatles/Article Classification. I sort of think gray in the middle doesn't make as much sense as a more chromatic rainbow... It would be good to have everyone use the same set if it made sense to do so. It may not though... we use more colors to carry info about proposed merge/delete and AfD bait than some do. 04:19, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, feel free to use the templates we've used: {{FA-Class}}, {{A-Class}}, {{B-Class}}, {{Start-Class}} and {{Stub-Class}}, and to propose improvements to that chromatic scheme. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 01:08, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Congrats

Wow, this is an extensive worklist, and it is certainly very impressive. :) If you think it is appropriate, you can also transfer part of your list (e.g. FAs and A-Class articles) to your WikiProject's table on the Work Via WikiProjects listing, so everyone can see the progress you've made. Again, congrats! Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 01:12, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Conversion process status

Note to self (and anyone else who happens to drop by to do the conversion to the new assessment system): everything up to "Wars" has been retagged. Kirill Lokshin 05:57, 7 May 2006 (UTC)