Talk:List of World War I flying aces from Estonia

Concerning the tags on this article

I do not quite understand the concept of merging single-item lists into a list of miscellany simply because I can not conjure up an organizing principle. List of World War I aces from random countries?

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The existing list(s) of World War I aces by country already exists in some form. If there were a way to sort the existing sub-lists to List of World War I flying aces via the "Country" heading, it should be relatively simple. Otherwise, it's a data entry plod compiling these lists. I should know; I did about 85% of the data entry work on the existing lists. My eyes still cross at the memory.

Georgejdorner (talk) 14:02, 26 March 2011 (UTC) --- Revisiting this, I am puzzled that there is a suggestion to merge an (in-progress) list of aces of a single nationality with a list of aces from a single country. What's the difference? And when will this imaginary article to be merged with appear for the merger?

Georgejdorner (talk) 18:57, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

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Sortable tables exist. Someone with far more interest in the topic than I must take up the merger. In the mean time, I've taken off the tag since no-one has done anything about the merge in years anyway, and as you point out, you can't merge an article to a non-existent article. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:15, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

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Hi, manski,

As the originator of List of World War I flying aces from Estonia, I shall be glad to supply a list of sinister reds as soon as I find the info....lol.

But, seriously...I started the Estonian list as one of a number of minor lists abstracted from Lists of World War I flying aces. The purpose of these small lists was to embarrass someone into somehow using sortable tables on the complete string of lists referred to in this paragraph to produce lists of British, German, etc. aces. I have requested help for this for five years now, and been roundly ignored. However, while these small lists attract attention, no one seems to connect the dots.

At present, I am searching for an article with which I could merge this one because two years of searching has uncovered other Estonian pilots, but no more aces. That is what also happened with a list of WWI Greek ace(s) that became a list of one. In that case, it was merged into an overall list of Greek aces of all eras.

I do have other purposes in creating such short lists. The circumstantial assignment of ethnic minorities to various air forces illustrates the vagaries of imperial policy on both sides. For example, Polish aces are to be found in the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian imperial air forces.

Americans, like myself, have been generally oblivious that WWI was a battle of competing empires; we think in modern terms of nation versus nation, not a clash between empires. These little lists educate by rattling that assumption.

Georgejdorner (talk) 20:15, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Dubious ace

I have found a more reliable reference that states this pilot was not an ace. This is per page 217, Above the War Fronts: The British Two-seater Bomber Pilot and Observer Aces, the British Two-seater Fighter Observer Aces, and the Belgian, Italian, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Fighter Aces, 1914–1918: Volume 4 of Fighting Airmen of WWI Series: Volume 4 of Air Aces of WWI. Norman Franks, Russell Guest, Gregory Alegi. Grub Street, 1997. ISBN 1-898697-56-6, ISBN 978-1-898697-56-5.

Georgejdorner (talk) 18:14, 17 April 2013 (UTC)