Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Archive 13

Date categories

It would be nice if events were categorized by year, too. This would be especially useful for battles: for each battle, a new category could be added with the year of the battle, for cross-referencing purposes. -- Ze miguel 15:22, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

I think we currently do this using regular date categories (e.g. Category:1815). Unfortunately, most battles don't have the proper categories yet. —Kirill Lokshin 18:41, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

OK it's just a question of effort then :) -- Ze miguel 18:50, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

American Civil War Battles

Copied from Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions

The North and South called many of the battles of the American Civil War by different names (see Naming the American Civil War). Some sort of guideline should be established to determine the proper names for pages on these battles. I propose some combination of the following criteria, in order of precedence:

1. The National Parks Service's prefered name
2. Most common name in contemporary history writing
3. Local name for the battle
4. The preference of the victor in the particular battle--Bkwillwm 05:28, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

I think this needs discussing here and perhapse the article "Naming the American Civil War" should be moved into this area. There was something on this in the old WikiProject Battle page (or at least the talk pages). This also brings up the issue of wars with two different names eg: American War of Independence and American Revolutionary War. --Philip Baird Shearer 21:48, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Spanish Succession Campaign Redundancy

I have discovered that there are two Campaignboxes for the War of the Spanish Succession covering the same battles. I have nominated the less complete of the two for deletion after transferring all missing battles to the first. There appears to be no reason why two campaignboxes should exist for this war. If you wish to vote, please do so at Wikipedia:Templates for Deletion. Roy Al Blue 02:43, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Campaignbox Spanish Succession

Template:Campaignbox Spanish Succession has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Campaignbox:Spanish Succession. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roy Al Blue (talk • contribs)

Template:Early Muslim conflicts

This template is to be deleted per a vote held on WP:TFD. The suggestions in the comments mentioned replacing with either campaignbox or warbox. I'd like to ask this group for help in implementing that solution, since you are most knowledgable about how it can be done per your standards. You can note completion either to me or directly on the TFD holding cell. Thanks very much. -- Netoholic @ 21:01, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

• I've seen several names, including "The Muslim War of Independence", "The Muslim-Meccan Conflict", and "The Wars of Muhammad." My vote goes for 'The Muslim Conquest', which is also the title of an Osprey book, and I would run it from the Battle of Badr in 2 AH/622 AD to the end of the Umayyad Caliphate (and thus the unified Muslim empire) in 128 AH/750 AD. Palm_Dogg 20:17, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Not bad. We should probably rename Category:Islamic battles to Category:Battles of the Muslim Conquest to reduce confusion. —Kirill Lokshin 21:55, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Requesting Assisstance

Back in 2005 I created the BRAC templete to deal with bases that would be effected. The BRAC processes ended last year with the aproval to go ahead with suggested changes; however several pages here still have BRAC tags, and I have know idea how they were effected. If you would like to help me, go to the Template:BRAC article, click on "what links here", and see what you can do about cleaning up the lose ends. Thanks in advance. TomStar81 02:52, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

request for review: Battle of the Thousand Islands

Battle of the Thousand Islands I'm pretty much done with this (other then adding a battle box and maybe some bacground for the personallities mentioned). It needs proofreading, copy-edit and wikifying. please, take a look and help me polish this.Mike McGregor (Can) 10:27, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Looks good! I'll try to do some copyediting a bit later. You might want to look into getting a map of the battle, though. —Kirill Lokshin 18:14, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

request for peer review, Battle of the Thousand islands

Wikipedia:Peer review/Battle of the Thousand Islands/archive1

I Just finished up the main body of this article on a relitivly small engagemet of the French and Indian War. I'm hopeing a peer review will bring some suggestions on how the article can be improved and hopfully bring some more info on the subject. I'd like to see more info on some of the personalities that don't have they're own page to link to, and some more detail on how the battle developed... Any input would be very much appreciated! Mike McGregor (Can) 18:13, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Military Biographies

I'm sorry to bother everyone, however I was refered to this talk page regarding my post at Portal talk:War. I haven't been able to find much coverage of military biographies and I was wondering if there were any plans to expand coverage of biographies in regards to most wanted articles, etc. Up to this point, I've been trying to clear the red links from List of naval commanders and similar pages. Is there a specific project dealing with this subject ? MadMax 01:57, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Since I'm the one who directed him here, I thought I might make a few comments: at the time the Battles/Wars project merger occurred, someone (Philip Baird Shearer, I believe) commented that the joint project would be in a good position to handle biographies of military figures. I generally don't work with biographical articles, so it doesn't really matter to me; but a number of project members do edit military biographies extensively, so they may have more interest in this.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a separate project for these articles, so we're left as the go-to group (the other option, WikiProject Military, isn't formally concerned with biographies either, and is rather less active as well). Unless there are objections, we could easily add military personnel to the scope of the project; we could then work on getting some article guidelines and such put together for them at our leisure. —Kirill Lokshin 02:07, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

• I can put together a small list (including a few I'm am currently working on) if anyone would like to look it over. I'm also planning to expand the List of military commanders within the month although I'm still waiting for a responce to its proposed format. MadMax 20:01, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I've added a temporary list from the various lists around Wikipedia

to the Wanted list. Although the naval commanders list is faily comprehensive, I'm sure there's quite a bit missing from the others. MadMax 05:16, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Battle of Hohenfriedberg

Hello, I have expanded the Battle of Hohenfriedberg and I would like to know if it is still a stub. Thank you. Rshu 23:24, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Battle "disambiguation" pages

Recently WikiProject Ships had to retag its ship name disambiguation pages from {{disambig}} to the non-disambiguation {{shipindex}} to prevent editors from applying the disambiguation manual of style (see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Ship index pages). Battle disambiguation pages are going to suffer the same treatment, such as Battle of Antioch (compare [1] with partially-"fixed" [2]). So if this project wants to retain battle disambiguation pages as is, it will have to come retag & recategorise them out of disambiguation. 202.161.124.15 21:02, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Help needed with categories

There are three things that I'm trying to get done:

1. Add {{WikiProject Military history category}} and {{Battle category by conflict}} (with the appropriate parameters) to all the sub-categories of Category:Battles by war. About half of them are already done, so there are approximately 40 categories to tag.
2. Add {{WikiProject Military history category}} and {{War category by participant}} (with the appropriate parameters) to all the sub-categories of Category:Wars by country. There are about 60 categories to tag here.
3. Sort the war articles currently in Category:Wars into the appropriate country category.

I would be very grateful for any help with this :-) —Kirill Lokshin 03:10, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm free next couple of days, count me in. --Loopy ^e 04:45, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

1. i think thats it for the {{WikiProject Military history category}} tag in Category:Battles by war...Mike McGregor (Can) 07:03, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

• I'd be happy to help. Do these categories replace the others or do they stay within Category:War ? MadMax 20:11, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks! If I understood your question correctly, yes; when you add a more specific by-country war category, you should remove Category:War from the article. Category:War should eventually be free of actual war articles—each one should go under one or more "Wars of Somecountry" category instead. Kirill Lokshin 21:22, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

• I've sorted Category:War with the expection of four, as well as creating extended categories of pre existing ones (ex. Category:Wars of Africa as opposed to various categories with one or two entries) although I was hesitant to create new categories for the remaining ones. MadMax 01:13, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks a lot! —Kirill Lokshin 01:19, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Sure no problem. :) Also all the categories on Category:Wars by country have the category template listed. 01:37, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

The WikiProject templates are done on Category:Battles by war, although I'm having a bit of trouble with the Participant templates. I have most of the post-1800 countries, however origins for countries such as Ancient Greece or China are a bit harder to determine. MadMax 08:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Dead or Killed?

What is the standard for listing casualties in Infoboxes? I'm sure I read somewhere it should be Dead, Wounded, Captured, Missing as opposed to Killed, KIA, WIA, MIA, but now I can't find where I read that. Cheers --Loopy ^e 04:44, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm guessing it was here. I've added a corresponding note to the new infobox instructions; that point seems to have been overlooked when we wrote them up. —Kirill Lokshin 11:02, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

"Dead" v. "killed" seems to be a matter of individual preference. When I began writing battle articles I worked under the impression that "dead" was consistently used throughout Wikipedia. I prefer it for a variety of reasons, not all of which I can say are objectively justifiable. But I'm no longer as adamant as I once was, and tend to leave "killed"s alone – mostly. Albrecht 20:09, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

According to this amateur website:

Killed vs. Died: "Killed in the war" usually implies directly, by violence, while "died in the war" ("deaths in the war") implies all causes, including disease, famine and accident. It's best not to use these words interchangeably.

I think I've usually adhered to this usage to some extent, even before I stumbled upon that passage, since "killed" and "dead" to me instinctively convey slightly different meanings. For battles, I write "killed"; for wars, it's "killed" for killed in action, and "dead" for total deaths. I'm not suggesting this as a standard; it's probably too fine a point for our purposes, and certainly not consistently observed in published sources. --Kevin Myers | (complaint dept.) 15:22, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Sounds fair to just leave it up to the preference of the editor then. Interesting dicussion, though. --Loopy ^e 20:13, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

The greatest battle since Waterloo?

I hope that someone knowledgable will comment on this assertion: [3] --Ghirla | talk 11:19, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

LARGEST would seem an more apt term. Clearly it was, at least in Europe.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 12:06, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Looks so, given that not much happened from 1815 to 1831 ;-) Kirill Lokshin 12:28, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Sengoku period campaignboxes

My primary focus on the 'pedia has been feudal Japanese battles, and I am now running into something of a dilemma.

The Sengoku period (1467-1615, 'The Age of the Country at War') is not nearly as well defined as a proper war like WWII. It consists of countless battles between hundreds of feudal lords jockeying for position; over the course of this period, a handful emerged as significant and powerful warlords who threatened to control significant portions of Japan or its entirety. Thus, I have chosen to separate the battles out by which of the major warlords fought them. I've created campaignboxes for "Campaigns of the Hojo", "Takeda", "Toyotomi Hideyoshi", and "Oda Nobunaga".

However, sometimes these warlords fought one another, and their battles therefore overlap. It has been decided that it is bad form to have any one battle listed on multiple campaignboxes. (And I agree muchly.) Thus, I am stuck with something of a dilemma. I suppose the only recourse is to decide for each battle, on a case-by-case basis, which campaign to put it in. Does the Battle of Nagashino belong in 'campaigns of the Takeda' because they instigated the battle, and because it marks the end of their power? Or does it belong in 'campaigns of Oda Nobunaga' because it marks a major victory on his part, of his gunners over the famed Takeda cavalry? Or does it belong under 'campaigns of Tokugawa Ieyasu', because it represents one of Tokugawa's first major battles and the beginnings of his rise to power?

Or should I do something really silly, and ignore entirely whose battles are whose, dividing the entire Sengoku period by decades, or by geography? Thanks for your input and ideas. LordAmeth 06:55, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm, I think being silly is the way to go. Maybe subdivide the Sengoku up into four or five sub-eras, similar to what has been done with the Hundred Years' War. You could start with the Ōnin War and its aftermath and end with Azuchi-Momoyama period and Rise of Tokugawa. Then further subdivide them by decade or geography, clan or leader, whichever you think more pertinent. In the example above, Nagashino would mark the end of the Takeda ascedency and the start Nobunaga's (Hey, to the victor goes the naming rights:). Hope this helps, or at least doesnt hurt :>--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 10:19, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

It may be a little difficult to decide on where to break up the period under this model, though—would Nagashino go under the Takeda campaignbox, or the Nobunaga one? —Kirill Lokshin 14:00, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Silly and cop-out as it may sound, why not BOTH?--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 16:51, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

No reason from the campaignbox perspective; but we would then need to add both campaignboxes to the article, no? Which may well be the best solution here, but given the size of those, it'll produce a rather large stack of boxes along the right margin ;-) —Kirill Lokshin 17:30, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Disagree. Either we should make a big one like Template:World War II, or divide it up chronologically (The Unification Period, Tokugawa Shogunate)/regionally (Sengoku Jidai in Central Japan, Sengoku Jidai on Kyushu), like most of the other campaigns. Palm_Dogg 17:59, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

The entire question, then, would become one of how to create the chronological divisions. There are a lot of battles, so broad partitions will produce enormous campaignboxes. —Kirill Lokshin 18:39, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

In that case I change my vote to R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine)'s suggestion and just do campaignboxes for each clan and resign ourselves to having two or three camapign boxes per battle. I guess there really is no other way to divy up Sengoku Jidai battles except by clan. Palm_Dogg 19:11, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Maybe by clan and by date? In other words, rather than having a single "Campaigns of the Takeda", we could have "Early campaigns of the Takeda", etc. This would, at least, reduce the size of each of the multiple campaignboxes. —Kirill Lokshin 19:51, 15 January 2006 (UTC)