Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Archive 26

Newsletter: Part Deux

I've written some material up for this month's newsletter; it's rather brief, though. There are several questions, then:

• Should we distribute the newsletter on a monthly basis, potentially keeping them brief; or, alternately, condense them to one every two months? Or perhaps some other arrangement?
• A handful of people have asked either to receive only a link to the newsletter, or to not receive it entirely; we'll need to deal with that as part of our distribution cycle. Should the default for members who haven't said anything be a full copy or just a link, though?
• As usual, are there any volunteers to distribute the thing?
• Finally, is there anything I've neglected to mention in this issue that should be there?

Given the discussion following the last issue, I'm somewhat hesitant to foist my preferences regarding these points on everybody; so I'd really appreciate some feedback here. Kirill Lokshin 02:00, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Once a month, that way we dont get a too condenced message (either loosing information of getting an overlong news letter). I would perfer a link, but this is in keeping that each newletter is archived somewhere. What I mean by this is that I perfer to have a list of links within a years time rather than a long series of blocks. Yet should the block be replaced every newsletter, therefore always keeping a similar size on my user page, I have no qualms about that. I hope this helpsDryzen 14:55, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm already creating the issues on indivdual subpages, so it would be pretty easy just to leave the link to the current one on everyone's talk page, rather than pasting it in. I'm perfectly happy to go along with whatever everyone else thinks would be most useful. Kirill Lokshin 21:09, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Project award issue

Apparently our project award is up for some sort of vote. I'm not entirely clear on what the point of it is, or what authority that particular process has to dictate admissible awards; but some input from the members of this project might be helpful there. Kirill Lokshin 02:58, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Wow. That page is among the best/worst examples of pointless bureaucracy that I've seen yet on Wikipedia. Leithp 07:34, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

officialis

Fruitcakes and busybodies. Andreas 07:41, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

hmm... an organisation that checks up projects award... Sounds like a government bureaucracy...Dryzen 14:48, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

mmm, I think there is a point to be made - actually I made it over there - that if every project simply issues its own awards, what real meaning do they end up having. Consider if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences yielded its perogative to award Oscars to individual film studios. So instead of a handful of truly outstanding pictures being recognized annually across the industry(I realize this is a bad example given the studio politics, but bear with me), you'd have potentially dozens of "Best Pictures" each year as each studio awarded its own. Additionally, was never happy with the design of "our" barnstar (or any of the other suggestions, come to that) but primarily the "winning design" for the simple fact that the barnstar isn't the focus of the design. The other awards have the barnstar as the central image, decorated in a way relevant to the category. Our design focuses on the chevrons, with the barnstar itself shrunk to a fraction of its size and almost seemingly added as an afterthought. My suggestion would be to have an info box at the bottom of wiki pages scrutinized by peer review, with the project logo and saying something like "This page conforms to the standards agreed upon by the Military History WikiProject." Then you can recognize more pages without any elitism, and give wider exposure to the project.Michael Dorosh 14:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

I think that is a perfectly fine suggestion. It is however different from some random page with a self-appointed enforcer person/clique raising the issue without even informing the project in question, if I understand correctly what happened here. If you want to have a constructive debate on the matter, the way they went is clearly not the way to do it. In fact it is none of their business to start with. I still think that page is a joke, they can not possibly be serious. Andreas 14:57, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

It's certainly an interesting suggestion, but somewhat unrelated to the award issue, which is meant to be given to editors rather than individual articles. Kirill Lokshin 21:01, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

My comment there is if you're going to do something, why not do it right? The concern is legitimate even if their handling was clumsy. I've awarded you a barnstar for your contribution to the "debate" there. Whether or not they are serious, if we ourselves think it a serious issue, it would behoove us to act with some decorum. It's either a lark or it isn't. If so, why bother responding to them at all. If not, then why not engage them with reasoned logic rather than what might be construed as a personal attack?Michael Dorosh 15:02, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Because I am not convinced it is an important issue. You make a good point, but I am not convinced of its practicality. I don't have a fundamental problem with the current system. It is probably less controversial than drawing up some guideline on what is a good article, an easy way to give out some encouragement, and in line with the Wikipedia approach. I also don't mind the way it looks. Andreas 15:28, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

My major concern with that would be that any process where contributors had to face a panel before receiving a barnstar would produce the same vicious mobs that can sometimes be seen on RFA, leading to nothing but resentment all around. Maybe a two-tiered system of awards given by individuals and awards given by groups (anything from WikiProjects to Wikipedia as a whole) might work? Kirill Lokshin 21:19, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Good points, both of you. Like you said Michael Dorosh, an "Oscar" of barnstars could produce top quality and reputable awards. But as Andreas pointed out this isn't hte group to do it. A such said organisation (barnstar "oscars") will need to be heavily populated by the projects themselves, since I would tend to belive Military History members have more understanding of what our award means. Therfore we fall back on having ourselves voting for our members the same as if this organisation didn't exist. (This is of course over simplification) That being said, I could well support the said organisation, but not the current clique.Dryzen 15:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Since anyone can award anyone else a barnstar for completely subjective reasons with no reference to actual facts, I am astonished that they are arguing about what the criteria should be. The awards are as meaningful or meaningless as the awarder chooses to make them. The analogy to the Oscars fails once you realize that anyone can award these "Oscars", instead of just "the Academy". --Habap 16:01, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, I should point-out that any concerns with the design or profligacy of the award should be voiced here, not at that circus committee. An oppose vote is a vote for priggishness and petty officialism. Albrecht 16:20, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

• As one of the participants on the awards discussion page I had one or two comments I wanted to make. The awards pages themselves are a listing of what people are currently doing. What some may call bureaucracy was an effort to try and organize the pages which were getting chaotic.

There were clear guidelines about posting an award. It would have been good form before posting the award to the page to at least let people know that a significant discussion had already occured.

I don’t see a problem with the award, and the military history project (of which I participate) was not singled out. By the way, when User:Kirill Lokshin said it would have been nice to be notified, he was notified here Barnstar, OTR & PUA Review -- evrik 17:18, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

In all fairness, the award was (to the best of my knowledge) listed only on the "Personal awards" page, not the "official" list of barnstars. Are there now to be rules and guidelines and bureacracy for that as well? Kirill Lokshin 21:06, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

To be fair to Kirill, he should be forgiven for ignoring this - "FYI. You may want to look and comment here", as that does not indicate why he should care about the page linked.

Additionally, ours was a PUA, not a barnstar. You have chosen to say it is a Barnstar (and not sufficiently rigorous enough to be a barnstar). We didn't try to jump through the hoops to become a Barnstar, so it shouldn't surprise you that it is unable to do so.... --Habap 21:19, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Heh, I actually did look at the page when I saw that link. At the time, though, I foolishly assumed it was merely going to be a discussion of how to organize the various award pages (borne out by the removal of the PUAs shortly afterwards), rather than an outright attempt at removing particular awards. Kirill Lokshin 21:39, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Amazingly within 24 hours this has become one of the most discussed section in our talk page.Dryzen 14:55, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Project on the mainpage

Battle of the Lower Dnieper is on DYK today. Well done Grafikm_fr for a very much in-depth and informative article right off the bat. Andreas 13:28, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Well done, I had never heard of this momentous battle.Dryzen 14:33, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

That may be because it is usually called "Battle for the Dnieper" in sources. I believe it should be renamed for that reason. See its talk page. heqs 19:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Excellent work, as usual! Kirill Lokshin 21:08, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Tatsinskaya Raid appeared on the main page under DYK on 28 April. Andreas 09:00, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Battle of Smolensk (1943) is on main page. Wewt? :) -- Grafikm ^(AutoGRAF) 20:22, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

User box Task force templates.

While looking for Userbox templates to populate my User page I begun to conform the boxes that I found to the ones posted in the WikiProject Military History page. I've since put them in the list in alphabetical order. Not all task forces have a template, should I complete the series?Dryzen 17:29, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Feel free. I didn't bother creating any that weren't requested by the task force; but it might be helpful to have them ready if anyone wants them. Kirill Lokshin 21:57, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

As per Kirill Lokshin's suggestion I have used each Task Force's notice template image to complete the Userbox series. Dryzen 14:30, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Potential change to worklist

Just to let everyone know, the "Work via WikiProjects" WP:1.0 group (the people that originally got us started on the worklist idea) have been discussing a number of changes that might be possible. The two most important ones that I noticed:

• Putting ratings directly on article talk pages by including them in the WikiProject banner ({{WPMILHIST}}, in our case). These would feed into categories by rating, which would then be monitored by one of several bots to produce a daily log of changes.
• Adding an "article importance" rating to determine what the key articles for a small release could be.

It's not yet clear when (or even if) the support for doing this will be in place; but, just based on the proposed idea itself, would there be any major objections to moving to this model once it was available? Kirill Lokshin 12:54, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Some very interesting work being done and the rating work could be a good point of intrest. But its a risky move, like you put about POVs, this addition could as well lift articles as send them in the deep. Dryzen 13:23, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm still waiting to see how easy-to-use the bot-generated logs will be. There are probably still particularly contentious articles whose ratings will bounce, but I guess there's really no way to avoid that; our worklist has probably escaped it more by virtue of not being very easy to find than anything else. Kirill Lokshin 13:31, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

You mention identifying key articles, at the moment our worklist is only the key articles. Are other projects listing all their articles? In our case that would be, uh, somewhat time-consuming. Leithp 13:33, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

If the ratings were built into {{WPMILHIST}}, any article tagged with it could be rated, and would automatically be placed on the list, so there wouldn't be a need to manage the list by hand. The article importance idea is, as far as I can tell, just a primitive way to pick out some good articles to include in, say, a 5000 article print edition. (It's not like we'll go around removing the ratings from talk pages because we don't think they're "key articles".) Kirill Lokshin 13:39, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

In that case it sounds extremely useful. In our case it would be a far better way of pointing relatively knowledgeable users to poor articles than the {{cleanup}} and {{stub}} systems. On the subject of stubs, I'm always amazed that more people spend more time administering the stub system than expanding the articles. That's a bit off-topic though.... Leithp 13:47, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Have to agree with Leithp here. Looks like an awesome idea. Laserbeamcrossfire

As an example, see Talk:1492-1524 Atlantic hurricane seasons. The primary points to notice are (a) the rating directly in the WikiProject banner, and (b) the linked category generated by it, which feeds into a collection of categories by rating. Neat, isn't it? ;-) Kirill Lokshin 03:32, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Looks awesome! Laserbeamcrossfire

I've started collating all of the needed materials here, if anyone is interested. Once the actual Mathbot system becomes operational, we can do the same for this. Kirill Lokshin 01:58, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

It looks like Mathbot is now running: here are some auto-generated worklists, and here is the log. I think we can probably switch over to the new format simultaneously with the change over to the new consolidated project banner (as below), unless anyone has objections? Kirill Lokshin 03:24, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

How about creating a new Cleanup category, in addition to the B-Class, Start etc cats? Leithp 07:40, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, would we want a separate "class" of articles, or just a cleanup flag in the template? I could see where it would be useful to flag an article as needing attentioon without changing the assessment. Kirill Lokshin 10:11, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

I hadn't though of that. The cleanup flag on the template would do the job just as well. Leithp 10:34, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

I've added support for |attention=yes into {{WPMILHIST}}. Try not to overload it with hundreds of stubs all at once, though ;-) Kirill Lokshin 13:42, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

That's done the trick. Cheers. Leithp 14:22, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Infobox conversion request

Just found {{Infobox British WWI division}}, which is used on about 50 articles. Might anyone be able to help with converting them to {{Infobox Military Unit}}? Kirill Lokshin 23:03, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

• Are you wanting someone to take on the task of replacing all the {{Infobox British WWI division}} templates with {{Infobox Military Unit}}? The British infobox includes some info (colors and previous and next) that the new Military Unit box does not have; likewise, there is the possibity of including more information in the new infoboxes. —ERcheck @ 23:38, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I put a test example on the British 33rd Division talk page. —ERcheck @ 23:41, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Very nice; that's just what I meant. As far as the previous and next divisions go, I think the Canadian units settled on using {{Succession box}} at the bottom of the article to represent the order of precedence (I assume that is the order of precedence being indicated here). Kirill Lokshin 23:43, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
      • So, do you feel that "conversion" means both moving to the new infobox and doing the succession box. Or is the new box sufficient? —ERcheck @ 23:47, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
        • Primarily the new infobox itself. If someone feels like doing succession boxes, they can; but we don't really have a guideline suggesting their use. Kirill Lokshin 23:50, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I converted completed conversion of British 33rd Division -- in order to capture the British First World War divisions link in the old infobox, I added List of British divisions in WWI to a "See also" section. I'll start from the list and go down in order ... I hope to get help, as I'm still working on unfinished USMC articles. —ERcheck @ 00:00, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Thanks a lot; your help is very appreciated! :-) Kirill Lokshin 00:04, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Finished through all Regular Army Infantry ... taking a break for RL and then USMC articles. I'll check back later. Suggest we work from the list above. —ERcheck @ 00:37, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
• Update: Completed through 46th division. Taking a break. —ERcheck @ 00:05, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

• I've updated the remaining templates as best I can. I'm not sure if all the information is correct but it might be a good idea for someone to run through them just in case. Sorry I couldn't have gotten here sooner. ;-) MadMax 04:26, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

• MadMax, I reviewed them and made a few changes (New Army vs Territorial / Infantry). So, looks like all the existing articles for WWI divisions are done. —ERcheck @ 00:41, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Great work on both your parts; and thank you very much for your help! Presumably we can go ahead and nominate the old template for deletion now? Kirill Lokshin 00:46, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

• Good idea -- I verified via "What links here" that the only link is to this page. No more articles. Go ahead and nominate. —ERcheck @ 00:51, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Done. Kirill Lokshin 00:55, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not too familiar with this project, but I also think these items should be standardized. I stumbled upon this after standardizing a number of University infoboxes. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 19:09, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

• Template:Infobox Polish Navy
• Template:Infobox Polish Soldiers
• Template:Infobox Polish soldier
• Template:Infobox Polish monarch

In theory, all of those should be converted to the corresponding standard infoboxes. In practice... the Polish templates—originally designed by the Polish military history task force (when it was still a separate project)—predate the standard infoboxes; the issue of deprecating them came up when the project became a task foce, and the comments from the task force members suggested that they preferred the aestheics of their own infoboxes. I've therefore avoided actively pushing a conversion, in order to minimize intra-project conflict.

Which is not to say that we can't go for a conversion here; but I think we'd need a pretty strong consensus for it within the project as a whole. Until I see some evidence that anyone actually cares, I prefer to grandfather in these particular boxes, rather than provoking the Polish task force into splitting back out over any perceived authoritarian moves on my part. Kirill Lokshin 23:30, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

You may want to look at the success of consolidating the University infoboxes Template talk:Infobox University. There were 42 separate infoboxes, now there are only 4, going on 1. You may not need to push the issue now, but I am glad that you are aware of the issue and hope that consistency is achieved. Thanks! --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 13:58, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Top-level categories (Part Deux)

As you may have noticed, the top-level category map has been coming along quite nicely. Aside from the major cleanup needed in several areas (military people and military units, primarily), which is a massive project unto itself, there are a number of points I'd like comments on:

1. Category:Military tactics, Category:Military doctrines, and Category:Military strategy seem to have massive overlaps (and parts of them need to be moved to the new Category:Warfare by type). Might it be a good idea to merge them in some fashion; and, if so, under what name?
2. Category:Military terminology seems rather badly constructed; aside from dictionary definitions, most of its contents should be categorized under actual topics. Maybe we should merge some of the permanent stubs into some sort of Glossary of military terms?
3. I'm hoping to combine Category:War art and Category:War novels under a single over-category; what would be a good name for it? Category:Cultural depictions of war, perhaps?
4. Is there some useful distinction between Category:War and conflict museums and Category:Military museums, or can they be merged?
5. Category:Military history and Category:Warfare, which are redundant with the new structure, have been sitting empty; does anyone have objections to nominating them for deletion?

Suggestions on any of these issues would be very appreciated! Kirill Lokshin 01:47, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Anybody have comments? ;-) Kirill Lokshin 16:30, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Since there seem to be no objections, at least to the last point, I've nominated Category:Military history and Category:Warfare for deletion here; comments would be welcome. Kirill Lokshin 01:28, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Consolidated banner template?

Now that the new parserFunctions extension has given us more-or-less reliable conditionals, I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to combine all of the various yellow talk page banners into the {{WPMILHIST}} template, which would display selected ones based on parameters (see {{Hurricane}} and Talk:Tropical cyclone for an example used by another project). This could include, beyond the basic banner:

• Article assessments (after the worklist conversion is completed)
• Task force notices
• Collaboration notices
• MILHIST peer review notices

So, worth doing, or totally crazy idea? ;-) Kirill Lokshin 21:45, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I think that if it is reliable, it is work pursuing. A lot of the project pages I'm paying attention to have 2 banners (WikiProject and Task Force) on them. If we can merge them into one banner that would be great - as well as adding flags for reviews, article class, etc. I say go for it :) - Vedexent 21:59, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

An example (with every option selected; most articles wouldn't have it quite so large) of a combined banner can be seen here. Note the automatic addition of various categories based on the parameters given. Comments? Kirill Lokshin 23:28, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Looks awesome. Looks really awesome, actually. Laserbeamcrossfire

Great work.Dryzen 18:10, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll try to see if I can write up a description of what all the different parameters are. Kirill Lokshin 22:37, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Nice. -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 22:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Okay, here is a draft of the instructions for the template. I'd appreciate if somebody could read through it and comment on how comprehensible it is. Kirill Lokshin 01:27, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Reads fine to me - nice one. --Loopy ^e 04:01, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Can we forgo the "yes" at the end of each parameter and make it so that if you use, say, {{WPMILHIST|FA-class|old-peer-review|WWII-taskforce}} it will display all that without having to have 3 parameters each with its own "yes"? Not essential, but good to have. BTW the hyphenation is a bit funky IMHO. -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 04:15, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

We can get rid of the hyphenation easily enough if you think it's a problem; I mostly followed the spacing on the existing templates when adding hyphens. Unfortunately, though, MediaWiki has no way of distinguishing a blank parameter and one that's not there at all, which is why all of them need the extra "yes" appended on the end. Kirill Lokshin 11:42, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, if the hyphenation is inherited from existing templates then they should stay. It's too bad MediaWiki doesn't take balnk parameters, but it's not a big deal. -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 03:09, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I'm trying to come up with a topic/battle/war/article that would fall into the domain of all the task forces at the same time like that! :D - Vedexent 00:19, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Okay, any objections to going ahead and switching to this new format, then? Kirill Lokshin 03:22, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Since nobody seems to be objecting (and the WP:1.0 people are ready for us, apparently), I've gone ahead and put the new code into the template. I'll update all of the project pages with any instruction changes a bit later today; in the meantime, feel free to start rating stuff! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 20:24, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Status update

Okay, all the instruction pages that referred to the old-style banners have been updated, and any articles that were in the collaboration or peer review queues have been converted. If anyone is bored and looking for something to do, here's what needs to be done to wrap this up:

1. Transfer the ratings on the old worklist to new tags on the relevant articles.
2. Convert all the articles using any of the individual task force notice templates to the new format.
3. Replace {{WPMILHIST}} with {{catwikiproject|Military history}} on any category pages where the latter appears.
4. Attack Category:Unassessed military history articles with wild abandon ;-)

Help with any of these would be very appreciated! Kirill Lokshin 02:10, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

And, for anyone interested, Mathbot is now generating a worklist and a log of changes for us. Kirill Lokshin 02:57, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Are these the ones that will make it to Wikipedia 1.0, or are these just the ones which have the quality tags? -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 03:03, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

All the ones that have the tags. I think the WP1.0 people are setting up a separate process for actually deciding which articles get put into the hardcopy version, but I'm not sure if that's active yet. Kirill Lokshin 03:05, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the explanation. Anyway, I've started doing some tagging consolidating those with multiple tags into the new format. -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 03:19, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

(Sneaking my head in) Nope, they're not active, but the processes Kirill refers to are Wikipedia:Version 0.5 Nominations, and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Nominations. There's still a bit of work left to do to set it up... a few more eyes can't hurt. :) Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 21:20, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

• Update: All the {{WPMILHIST}} Category tags, with the exception of Category talk: and Categories listed for deletion, have been replaced with {{catwikiproject|Military history}} MadMax 01:28, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Hard Copy Release

What are you talking about?Michael Dorosh 19:24, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

The WP 1.0 project plans to do a DVD release of a limited subset of Wikipedia articles (possibly as early as late this year). Kirill Lokshin 19:35, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Wow, that's a pretty terrible idea. Lots of headaches all around; little practical purpose. Albrecht 20:01, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Meh, it's something that's been in the works for a long time. Probably won't come to much on a practical level; but, from a PR standpoint, being able to distribute Wikipedia(tm) on DVD will probably be a good thing. Kirill Lokshin 20:13, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and who gets the money from that? I suspect the contributors will not be being paid since they've so "generously" donated their work into the public domain. Now I can see why some dude freaked out when I put a limited copyright notice on some images I created and uploaded.:-)Michael Dorosh 01:40, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation, presumably? I believe that's the way the German Wikipedia has done it (they've done a DVD release before; I have no idea how successful theirs was). Kirill Lokshin 01:42, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I doubt the costs would be much more than production - the first German CD was sold for 3 Euro and was also distributed for free with an issue of some computer magazine (as well as the iso being up for free download). The subsequent DVD release sold for 9.9 Euro - "this price included 16% taxes and a 1 Euro donation to Wikimedia Deutschland; production costs were about 2 Euro. The DVD image can also be downloaded for free." The rest probably went to the distributor. --Loopy ^e 04:43, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Passchendaele?

Does anyone have the slightest idea why "Battle of Passchendaele" was moved to "Passchendaele"? Gsl mentioned that "that is where the community has decided the main article should be," but I have trouble believing such a bizarre move was borne of a consensus. More importantly, does anyone object to changing it back? Albrecht 15:49, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Seems utterly bizarre; should we move Battle of Stalingrad to Stalingrad, then? I have no objections to moving it back, but it might be best to go formally through WP:RM on this one, just in case there's something obvious we're missing. Kirill Lokshin 16:01, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Passchendaele was originally at Passchendale and was cut-and-paste moved to Passchendaele back in March 2002. I cannot recall it ever having moved to or from anywhere else. Battle of Passchendaele has never been moved either that I am aware of. Gsl 22:38, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

A source a day keeps the copyright police away...

...but, unfortunately, Image:Waricon.png doesn't have one (or at least not one likely to satisfy them) :-(

Given how prominently it's used, I think it's better to make absolutely sure somebody doesn't delete it out from under us. So, two questions:

1. Can anybody figure out where it's from? When The Minister of War originally uploaded, he noted it was cropped from a US Army map of WWI operations, but I'm not sure what map that would be.
2. If we can't determine where it's from, does anyone have any good ideas for something we could replace it with? Obviously, to avoid having this problem come up again, it would need to have a very detailed provenance available. Kirill Lokshin 23:42, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

It appears to be a map of the Morhange-Sarrebourg area in Lorraine, where the Battle of the Frontiers took place in the first months of WWI. It looks like The Minister of War cropped out "Sarre" out of Sarrebourg. Laserbeamcrossfire

It's cropped from here. Gsl 00:14, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Wow, excellent detective work! Thanks a lot! Kirill Lokshin 00:18, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Sihang Warehouse, Round 2 (what's up with the "Part Deux" deal :D )

I've submitted Defense of Sihang Warehouse for WP:FAC here. It was on our MILHIST Peer Review a while back so if you read it, please hop over and give some some precious comments (hopefully to support, but criticisms are of course welcome). Well if you haven't read it, please do, then comment! :D -- Миборовский ^{U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai!} 04:58, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Ranjit Lal Jetley

This Indian Maj. Gen. is up for deletion as non-notable; the article is also very poorly referenced. If anyone has opinions on the notability of military people, or information about Jetley specifically, pls comment at the AfD. JackyR 15:14, 6 May 2006 (UTC) moved here from Template:WPMILHIST Announcements by Kirill Lokshin 16:27, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I nominated Harold Marshall for deletion but was shouted down by some teenagers who felt that because he was the subject of a famous photo, he merited an entire article. Perhaps, but the article is dull as dishwater since there is nothing in the historical record about him. I ought to know, anything that does exist about him on the Internet, I put there as part of the research for our regimental website. I would love to see some guidelines on military notability drafted.Michael Dorosh 20:19, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Jetley's survived and is in the capable hands of User:AshLin (Indian military officer). But I'm glad I didn't know about Howard Marshall when I was scrabbling to find criteria and verification: I can feel myself bleeding from the ears when up against the teenagers and people who can't tell the difference between web-presence and notability... Please, draft some criteria. For all our sakes! :-) JackyR 01:40, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

WP:Peru-Peruvian Army

Hello, I am from Wikipedia:WikiProject Peru and we are doing our May collaboration project on the Peruvian Army. I know that there are alot of military buffs around here so if anyone is interested you can come and help us out with the article. Thanks.--Jersey Devil 08:44, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Battle of Kettle Creek

I have rewritten the article on Battle of Kettle Creek but I need some hlep. First, please read over it and tell me if it is okay. Second, I am having trouble with my footnotes. I do not understand HTML very well, but I tried. I used the <ref>Reference</ref> code. The numbers appear but not footnotes. Help Please. (Steve 21:02, 9 May 2006 (UTC))