This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
This is a serious suggestion.
You "people" need some content experts. Otherwise, your historiographic efforts are going result in a meatless pottage of mediocrity.
Please consider using "Military Personages" instead of "People." A thesarus would be of immense help.
Best Regards, Philippsbourg
Apparently, as we discovered when trying to tag some of the relevant articles, the various military people categories are a complete mess, with inconsistent naming, structure, etc. I'd like for us to come up with a better scheme for this particular categorization tree. Hence, my initial idea:
At the top, we split Category:Military people into two category trees: Category:Military people by country and Category:Military people by type.
Category:Military people by country would be similar to all of our other "by country" categories, and contain things like Category:Military people of France and Category:Military people of the Holy Roman Empire. I suspect we'll have to stick with "Something of Foo" rather than "Fooish something" for the naming here, for the same reason we did it for the battles: some of the historical states we need to work with don't have good adjective forms, and we'd like a consistent naming pattern.
Category:Military people by type would contain both ranks (e.g. Category:Admirals) and other types (e.g. Category:Military engineers or Category:Military pilots). Maybe there's a better name for this?
The bulk of the scheme would then consist of sub-categories formed by the intersection of one of the type categories with one of the country ones: Category:Admirals of France, Category:Military engineers of Spain, and so forth. This should help keep each category to a manageable size.
Optionally, we may also want a third way of categorizing people: by conflict or period. My suggestion here would be to avoid creating too many categories and just to create a handful for the biggest conflicts: Category:Military people of World War II and Category:Military people of the Crusades and so forth. Individual articles could be included in both a country+type category and a conflict/period category, as needed. (There might be an issue here in terms of wanting to create categories like "French admirals of World War II"; I can't think of any good way to name them without resorting to adjective forms, which would then be inconsistent with the rest of the scheme. Anyone have any ideas?)
Any comments or suggestions would be extremely appreciated! Kirill Lok s hin 17:40, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Get rid of all the other categories, keep it simple. General MacArthur goes under one cat only - Soldiers, a sub cat of Military People. You can then put him in a period category - ie World War I, World War II, Korean War, etc. Don't need a "Military people by time period" category really, do we? Michael Dorosh 17:57, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
How about putting them into national categories, ie
That might be a better way to go. But is a Prussian a German? :) Then if you want to categorize by conflict, do it within the nationality
or whatever. Michael Dorosh 18:16, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
"Get rid of all the other categories, keep it simple." If this means getting rid of Category:Women in war then I'm against it. Really, although I like the idea of rationalizing the categories (I've been doing a lot of that myself), I don't agree with the idea of setting up one architecture and shoehorning everything into it. How about Category:Medieval Knights Templar? Cross categorization is usually a good thing. It's draconic to assign only one category to an important general like MacArthur and demand that readers intuit our rationale. Durova 19:15, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Okay, here's a somewhat revised version of my original scheme, given as a few example category trees:
The primary categorization remains by country; the relevant sub-categories of a particular type can then be collected across country lines for easy access. I've also removed the separate "by type" category tree in favor of putting the top-level type/rank categories directly under "Military people".
Obviously, the categories need not be broken all the way down in all cases (i.e. sub-categories for specific ranks/conflicts/whatever should only be created if there are enough entries to fill them). I've changed the nationality descriptors to "Fooish people", per Leithp, but have stuck with "of Foo" for the wars, as some of them have names that don't lend themselves to the other form. Further comments are welcome! Kirill Lok s hin 19:43, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Next question, then: how should we name the period/conflict categories? The current usage seems to be a mix of things like "Fooish War people" and "People of the Fooish War". My initial inclination would be to prefer the second option, for ease in creating combined country+conflict categories ("French military people of the Napoleonic Wars" seems somewhat less confusing than "French Napoleonic Wars military people"). And do we want to have "military people" rather than plain "people" for all of these, since some of the larger wars would presumably have broader categories for non-military people associated with the war in question? Kirill Lok s hin
For a first step, how about cleaning up the very top level of categorization? We have:
My suggestion, then:
Comments on this would be much appreciated! Kirill Lok s h in 04:30, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed a couple of these boxes appearing in some of the stubs for American Civil War generals. I would like to ask those who consider this a good idea (I do not, for reasons I will state below) to avoid adding these boxes to stubs; there are plenty of finished biography articles that could keep you busy. The stubs are obviously missing a lot of information and sometimes the information there is incorrect. Therefore, the person who expands the stub (often me), has to correct not only the text of the article, but also the box, which is a pain.
<soapbox>
I have pretty much ignored these boxes (both for battles and people, although not for campaigns, which are sort of useful) and do not create them for articles I write, but I do feel a need to make corrections in ones that others add to articles. In general, these boxes add very little to a well-written article, and their superficialities often make them pretty useless, although ignorable. They have negative consequences as well. They are a fertile ground for inconsistencies to spring up (dates of battles, casualties, etc.). They also pose a minor barrier to entry for new editors. The entire Wiki technology experience was originally designed to be trivial to edit, encouraging participation, and now Wikipedia is going really bonkers with all sorts of templates and boxes that make some of these files pretty darn complicated. As to the Military Person box, the first few I have seen are really sort of a mess. American Civil War generals had way too many commands, being promoted from 2nd Lt. to Major General in just 2-3 years, going from company command to Corps or Army command, and fought in too many battles to be summarized in a useful way; in fact, just listing the Campaigns would be onerous for many. Ranks are complicated by brevets and USA vs USV. Units, which change month-by-month sometimes, are mouthfuls like "2nd Brigade, 3rd Division, III Corps, Army of the Potomac" and "Hoke's Brigade, Early's Division, Third Corps, Army of Northern Virginia." If anyone attempted to make these boxes comprehensive, they are going to be two screens in length and disrupt the graphics for half of the article. If anyone is really interested in such details, perhaps we can agree on common formats for tabular command/promotion histories to appear at the bottom of the articles.
</soapbox> Thanks for letting me vent. :-)
Hal Jespersen 17:48, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
(after edit conflict)
Meh. In my opinion, the infoboxes are useful as summary information, particularly for long articles; but not as an end to themselves. The person infobox, in particular, has some very flexible fields ("Commands", which you noted, is one of them). The original intent was to have only notable ones listed (that is, where the person's commanding of them was notable, not where the unit itself was notable), but obviously we have people putting long lists of the person's entire promotion history in there, which is counterproductive to providing a summary. Any suggestions of how to deal with this (whether by having a guideline for what to list in the field or by removing the more problematic fields entirely) would be welcome.
(The battle infoboxes don't suffer from this as much, since they've been around for a much longer time, resulting in certain conventions for how they're to be used. The concern of inconsistent information is not, in my view, any more problematic than merely having any information appear twice in an article; it's quite easy to get inconsistent dates/numbers across multiple sections, for example.) Kirill Lok s hin 18:07, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
The point about ease of editing was stated to be about Wiki technology, which was developed before Wikipedia was created. Although I certainly think that the reader is eventually the most important person, you cannot discount the importance of attracting good editors to the process. (And when I say "editors" I really mean "authors".) If you set the bar too high technically, you will suppress the interest of people in disciplines other than computer science or word processing from participating. Certainly not all of them, but perhaps a noticeable percentage. Well, anyway, my only real point was: please hold off on these people boxes for stubs in the American Civil War. There are hundreds of completed biographies that are better targets.
Since I wrote my original post, I have been thinking about why this is more difficult for the American Civil War biographies than for others, and I think the problem is that there is such an enormous interest by Americans in documenting that war that personalities who would be entirely forgotten in other wars are studied and discussed ad nauseum. Although I do not frequent the sections on, say, World War I or the Napoleonic Wars, I find it hard to imagine that there are biographies written about all of the brigade and division commanders in those conflicts. Hal Jespersen 23:44, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I re-interate: A person of average intelligence can figure out how to use an infobox in 10 minutes or less, and then they know it "for all time". Use of these does not represent a "barrier" to those who are not "people in disciplines other than computer science or word processing" - even though they are a barrier to those that aren't willing to invest 5-10 minutes in understanding how a table or infobox works. Given that use of a home computer requires a modicum of understanding, I don't think that the "technical demands" are unreasonable.
If there are problems with the fit of the infoboxes to these articles, then it might be better to work with the people maintaining the templates to make them fit better. There are enough people attached to this Wikiproject - or who are not attached to this wikiproject but have noticed the templates and are using them already - who are writing and editing articles on the American Civil War that I think asking people to stop using the templates is really not going to change much. Even if we put big warning signs on the front page, enough people would ignore it, or not see it, that they would still use it.
In short - it might be better to channel the tide, not swim against it. You may be right in your complaints - but as no one has direct control over how people use Wikipedia, I doubt that any central authority could govern something like that. - Vedexent 00:04, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
Please comment, and hope it was OK to use template on talk page. Joaquin Murietta 07:47, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Has wikipedia standardized which of these two terms will be used consistently? In the Commonwealth, Second World War in the preferred usage and is a standard convention among "serious" historians. How is it translated from other languages? I believe the Germans refer to it as "zweite Weltkrieg"? World War Two seems to be an American term but I wonder if they are not in the minority? Michael Dorosh 17:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
2100 Hours 30 March, 2006
Please note that the U.S. Army Center of Military History, the Chief Historian of the U.S. Army, and The Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, all use the term "WWII." The title of the huge series of official U.S. Army histories known as the "Green Books" uses the term "WWII." Ergo, it is not "amateurish" to use this term.
Best Regards, Philippsbourg
Somewhat of a trivial thing, but I'd appreciate any feedback on my new signature trick, shamelessly stolen from the similar Esperanza one (it's the silver h and the page it links to, if it's not obvious ;-). Anyone have a better idea than silver for the color, incidentally? Our normal lightsteelblue looks close enough to the regular link color to be useless here. Kirill Lok s h in 20:23, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Has anyone come up with a nice format for presenting orbat formats on wiki? I have one in mind.
As orbats are sometimes VERY long and VERY detailed, they take a lot of space. They're definitely notable, as an orbat is essential for comprehending any battle. But they're not notable enough to have their own articles. But a detailed orbat detracts from overall flow, style and formatting on many pages, especially those shorter ones, light on descriptive, but heavy on facts.
Therefore I present:
Nothing to see here. Move along. The good stuff is down below. |
OK, so I just updated Battle of Shanghai (1937) with this awesomely cool gadget, for a partially completed orbat 1. before the battle; 2. right after start of the battle. And 3. 2 months into the battle; and 4. 3 months into the battle; and maybe 5. aftermath of battle are coming.
National Revolutionary Army
Imperial Japanese Army
|
National Revolutionary Army3rd Military Region - Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (20 Aug 1937)
Imperial Japanese Army
|
As you can see, these take VERY little space. When collapsed. If desired, the reader can click open one, a few, or all, or none, of the orbats given in an article. The "Orbat soon after 13 Aug 1937" is quite long (several pages printed, I think) when uncollapsed, but when collapsed it's only a single line... this way, it is possible to cram as many orbats as necessary into an article in a stylish, artistic, easily accessible way without overburdening the article with badly formatted orbats that hurt the eyes.
Thoughts? -- Миборовский U| T| C| M| E| Chugoku Banzai! 04:19, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
PS. It is also possible to make the box disappear,
No box this way. |
-- Миборовский U| T| C| M| E| Chugoku Banzai! 04:22, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
It might be helpful to include links to a few excellent articles, as examples. Preferably not the World Wars, since those are way larger and more complicated than the average article one would be editting. Brock 02:43, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Here are some points to consider:
1) At the risk of stating the obvious, some soldiers are Killed in Action, others are wounded and die of their wounds later. I'm not sure how military historians count the second category. I would guess that you are only counted as dead if you die on the battlefield during the battle.
2) Some soldiers die of non-battle related causes, most notably disease. These losses should not be discounted but I don't know how military historians count this category. These soldiers are not Killed in Action but when you look at total troop strength, disease takes a heavy toll in wars up until and including WWI.
3) I assume that the strength box does not look at civilian populations. Does the casualties box consider civilian casualties? The civilian death tolls in sieges such as Stalingrad and Tenochtitlan were horrific. In a siege, the civilians are as much a part of the battle as the soldiers.
I'm not trying to wage a polemic here. I'm just trying to understand what the guidelines are and suggesting that they might be refined to consider the issues mentioned above. Richard 18:30, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Current military operations (US) use the acronyms KIA (killed in action), WIA (wounded in action), DOW (died of wounds), NBI (non-battle injury), DNBI (died [of] non-battle injury). Civilian or non-combatant casualties would be termed collateral damage. Hope this is helpful.
Thanks for the newsletter on my talk page. This has gone a long way since the earliest days when I was involved in it. The idea of a project newsletter is good too; that kind of service could reawaken old interests. :-) Eclecticology 00:29, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
As indicated on the category page for Category:Recipients of the Distinguished Service Order - I've asked the creator of the page if this is really necessary? The Distinguished Service Order was practically a gimme for any halfway decent battalion commanders and recipients of the various militaries and services numbered in the 1000s. VC winners I can understand, even some of the rarer Orders, but the DSO? What is the consensus among Military history project members? There are so many categories that it seems like a waste to introduce trivial ones like this. See Bert Hoffmeister for an example of overcrowding of categories. Michael Dorosh 18:33, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
This is a serious suggestion.
You "people" need some content experts. Otherwise, your historiographic efforts are going result in a meatless pottage of mediocrity.
Please consider using "Military Personages" instead of "People." A thesarus would be of immense help.
Best Regards, Philippsbourg
Apparently, as we discovered when trying to tag some of the relevant articles, the various military people categories are a complete mess, with inconsistent naming, structure, etc. I'd like for us to come up with a better scheme for this particular categorization tree. Hence, my initial idea:
At the top, we split Category:Military people into two category trees: Category:Military people by country and Category:Military people by type.
Category:Military people by country would be similar to all of our other "by country" categories, and contain things like Category:Military people of France and Category:Military people of the Holy Roman Empire. I suspect we'll have to stick with "Something of Foo" rather than "Fooish something" for the naming here, for the same reason we did it for the battles: some of the historical states we need to work with don't have good adjective forms, and we'd like a consistent naming pattern.
Category:Military people by type would contain both ranks (e.g. Category:Admirals) and other types (e.g. Category:Military engineers or Category:Military pilots). Maybe there's a better name for this?
The bulk of the scheme would then consist of sub-categories formed by the intersection of one of the type categories with one of the country ones: Category:Admirals of France, Category:Military engineers of Spain, and so forth. This should help keep each category to a manageable size.
Optionally, we may also want a third way of categorizing people: by conflict or period. My suggestion here would be to avoid creating too many categories and just to create a handful for the biggest conflicts: Category:Military people of World War II and Category:Military people of the Crusades and so forth. Individual articles could be included in both a country+type category and a conflict/period category, as needed. (There might be an issue here in terms of wanting to create categories like "French admirals of World War II"; I can't think of any good way to name them without resorting to adjective forms, which would then be inconsistent with the rest of the scheme. Anyone have any ideas?)
Any comments or suggestions would be extremely appreciated! Kirill Lok s hin 17:40, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Get rid of all the other categories, keep it simple. General MacArthur goes under one cat only - Soldiers, a sub cat of Military People. You can then put him in a period category - ie World War I, World War II, Korean War, etc. Don't need a "Military people by time period" category really, do we? Michael Dorosh 17:57, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
How about putting them into national categories, ie
That might be a better way to go. But is a Prussian a German? :) Then if you want to categorize by conflict, do it within the nationality
or whatever. Michael Dorosh 18:16, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
"Get rid of all the other categories, keep it simple." If this means getting rid of Category:Women in war then I'm against it. Really, although I like the idea of rationalizing the categories (I've been doing a lot of that myself), I don't agree with the idea of setting up one architecture and shoehorning everything into it. How about Category:Medieval Knights Templar? Cross categorization is usually a good thing. It's draconic to assign only one category to an important general like MacArthur and demand that readers intuit our rationale. Durova 19:15, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Okay, here's a somewhat revised version of my original scheme, given as a few example category trees:
The primary categorization remains by country; the relevant sub-categories of a particular type can then be collected across country lines for easy access. I've also removed the separate "by type" category tree in favor of putting the top-level type/rank categories directly under "Military people".
Obviously, the categories need not be broken all the way down in all cases (i.e. sub-categories for specific ranks/conflicts/whatever should only be created if there are enough entries to fill them). I've changed the nationality descriptors to "Fooish people", per Leithp, but have stuck with "of Foo" for the wars, as some of them have names that don't lend themselves to the other form. Further comments are welcome! Kirill Lok s hin 19:43, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Next question, then: how should we name the period/conflict categories? The current usage seems to be a mix of things like "Fooish War people" and "People of the Fooish War". My initial inclination would be to prefer the second option, for ease in creating combined country+conflict categories ("French military people of the Napoleonic Wars" seems somewhat less confusing than "French Napoleonic Wars military people"). And do we want to have "military people" rather than plain "people" for all of these, since some of the larger wars would presumably have broader categories for non-military people associated with the war in question? Kirill Lok s hin
For a first step, how about cleaning up the very top level of categorization? We have:
My suggestion, then:
Comments on this would be much appreciated! Kirill Lok s h in 04:30, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed a couple of these boxes appearing in some of the stubs for American Civil War generals. I would like to ask those who consider this a good idea (I do not, for reasons I will state below) to avoid adding these boxes to stubs; there are plenty of finished biography articles that could keep you busy. The stubs are obviously missing a lot of information and sometimes the information there is incorrect. Therefore, the person who expands the stub (often me), has to correct not only the text of the article, but also the box, which is a pain.
<soapbox>
I have pretty much ignored these boxes (both for battles and people, although not for campaigns, which are sort of useful) and do not create them for articles I write, but I do feel a need to make corrections in ones that others add to articles. In general, these boxes add very little to a well-written article, and their superficialities often make them pretty useless, although ignorable. They have negative consequences as well. They are a fertile ground for inconsistencies to spring up (dates of battles, casualties, etc.). They also pose a minor barrier to entry for new editors. The entire Wiki technology experience was originally designed to be trivial to edit, encouraging participation, and now Wikipedia is going really bonkers with all sorts of templates and boxes that make some of these files pretty darn complicated. As to the Military Person box, the first few I have seen are really sort of a mess. American Civil War generals had way too many commands, being promoted from 2nd Lt. to Major General in just 2-3 years, going from company command to Corps or Army command, and fought in too many battles to be summarized in a useful way; in fact, just listing the Campaigns would be onerous for many. Ranks are complicated by brevets and USA vs USV. Units, which change month-by-month sometimes, are mouthfuls like "2nd Brigade, 3rd Division, III Corps, Army of the Potomac" and "Hoke's Brigade, Early's Division, Third Corps, Army of Northern Virginia." If anyone attempted to make these boxes comprehensive, they are going to be two screens in length and disrupt the graphics for half of the article. If anyone is really interested in such details, perhaps we can agree on common formats for tabular command/promotion histories to appear at the bottom of the articles.
</soapbox> Thanks for letting me vent. :-)
Hal Jespersen 17:48, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
(after edit conflict)
Meh. In my opinion, the infoboxes are useful as summary information, particularly for long articles; but not as an end to themselves. The person infobox, in particular, has some very flexible fields ("Commands", which you noted, is one of them). The original intent was to have only notable ones listed (that is, where the person's commanding of them was notable, not where the unit itself was notable), but obviously we have people putting long lists of the person's entire promotion history in there, which is counterproductive to providing a summary. Any suggestions of how to deal with this (whether by having a guideline for what to list in the field or by removing the more problematic fields entirely) would be welcome.
(The battle infoboxes don't suffer from this as much, since they've been around for a much longer time, resulting in certain conventions for how they're to be used. The concern of inconsistent information is not, in my view, any more problematic than merely having any information appear twice in an article; it's quite easy to get inconsistent dates/numbers across multiple sections, for example.) Kirill Lok s hin 18:07, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
The point about ease of editing was stated to be about Wiki technology, which was developed before Wikipedia was created. Although I certainly think that the reader is eventually the most important person, you cannot discount the importance of attracting good editors to the process. (And when I say "editors" I really mean "authors".) If you set the bar too high technically, you will suppress the interest of people in disciplines other than computer science or word processing from participating. Certainly not all of them, but perhaps a noticeable percentage. Well, anyway, my only real point was: please hold off on these people boxes for stubs in the American Civil War. There are hundreds of completed biographies that are better targets.
Since I wrote my original post, I have been thinking about why this is more difficult for the American Civil War biographies than for others, and I think the problem is that there is such an enormous interest by Americans in documenting that war that personalities who would be entirely forgotten in other wars are studied and discussed ad nauseum. Although I do not frequent the sections on, say, World War I or the Napoleonic Wars, I find it hard to imagine that there are biographies written about all of the brigade and division commanders in those conflicts. Hal Jespersen 23:44, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I re-interate: A person of average intelligence can figure out how to use an infobox in 10 minutes or less, and then they know it "for all time". Use of these does not represent a "barrier" to those who are not "people in disciplines other than computer science or word processing" - even though they are a barrier to those that aren't willing to invest 5-10 minutes in understanding how a table or infobox works. Given that use of a home computer requires a modicum of understanding, I don't think that the "technical demands" are unreasonable.
If there are problems with the fit of the infoboxes to these articles, then it might be better to work with the people maintaining the templates to make them fit better. There are enough people attached to this Wikiproject - or who are not attached to this wikiproject but have noticed the templates and are using them already - who are writing and editing articles on the American Civil War that I think asking people to stop using the templates is really not going to change much. Even if we put big warning signs on the front page, enough people would ignore it, or not see it, that they would still use it.
In short - it might be better to channel the tide, not swim against it. You may be right in your complaints - but as no one has direct control over how people use Wikipedia, I doubt that any central authority could govern something like that. - Vedexent 00:04, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
Please comment, and hope it was OK to use template on talk page. Joaquin Murietta 07:47, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Has wikipedia standardized which of these two terms will be used consistently? In the Commonwealth, Second World War in the preferred usage and is a standard convention among "serious" historians. How is it translated from other languages? I believe the Germans refer to it as "zweite Weltkrieg"? World War Two seems to be an American term but I wonder if they are not in the minority? Michael Dorosh 17:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
2100 Hours 30 March, 2006
Please note that the U.S. Army Center of Military History, the Chief Historian of the U.S. Army, and The Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, all use the term "WWII." The title of the huge series of official U.S. Army histories known as the "Green Books" uses the term "WWII." Ergo, it is not "amateurish" to use this term.
Best Regards, Philippsbourg
Somewhat of a trivial thing, but I'd appreciate any feedback on my new signature trick, shamelessly stolen from the similar Esperanza one (it's the silver h and the page it links to, if it's not obvious ;-). Anyone have a better idea than silver for the color, incidentally? Our normal lightsteelblue looks close enough to the regular link color to be useless here. Kirill Lok s h in 20:23, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Has anyone come up with a nice format for presenting orbat formats on wiki? I have one in mind.
As orbats are sometimes VERY long and VERY detailed, they take a lot of space. They're definitely notable, as an orbat is essential for comprehending any battle. But they're not notable enough to have their own articles. But a detailed orbat detracts from overall flow, style and formatting on many pages, especially those shorter ones, light on descriptive, but heavy on facts.
Therefore I present:
Nothing to see here. Move along. The good stuff is down below. |
OK, so I just updated Battle of Shanghai (1937) with this awesomely cool gadget, for a partially completed orbat 1. before the battle; 2. right after start of the battle. And 3. 2 months into the battle; and 4. 3 months into the battle; and maybe 5. aftermath of battle are coming.
National Revolutionary Army
Imperial Japanese Army
|
National Revolutionary Army3rd Military Region - Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (20 Aug 1937)
Imperial Japanese Army
|
As you can see, these take VERY little space. When collapsed. If desired, the reader can click open one, a few, or all, or none, of the orbats given in an article. The "Orbat soon after 13 Aug 1937" is quite long (several pages printed, I think) when uncollapsed, but when collapsed it's only a single line... this way, it is possible to cram as many orbats as necessary into an article in a stylish, artistic, easily accessible way without overburdening the article with badly formatted orbats that hurt the eyes.
Thoughts? -- Миборовский U| T| C| M| E| Chugoku Banzai! 04:19, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
PS. It is also possible to make the box disappear,
No box this way. |
-- Миборовский U| T| C| M| E| Chugoku Banzai! 04:22, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
It might be helpful to include links to a few excellent articles, as examples. Preferably not the World Wars, since those are way larger and more complicated than the average article one would be editting. Brock 02:43, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Here are some points to consider:
1) At the risk of stating the obvious, some soldiers are Killed in Action, others are wounded and die of their wounds later. I'm not sure how military historians count the second category. I would guess that you are only counted as dead if you die on the battlefield during the battle.
2) Some soldiers die of non-battle related causes, most notably disease. These losses should not be discounted but I don't know how military historians count this category. These soldiers are not Killed in Action but when you look at total troop strength, disease takes a heavy toll in wars up until and including WWI.
3) I assume that the strength box does not look at civilian populations. Does the casualties box consider civilian casualties? The civilian death tolls in sieges such as Stalingrad and Tenochtitlan were horrific. In a siege, the civilians are as much a part of the battle as the soldiers.
I'm not trying to wage a polemic here. I'm just trying to understand what the guidelines are and suggesting that they might be refined to consider the issues mentioned above. Richard 18:30, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Current military operations (US) use the acronyms KIA (killed in action), WIA (wounded in action), DOW (died of wounds), NBI (non-battle injury), DNBI (died [of] non-battle injury). Civilian or non-combatant casualties would be termed collateral damage. Hope this is helpful.
Thanks for the newsletter on my talk page. This has gone a long way since the earliest days when I was involved in it. The idea of a project newsletter is good too; that kind of service could reawaken old interests. :-) Eclecticology 00:29, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
As indicated on the category page for Category:Recipients of the Distinguished Service Order - I've asked the creator of the page if this is really necessary? The Distinguished Service Order was practically a gimme for any halfway decent battalion commanders and recipients of the various militaries and services numbered in the 1000s. VC winners I can understand, even some of the rarer Orders, but the DSO? What is the consensus among Military history project members? There are so many categories that it seems like a waste to introduce trivial ones like this. See Bert Hoffmeister for an example of overcrowding of categories. Michael Dorosh 18:33, 3 April 2006 (UTC)