Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Archive 6

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warbox/battlebox

Interesting infobox based on the battlebox at American Civil War. There also was an idea for a per-nation war navigation footer table too, but the author reverted herself for some reason. See this diff. --mav 02:56, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yo. We cooked up a warbox scheme over at Talk:Military history of the United States. If anyone else is interested, feel free to join the party. jengod 19:57, Apr 12, 2004 (UTC)

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Naming conventions for Wars in the same place

In Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Battles there is a discussion under Naming coventions for battles in the same place

I think that there should be a gidence on this in Wikipedia:WikiProject Wars and use one which already exists as a template example.

Philip Baird Shearer 05:33, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

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How to layer information about campaigns in modern warfare

I think that there needs to be guidance on how to layer modern wars so that there is a distinction made between the stratigic political and milirary overview and details down to the unit/ship level.

In the good old days when people knew what they were doing. Wars might or might not have one or more campaign. They fought campaigned during the campaign season had a battle and a siege or two and then went home for harvest/winter.

Even when warfare became an all year round affair and in large one over many Theaters.It was still possible to differentiate between wars, theaters, campaigns, and battles in most cases. Eg WWII.

With th exception of the cold war, most post WWII wars have not been big enough to have more than one theater, but they often had more than one phase or campaign.

For example with the Falklands War, it is possible to distinguish between the war Phase/campaigns and the individual battles eg.

Roots/causes. Politics Diplomacy: before and during the war.

Phase 1: Argentinian initiation

    strategic overview,  political military planning etc.
    Argentinian military actions

Phase 2: UK Reaction

     strategic overview political military planning etc..
     campaign  sea
     campaign land    
        Battle for Goose Green.
        Battle for Port Stanley etc.

Theses battles are not on scale of the Battle of the Somme and they may not warrant a page to themselves, but they are clearly delineated and can be expanded if wanted into individual pages.

End/Summery

I think that there are areas in Wikipedia where this distinction could usefully be made.and would help clarify the information. One example is the Gallipoli campaign in WWI. At the moment it is all lumped into one page Battle of Gallipoli If it were to be laid out as

Dardanelles Campaign

 Discussion about the political and military planning and strategy
 campaign at sea (The naval battles to try to force the passage)
 campaign on land Battle of Gallipoli

I think that one of the problems with the Gulf War (1990-1991) is that this distinction has been lost. But there is no reason that it should be. For example there are two distinct phases to the war.

Phase 1 Iraq's invasion of Kuwait

  Discussion of Iraq's strategy
  First Battle of Kuwait

Phase 2 Removal of Iraq from Kuwait

  Overall political and military planning and strategy
  3 campaigns

1) Air campaign

   Strategic bombing of Iraq
   Hunt of Iraq missiles
   Tactical support of land campaign

2) Land campaign

   Holding the line at the Saudi boarder and Build up of forces.
   Deep penetration raids and hunt for Missiles
   Invasion of Iraq (Desert Storm)
   Second Battle of Kuwait

3) Sea campaign

    Campaign at sea (land attacks etc)
    Amphibious operations (see Second Battle of Kuwait)

There are several advantages to this type of approach.

• Experts in different fields can contribute to their area of expertises. For example the more detailed parts of maritime and land battles of a campaign tend to be addressed by different people.
• Cross linking becomes more precise. For example there is a page HMS Goliath (1898) which has a link to Dardanelles Campaign. It is unlikely that someone who is on the page HMS Goliath is going to want much of the information on the land battle. But they might be very interested in the navel section. A link in the navel section to the ship(s) which took part would be of interest to a navel historian, but it is not a detail that the land Battle of Gallipoli needs. Creating a campaign level above the the battle level allows for this disambiguation.
• The drill down details become something which the authors at each level can decide on without it being argued about by people interested in other areas. For example at the strategic/political level there should be disinterest that there are several separate wikipedia page on different parts of the Battle of Waterloo. All that is needed at the strategic level is a link to the battle.
• Last, but not least, it allows for impact of controversial issues to decanted into specific areas so reducing the impact of editor wars.

So has anyone else got any thoughts on this? Philip Baird Shearer 05:33, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

My thinking is that an article about a war or campaign should cover, in its entirety and self-contained, the war or campaign, following basically the structure you describe:

• brief lead text intro
• roots/causes/origins
• phase 1
• phase 2
• ...
• summary

There may also be sections on, say, significant technology or whatever. Then, if each or any of the middle sections warrant it, these can be expanded as their own articles. The reader should be able to get a complete description of the war/campaign from reading the article and not be directed to read other articles first.

That's the approach I took with Gallipoli anyway (and I do intend to write a "Naval operations at Gallipoli" or some such article eventually). In the parent article, I try to make it obvious that more detail is available via the See main article links. I then have the navigation table at the bottom of each article so that, to read through the series of articles, you just click the next link in the table.

I don't know how easy it would be to enforce this sort of organisation on a "popular" article such as "Gulf War" or "World War I". There is a danger that someone will notice an ommision in the parent article and add it, unaware that it is covered in a sub-article.

Geoff/Gsl 06:28, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Military Collaboration of the week

I've created a new Wikipedia project for a Miliary Collaboration of the week. Any one who wants to help out is more then welcome. Oberiko 15:02, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Current wars in Burma

List of current wars: This article lists countries in a state of war, whose current wars not necessary have an article. Sarcelles 23:39, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)