Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wars

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New portal

I've created Portal:War to present a cohesive facade to the various war-related projects. Any comments, suggestions, ideas, or offers of help would be extremely welcome. Kirill Lokshin 01:19, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Compound Warbox colours

After thinking it over, i agree the colours dont make sense. But perhaps we can make some sense of it in another way. We could, for example, do it historically, having different colours for different wars (still avoiding pink :-) ). Or are there other options?

Well, I'm quite content with having all wars use the same color(s); but if anyone can come up with a more complicated scheme that isn't completely incomprehensible to someone who hasn't read the project page, I'd be willing to consider it. Unfortunately, it seems like any real discussion of the question needs input from more people; I'm planning on an extensive round of {{WikiProjectWars}} - tagging Saturday, and that may get some more eyes here. Kirill Lokshin 13:36, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

At Wikipedia:WikiProject Battles, the battlebox started out with a colour scheme, but it had a number of disadvantages: (1) created extra work for the editor writing the battlebox; (2) the colours looked horrible or clashed with some or all of Wikipedia's various skins; (3) a campaign which strayed over a boundary between colours had half its battles in one colour and half in another. So we took out the colours. Gdr 18:11, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Project tagging and categories

I've just finished tagging some 250-ish war articles with {{WikiProjectWars}}, going through the sub-categories of Category:Wars in the process. It is, quite frankly, a total mess; wars can be filed under a number of different, completely unrelated sub-categories.

I propose to institute a twin-branch category scheme (similar to the one used by WP:BATTLES):

                         Category:Wars
                                |
              ,-----------------+-----------------.
              |                                   |
   Category:Wars by country          Category:Wars by type

Wars by country will contain "Wars of France", "Wars of Germany", etc., while Wars by type will be a parent for the existing "Guerrilla wars", "Civil wars", and other categories.

Under this scheme, every war will be somewhere under "Wars by country", and optionally under "Wars by type", if it fits into one of those categories.

Obviously, major wars will have their own, dedicated categories to hold related articles (e.g. Category:World War I). I'm open to ideas as to whether the category, or only the individual war article, should be included in the "Wars by country" scheme in these cases. Kirill Lokshin 19:38, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Yeah i noticed the mess too. This categorisation makes sense, although we risk doing double work with Category:Military History of the ... (I have seen at least US and GB).

What type of wars do you envision? National wars & Civil wars seem no-brainers, Guerilla wars comes a close second, though it's a tricky nomer. One-sided wars or something?

For sake of good housekeeping, I suggest we keep the top category devoi of articles if we can avoid it. Perhaps we'll have to add some categories depending on what we encounter.

War-stubs should also be a sub-category imho (ties in with discussion below). --The Minister of War 07:34, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Cenepa War

Could someone who knows more about hte war than I do check out the dispute there. Thx. Falphin 02:23, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

War-stub

I see a {{war-stub}}'s been created, though it lacks a category (it just feeds into the same cat as mil-stub, presently), nor was it proposed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals, as is customary. (Well, supposedly...) I only see about 22 "wars" in the mil-stub category, so this would be pretty small (though I'm inclined to wink at almost any way to get the rather large and ad hoc mil-stub cat down to side). It's been suggested at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Discoveries that this could be instead fed into {{battle-stub}}. Another point to consider is matters in-between: campaigns, operations, etc. Alai 00:32, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, yes, i started up the {{war-stub}}. Noticed there were quite a few wars undocumented, and thought the stub might serve nicely, especially as {{mil-stub}} is so dominated by modern weapons and such. I expect there will be few stubs, but enough to make a list, start checking it twice, and see who's naughty and nice. The idea was to document all wars asap; that should be a much more viable goal than documenting all battles, or all military-related topics. Mil is just too broad, battle too specific (and too many!).

I didnt link it to any articles yet (though there are some clear candidates), because the scope of the stub needs to be clarified first - you beat me to it posting it here, though i dont doubt that this stub should exist.

Personally, i think the tag should only be used for articles pertaining the War itself, no campaigns, no battles. Basically, only the articles on which we would also use the warbox. This way, only the most important articles will be flagged, and hopefully expanded asap. A secondary reason to include it on pages with the warbox, is because a warbox on a small article sometimes looks plain silly. However, if somebody does see a large warbox, but a small article, they will hopefully be inspired to add to the article rather than attack the idea of a warbox. The goal is to make large articles with warboxes rather than small ones without.

Alternatively, we could broaden it to campaigns and invasions and the like (one step above battles, or even including battles). This would certainly take a larger chunk out of mil-stub, but the larger case-load would probably be documented much slower.

Apologies for putting the stub online before proposing it on WP:WSS, i wasnt aware it was customary (Kirill notified me it was, so i wanted to propose it today). I must say, for an encyclopedia without rules, Wikipedia sure seems to have a lot of red tape! As somewhat of a newbie, its impossible to tell what to post where - everything has its own page and everything is anarchic! There really should be a table of contents or something - but thats another topic! :-) --The Minister of War 07:19, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Using {{war-stub}} on campaigns strikes me as a bad idea; for example, is the Battle of Normandy a battle or a campaign by those rules?

As I understand it, the new warbox will be able to replace the existing {{battlebox}}, and would therefore be added to everything in Category:Battle stubs anyways; I think we can safely use {{battle-stub}} for our tagging needs.

(Which, again, brings me to question the need for keeping the projects separate. We're in a position to share stub types, share infobox templates, and, to an extent, share categories. What, then, is the benefit of having two projects [with all of the associated costs, i.e. splitting of labor, no central place for discussions, etc.] versus just merging this project into WikiProject Battles?) Kirill Lokshin 10:38, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't see why we can't replace the 'battle-stub' with 'war-stub' on all the pages. There's no need for stubs to be so finely categorized; they can all go under 'war-stub', I think. As for merging the projects, I don't see why not. Our goals and topics covered are very closely related, and I get the impression (though I may be mistaken) that the WP:Wars has only a handful of contributors. Combining the projects would result in more compatibility standardization between the warboxes and battleboxes, and between the colors used to represent different parts of the world, and in other ways as well. But, of course, I wouldn't want to impose that sort of thing upon the creators (or primary heavy contributors) of WP:Wars - ultimately, I think it should be up to them. LordAmeth 11:08, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

If we agree to use a single stub type, the name of the stub is merely an issue of semantics (albeit a significant one, since changing the category a stub uses requires updating every article that uses that stub tag).

For full disclosure, the (active) contributors of WP:WARS are basicaly myself and The Minister of War; I'm basically in favor of a merge, but I asked for some outside opinions to make sure we weren't just working in an echo chamber here :-) Kirill Lokshin 13:11, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, I agree there is substantial overlap, maybe even enough to merge. But i'm not so sure. The focus of this WP, in my view, is to categorise wars, tag them with a new warbox, and improve the coverage of wars. (with the stubs). Personally, i believe this is a far broader approach than on Battles, where the focus is strictly on specific details for troop strength, maneuvers and the like. Because of this, we would probably be able to attract a broader range of interested members, as Battles requires specialistic knowledge and Wars does not.

Sure, we could merge with Battles, but we would (in practice) probably be working somewhat apart anyway. I agree that there definitely needs to be standardization between us, and i intend to stay active for Battles. In practice, i very much doubt there will be any difference whether we merge or not, other than that it looks more "tidy" (and that Kirill and I will get out more ;-) )

Concluding, (while writing this) i guess i think its silly to keep war inside battle, when (a) battles usually occur within wars rather than vice versa (b) there is substantial work to do On War (c) there is already a WP:WARS which will otherwise be empty and not attract any potential members (d) Battles is very specialistic. Agreed, starting a WP with two (and a half) members is also somewhat silly, but my guess is this will change once we really start. On second thought, I'd call it ambitious rather than silly. The Minister of War 18:26, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

There is, in both projects, a range of articles requiring both general and specialized knowledge; the general contributor can do fine work on World War II, but probably not as much on Third Italian War between Charles and Francis. Similarly, Battle of Stalingrad is easier to work on than Battle of Bicocca. I remain convinced that both subjects can be specialized to an equal degree.

The real issue in this discussion is not the writing of articles; that tends to be done by the individual editors in the projects, and will continue regardless of what the title of the project page is. The administrative overhead of having two projects rather than one (and, in particular, the resultant inability to have a single, centralized place for discussions to occur), is rather more significant.

In other words, I see both projects as being part of a "WikiProject Military Conflicts" that ranges from small battles through campaigns to wars and "meta-wars". I think that, rather than attempting to somehow divide this continuum into separate projects, we would be better served by having a single group, whose purview would extend through all of military history; this seems, to me, easier than having two projects but forcing them to work as one.

Thus, in conclusion, I am in favor of formally merging the projects (meaning not only working as a single group, but also an actual merge-and-redirect of the relevant pages). I see no reason why all of the work on wars could not occur (and occur more easily, with more participation) under a "Battles" project, so long as the project page makes clear that wars are also included. Kirill Lokshin 18:42, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm. Good points, but I still kind of disagree.

I agree that the implicit "mother-project" is Military History. With that in mind, i can certainly see both Battles and Wars (and the vague vaccum in between) definitely belong together. However, i still find it very counterintuitive to combine both in Battles. Secondly, i do think a "War" group would attract more people, because the goals of battles is very specialised. I can attest myself that i was kind of intimidated by the to-do list there (though being stubborn and an easy learner decided to join anyway).

Perhaps we should just rename to Military History? The Minister of War 19:25, 18 October 2005 (UTC)