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Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/Newsletter February 2010

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The Military history WikiProject Newsletter Issue XLVIII (February 2010)
From the coordinators

March, as you know, is an election month for our project, when we pick the coordinators for the next six months. We are seeking motivated individuals willing to devote some of their time and energy to the project so it continues to grow and prosper.

Also, I am making a personal appeal to each of you, the members of this project, to come out and vote for the candidates that run. These users will be responsible for managing the assessment process, answering questions, and making sure that the project's other needs are met. We have approximately 1,000 users who identify as being a part of our project, yet on average only about one-tenth of that number participate in elections. Moreover, as we typically hold referendums on major issues affecting the project along with these election, those who do not vote miss the opportunity to give their opinion on matters affecting the project as a whole. Remember, one vote always makes a difference. For the coordinators, TomStar81 (Talk) 23:47, 6 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Articles of note

New featured articles:

  1. Admiralty Islands campaign
  2. Alexander Pentland
  3. Anthony Roll
  4. Battle of Winterthur (1799)
  5. Cedric Howell
  6. HMS Calliope (1884)
  7. The Disasters of War

New featured lists:

  1. List of battlecruisers of Germany
  2. List of National Treasures of Japan (castles)

New featured pictures:

  1. Australian military encampment, 1918
  2. Injured Arriving by Boat at Balaklava
  3. USS New Jersey, 1918

New A-Class articles:

  1. Battle of Taejon
  2. Bombardment of Papeete
  3. First Battle of Maryang San
  4. Henry George Chauvel
  5. List of Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves recipients: 1942
  6. Michael J. Daly
  7. Nguyen Van Nhung
  8. No. 1 Wing RAAF
  9. Oswald Watt
  10. Red Tail Project
  11. Siege of Godesberg (1583)
  12. SMS Goeben
  13. Yermolayev Yer-2
Project news
  • A discussion has begun concerning our military history manual of style's guideline recommending preemptive disambiguation on the naming of military units. As the outcome of the discussion will likely effect a number of pages within our scope we are seeking input from the community on whether the guideline should be changed.
  • Late last year, several largely inactive task forces were merged. However, the mergers of the Australia and New Zealand task forces did not take place as there was no consensus for a new name. To resolve this, a discussion has begun and all editors are encouraged to participate.
Contest department
Awards and honours
Editorial: Reliable sources in military history

Across Wikipedia, guidelines have been set up so that editors can vet sources for themselves. Links to some of these and a guide for checking if a source is reliable can be found in an excellent Signpost dispatch written by Ealdgyth (talk · contribs). However, for the majority of military history-related topics, we strive for more than just basic reliable sources. Specifically, we aim for peer-reviewed articles and books over, for example, most websites.[N 1] Contemporary news articles or accounts can and should be mixed in (if possible) to give a picture of the general view point of the time—were they calm, afraid, unsure of what was going on?

Another major tenet is neutrality. If an editor rewrote the article Dieppe Raid using only the official Canadian history,[N 2] we would have a problem; while it does contain a thorough and in-depth overview, a point-of-view can still be read. For one, it gives an undue amount of focus to Canada's input in the planning of the landing, and it would probably give an undue focus to their troops if a majority of the landing forces hadn't been Canadian. Granted, this is a book written to document that country's role in the Second World War, so you would hope it focuses on them, but the same reason makes it unsuitable for use as the major reference for the article.

In this case, you would like to utilize a few recent, peer-reviewed books and journals, the official British, Canadian and German histories, possibly a few books written by historians from the aforementioned countries, and newspapers from that time period.[N 3] Obviously this is ideal, but you need to represent all three sides in this (the United States would be a fourth, but they played only a minor role in the planning and invading). This neutrality aspect applies especially for battles and to a lesser degree biographies, but it can be utilized in virtually every article in our scope. For example, it could be beneficial to obtain Japanese accounts of B-29 Superfortress bombing raids or non-Puerto Rican peer-reviewed sources for that insular area's role in the Second World War. —Ed (talkmajestic titan)

Notes
  1. ^ It should be noted that certain sites like Combined Fleet or Navweaps, which are authored by recognized or published experts in the field, are not "most websites."
  2. ^ Stacey, Colonel C.P. Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain and the Pacific. 1, Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War. Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1955.
  3. ^ For example, some of the Canadian newspaper articles written about the raid are listed on their War Museum's website here, while a London Gazette supplement written after the war can be seen on their website. Anyone with access to the archives of The New York Times can view the stories printed by that paper on the raid by searching their archives, and the Google News archive lists many newspapers, some of which were scanned by Google and are available at no charge; most of the non-free material requires a subscription to ProQuest.

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