Talk:France during World War II

Requested move

France during World War II → France during the Second World War – per . Moved by user:Anthony Appleyard as uncontroversial. ^walk victor falk ^talk 13:40, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. Use World War II for consistency with the large number of articles in the Category:World War II by country category tree. Title is recognisable, precise, concise and natural; meets all the criteria of Wikipedia:Article titles. DrKiernan (talk) 16:21, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Also, both equally meet wp:criteria, naturally enough since they're exactly synonymous, so you haven't provided no means to choose one or the other. Furthermore you haven't considered that wp:articletitles is about articles, and that this a dab page. ^walk victor falk ^talk 16:02, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

It doesn't matter. WP:RETAIN and WP:ENGVAR must be respected, even if might lead to some sub-optimality. It is a cost to be accepted to have a variety of English language. This is an extremely well-established principle on wikipedia. ^walk victor falk ^talk 17:19, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

• Strong oppose. There's a well-established consistency in these articles which, whatever their exact phrasing, all use "WWII". Plus, the top article, World War II, uses this phrasing. I don't think "World War II" any less familiar to Brit Eng speakers (I am one, after all) than "Second World War". Personally, I'd prefer to see "France in World War II" though, per the norm for western European articles. Brigade Piron (talk) 20:45, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

No, there is no consistent format, but mostly "main" articles are either in the form "Military history of X in WWII" or "X in WWII", and then there are exceptions like Yugoslav Front, Nazi Germany or German occupation of Norway. The general guidelines are that consistency is to be strived for, but beyond that there is no consensus that all "main" WWII articles must follow a certain format.

But this is a bit moot, since it's not a "main" article, it's not even an article, it's a disambiguation page, so guidelines for consistency across articles do not apply. ^walk victor falk ^talk 21:27, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

• Comment As the creator of this dab page a couple of days ago [1], I made a very conscious editorial choice to deviate from consistency. The articles about France are of rather inferior quality with what would be expected, when comparing with other countries. This is because France is unique in not having a "main" WWII article; this leads to no single article is thought to be worth editing. It also led to tons and tons of bad pipelinking, e.g. to "Military History of France in WWII" instead of "Free French Forces", or to "Military Administration in France (Nazi Germany)" (which BTW, doesn't include the Northern France areas administrated from the Brussels' kommendantur or Alsace-Lorraine, or the Italian-occupied areas) instead of "Vichy France" (which is not the same, but overlaps significantly with "Zone libre") and vice-versa.
  It's a mess.
  I wanted to sort it out with a dab page that would function as a central node for navigating among them, and by using a different styling sending a clear signal that it is not a standard WWII wiki article page. ^walk victor falk ^talk 17:38, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is not a WP:RETAIN or WP:ENGVAR issue. I only half understand the nom's rationale directly above, but using "Second World War" instead of "World War II" as some kind of code to the reader (or editors?) about the content of the page is not the way to achieve the goal. Maybe create the "main" France in WWII article? But in the meantime, this is not the solution. Dohn joe (talk) 14:47, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

{{sofixit}} Creating a "main" article is the ideal. However, click on all those links in this dab page to see what a daunting task it is, actually far more of my time is taken up by WWII articles instead of the pre-Napoleonic ones I wished to edit when I joined the French military history task force. I'd like nothing more than that such an article came to pass and I've been working on that, and then this dab page would be converted to one of the countless redirects to French WWII articles. So the unorthodox name is to avoid imposing a presumption on what the name of that hypothetical article should be. This page is not meant to evolve into such an article, but to be either a disambiguation page (in the interim) or a redirect. ^walk victor falk ^talk 16:02, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

I seem to have tried to circumvent that. Having started to form an article around the points linked to, that argument is no longer current. If it stands, we have moved from no general article to a poor general article which is probably still better than a short disambiguation. GraemeLeggett (talk) 21:38, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. The Wikipedia article for World War II is "World War II", not "The Second World War". Logically, it would make sense to establish consistency, so, imo: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Twyfan714 (talk) 17:47, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose WP:CONCISE ; though I've seen "World War 2"/"WW2" used in British material... instead of "II" -- 65.94.171.206 (talk) 03:55, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
• Comment - this isn't an ENGVAR issue in the way that "harbor/harbour" or "tyre/tire" is. Yes, British and Commonwealth historians tend to prefer TSWW over WWII, and Americans tend to use the opposite, but both forms are used in all varieties of English. Given that Britain's corresponding article is at Military history of the United Kingdom during World War II, I don't think it's a big deal to leave this one here. Parsecboy (talk) 13:28, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Structure of the article

I'd like to try to establish a structure for the article so that it is logical and doesn't lead to wp:undue issues, and that sections are in the right hierarchy with corresponding {{main}} tags: ^walk victor falk ^talk 10:08, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

WWII France:
Intro ipsum lorem.

Phoney war, Narvik, Operation Pike

• Battle of France

Schlieffen Plan, Mechelen Incident, Manstein Plan,

• Fall Gelb

Battle of Belgium,Ardennes, Sedan, Sichelschnitt,

• Fall of France

• Fall Rot

Paris free city,

• Free France

• Appeal of 18 June
• London Government

• Free French Forces

• Occupied France

• Zone occupée

• Militärverwaltung in Frankreich
• Militärverwaltung in Belgien und Nordfrankreich
• Alsace-Lorraine#World War II

• Italian occupation of France during World War II

• Vichy France

• Zone libre

Operation Anton,

• French against French: 1940-1942

Colonies

• Liberation of France

• Campaigns in France and Germany 1944-1945

This is by all means not complete or exhaustive. Feel free to {{fixit}} any want way you want, just leave a comment here on what you did and why. ^walk victor falk ^talk 10:08, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Article or not?

Well, my start at an article got reverted yesterday night on the grounds of lack of citations (fair enough - I should have added at least one or two even if I was working by précis-ing topics from the ledes of the article) and because it was "unilaterally" created. And gave BRD. So lets Discuss. Do we want an article here? I got the impression from the discussion that was reasonable and through feedback at least one editor supported it. GraemeLeggett (talk) 09:59, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

I think what the problem was (besides the lack of citations) was that other articles (eg. Military history of France during World War II) have already discussed most of what the subject here is. That being said, I wouldn't mind combining those articles into this one, but we just have to be careful and prevent it from becoming too long. Plus, there are other articles that have the same idea (see Belgium in World War II and Spain in World War II) so I'd vote for creation. Twyfan714 (talk) 12:51, 1 May 2014 (UTC)