Talk:Finnish Civil War

RE: Conscripts made up 70% of Finland's Combat Forces

I hate to quibble but if for some strictly abstract or statistical exercise, the total combined number of conscrips and draftees' were were teased out from the often integral, diverse and at times mission critical positions they skilfully performed deep within the various Professional Combat, Support, Maintenance, Logistics and Intelligence Units into which these men had been wholly assimilated. Then after untangling each one, then segregating from the rest of his unit, if we were to gather these conscrips together in one large lump and somehow view them as a distinct component, incompadable with the smaller lump next to it, made up of Professional soldiers and then counted the number of men in both groups, and did a simple bit of math.

We would find that contrary to what the article claims: Conscrips did not make up 70% of Finland's military force, but only 2/3s or 66% while the professional cadre accounted for 34%. Yes just a few points off but a ratio of 2:1 is much different than 7:3 in a military training, mentoring, controlling and fighting situation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WOPrLookingGLASS (talk • contribs) 12:50, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Conversion of inline Harvard referencing to shortened footnotes.

RfC (concluded 5 September 2020) deprecated inline parenthetical citations, also known as Harvard referencing. The current style mixes explanatory notes & inline citations. I plan to shift to separate explanatory notes with shortened footnotes and their references to give a consistent & cleaner style. Once we reach a critical mass, I will replace {{Use Harvard referencing}} with {{Use shortened footnotes}}. Peaceray (talk) 05:42, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

FA sweeps

Concerns about this article:

• Citation style does not make for optimum verifiability. Putting all the citations for one paragraph in one footnote does not help the reader check a piece of information as they don't know which of the several sources cited to look in. It's better to cite each sentence or couple sentences individually.
• Article is a bit too long at almost 12,000 words for optimum readability. It would be better to use more aggressive summary style and shift details to sub-articles.
• Too many images that sandwich each other in violation of MOS:IMAGELOC, especially around the maps.
• The English language sources look OK for WP:RS, but I do not speak Finnish and cannot say if the same is true of them.

Overall, the article is in better shape than many FAs. (t · c) buidhe 06:39, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

The citation style is indeed highly problematic. For example, ref 9 essentially boils down to "this paragraph is sourced to a total of 205 pages of content across 5 sources". Verification is not possible in practice. For example, I was trying to verify that the label "Svecomans" is appropriate for the Jäger Movement (I've always associated it primarily with university students rather than Svecomans, even if there's probably a massive overlap in the Venn diagram of these groups) but just looking at the ref makes me want to give up.

The Finnish language sourcing also raises some concerns:

• Multiple references to newspaper articles about books/publications rather than the books themselves
• At least one newspaper editorial
• One master's thesis
• One SPS website; I'm not familiar enough with the author to determine whether they count as an SME
• A website for a company providing historical walking tours of Helsinki
• One student project website (even if supervised by profs.)
• Incomplete references for many (most?) of the online sources, missing authors and publishers. At least one bare link.

For non-Finnish references, a first glance raises the following questions:

• Why is there a thing by Otto Wille Kuusinen in the bibliography?
• Citing literature from the 60s for casualty figures seems dubious when there's much more moderns literature available, incl. the Finnish National Archive project used in fi.wp.

This might be in a better shape than many equally old FA articles, but needs a good look-over. Ljleppan (talk) 07:35, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Initial comments content-wise based on a skim-thru and some ctrl-F'ing:

• Should mention the aviation aspect at least briefly, incl. Eric von Rosen's donated aircraft; sufficiently notable that he continues to influence FAF symbology to this day.
• In the Warfare section, there's significant focus on individual actions, but little overarching analysis of how the battles were fought. A potential source would be The transfer of military knowledge and the Finnish Civil War: The Finnish volunteers in the Royal Prussian Jaeger Battalion 27 as adopters and disseminators of the German art of war, 1915–1918 by Pasi Tuunanen.
• Analysis of aftermath is limited, at least on the following points:
  • Public discourse in the following century (nb: Not "decades", "century": the conversation still goes one, even if it has calmed down), especially w/r/t what the name and nature of the conflict were (footnote A is insufficient; see e.g. fi:Suomen sisällissodan nimet for the fi.wp article on the name). This should also include discussion regarding the historiography. Possible sources include chapter 12, The Post-Cold War Memory Culture of the Civil War: Old-New 
Patterns and New Approaches in The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy (2014) edited by Tepora and Roselius.
  • The discussion regarding national unification (or the Finnish compromise) is very vague, esp. in the context of how important it becomes by the 1939 Winter War.
  • Communist Party of Finland is name dropped, but there's no description of how it was banned until 1944, or it's influence within Finland; these are important for understanding the post-civil war political landscape.
  • No discussion regarding the lasting impact of the Jäger Movement within the Finnish Defence Force, esp. how significant roles they played as commanders during the Winter War and Continuation War. If I recall correctly, there was a bunch of infighting between those from the Jäger background and those from the Russian army background in the 1920s.
  • No discussion on what happened to the White Guard/suojeluskunnat in the aftermath, e.g. how they get pretty much folded into the FDF structure, or the 1921 almost-a-coup (fi:Suojeluskuntaselkkaus).
  • No mention of Heimosodat (transl. Kinship Wars).

Not all of the above need extensive discussion, but I'd expect at least some prose about them. Ljleppan (talk) 10:28, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Listing at WP:FARGIVEN. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:19, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Name of the war

I think it's problematic that there is no discussion in the article about the name of the war, or more broadly: the discoursical side of the war.

From the perspective of the winners, the war was "vapaussota" ("war of liberation"). This discourse was the official narrative in the Finnish Republic after 1918. "Vapaussota" was the origin myth of the Finnish independence and the very Finnish state.

From the losers' pespective it was a civil war ("kansalaissota"), or even better, a class war ("luokkasota"). It was also a failed revolution, a failed rebellion. The class nature of the war was very clear and strongly emphasized by the socialists.

The antagonism between the two narratives, the "white truth" and the "red truth" was a defining feature in the Finnish society and politics for generations.

The consensus of a "civil war" (kansalaissota, nowadays "sisällissota"), presented like here as if it was how contemporary people saw the things, is a much later thing that only started to form in the 1960s. 2001:14BB:670:5912:0:0:2046:B901 (talk) 05:42, 22 December 2021 (UTC)