User talk:PBS/Archive 12

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		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		For your vigilant work and efforts herein, especially on: "Battle of Berlin" & "Battle in Berlin" articles. Kierzek (talk) 02:54, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Congo

Hello,

could you please explain why you removed the Belgian atrocities in the Congo Free State from the List of wars and disasters by death toll?

Regards,

Haggman

Thank you

Dear Mr. Shearer

Please accept my humble apologies for the extreme lateness in my reply. I can offer no excuse, but I got overwhelmed with various other projects in real life, so I have not been able to contribute. Thank you for your kind words, and I would be honored to offer some ideas for discussion about revisionism. This may be going into original research here, but I think the revisionism page should pay attention to the politics of memory. History may not be politics, but there is a political component in that what people choose to remember and choose to forget about the past does have political resonances. Hope to be able to contribute so more in the new year, and thank you for your kind words. Please accept my best wishes for the New Year.A.S. Brown (talk) 01:33, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Battle of Berlin

Dear Mr. Shearer,

I would like you to look over a current edit conflict going on in the Battle of Berlin article. This one editor, Kierzek, appears to want to pack the article full of extraneous references when my point is that citing 3 authors who all use Krivosheev is redundant. He, however, insists that these are "respected sources" and even went so far as to re-insert a figure of 200,000 wounded which was not in the Mueller but grafted onto it from an East German source by the banned user JohnHistory so as to make his math appear correct (KIA+WIA+POW).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Battle_of_Berlin#Casualties:_summing-up_and_suggestions

I showed the way that demographic and casualty studies are used in other wiki articles, but Kierzek continues to ignore my presentation and reverts edits even to the point of being nonsensical. For instance, he found issue with me deleting a line on Hamilton (but keeping the reference as a secondary reference to Krivosheev), even when Hamilton in his notes directly cites Krivosheev with an identical casualty figure. Furthermore, I had put in parenthetical "(Overmans, 2000)" to clarify the civilian data that Clodfelter used in his book, but Kierzek disagreed with this and restored the semantically nonsensical line of casualties being "unknown," but 125,000 died. I believe clarifying the statistical work that these historians are citing is important, but to Kierzek, it's either one or the other. He seems to believe that each history text is an independent work unto itself.

I think I am making a legitimate point about how historians use statistical data, namely they get their data from preexisting statistical and archival work, but there's little purpose for me to smash my head against a brick wall when people all have their idiosyncratic interpretations of how history is done.96.238.16.143 (talk) 21:23, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

It is a shame I am having to go to another's talk page to apparently state a defense. At any rate, the main reason I reverted the edits by 96.238.16.143, who is N/K/A Megakedar is because of his approach to editing of the article. It was the method not the content that was the problem. I certainly also want "clarifying" of sources and information. Along with proper citing. I will not bother with the other obtuse assumptions put forth as to what I might believe, as stated above. Thanks, PBS for your helpful comments on the Battle of Berlin talk page and I believe enough has been said. Kierzek (talk) 19:36, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Greetings again, I have answered a number of your concerns in the Battle of Berlin article. Take a look. Megakedar (talk) 04:45, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Second English Civil War

Hi Philip.

Don't like to bother you, but for a while I have been thinking that the article on the Second English Civil War should probably have a brief section on Ireland. Personally, I don't really think it is possible to understand the Royalist strategy in the Second Civil War without reference to Ireland.

For example, the return of Ormonde to Ireland and the subsequent peace of 1648-49; the use of Southern Irish ports as privateer bases by Prince Rupert; and of course the eventual Cromwellian invasion, influenced in part by these developments.

A short section on the developments in Ireland would also provide a connective link between the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland and the Civil Wars in England.

Inchiquin (talk) 12:33, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Carson signing Solemn League and Covenant

I know it is a long time ago, wow almost 5 years, but do you recall this image File:Carson signing Solemn League and Covenant.jpg that you uploaded? We are working on upgrading Ireland to GA or maybe FA and while I found a source for the image, I have not found an author or publication date information. Any assistance you can give would be great. I am not watching this page so please drop me a {{talkback}} when you reply. ww2censor (talk) 14:33, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks anyway for replying. ww2censor (talk) 14:00, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Terror Bombing, a good but controversial article, ended

Noting the discussion, [1], still I don't see the encyclopedic sensibility or basic logic of subsuming "terror bombing" into 'Strategic Bombing'. Terror bombing's definitional purpose is to induce terror, while strategic bombing's definitional purpose is to raze the enemy's economic capacity. I'm sure there's overlap, both topics are about bombing, but if I were looking for information about terror bombing or a history of that, I certainly wouldn't expect it to be in the strategic bombing section. But my larger point is, you don't generate progress in this encyclopedia by destroying knowledge. Yes, there's completely legitimate disagreement about what terror bombing is and isn't, just as there is disagreement on anything with the word 'terror' attached to it. The duty of an excellent encyclopedia is not to run away from controversy, and certainly not to eliminate content, but to include the disagreement. (As I'm attempting to do in History of Terrorism). Where is the information on terror bombing now? Well, it's largely in the weirdly named Aerial bombing of cities. What do cities have to do with it? Isn't terror basically about bombing civilians, whereever they are, countryside, village, and so on? Even stranger, looks like I agree with Sherzo on this matter (from the basically evenly split discussion on merging): Oppose Terror bombing is a distinct concept with a large enough base of scholarly sources to merit its own article. Sherzo (talk) 09:57, 15 October 2009 (UTC)Haberstr (talk) 20:26, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh really?

By you? Are you going to block me yourself or do you intend to find someone who trusts you? Your contributions to that talk page are patently worthless to the article so it might be hard. The only impression I've gotten is that you need to keep on going to show you know something about something, even to the detriment of the now productive discussion initiated by Andrew Lancaster.

So I very correctly do a little resectioning and you get all bent out of shape, and now are making threats because you think I've made you look a little unknowledgeable. Boohoo. Meanwhile you are still contributing nothing of value to the talk page or article. I might report you soon enough. DinDraithou (talk) 16:46, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Kashara

The article Kashara has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

There is no "town" called "Kashara" in Kursk Oblast. There is no "Kashara Region" either, and only Russian republics have "capitals". There are two villages called "Kashara" (and one "Kasharka") but the information here is not enough to figure out which one is meant. Fallingrain is not a reliable source.

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:16, January 27, 2010 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Last will and testament of Adolf Hitler

An editor has nominated one or more articles which you have created or worked on, for deletion. The nominated article is Last will and testament of Adolf Hitler. We appreciate your contributions, but the nominator doesn't believe that the article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in his/her nomination (see also Wikipedia:Notability and "What Wikipedia is not").

Your opinions on whether the article meets inclusion criteria and what should be done with the article are welcome; please participate in the discussion(s) by adding your comments to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Last will and testament of Adolf Hitler. Please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~).

You may also edit the article during the discussion to improve it but should not remove the articles for deletion template from the top of the article; such removal will not end the deletion debate.

Please note: This is an automatic notification by a bot. I have nothing to do with this article or the deletion nomination, and can't do anything about it. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 01:14, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Your recent edit concerning Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo

Dear Mr. Shearer, I have seen your recent edit of the article on the battle of Waterloo. While I agree that the Coalition did not recognize Napoleon as Emperor in 1815, I argue this reason is insufficient in justifying the absence of his rightful Imperial title in an encyclopedic article. Here is why: as you probably know, a French Constitution had been validated by plebiscite on the 1st of June 1815 and this Constitution had put in place the French Empire with Napoleon as Emperor. Thus, taking the view that he was not Emperor in 1815 is adhering to the Coalition's point of view about the nature of the French form of government, an issue that was actually strictly within the scope of French internal affairs. The issue of the recognition of the regime was at the time of a strictly political nature and was usually settled in peace treaties (e.g. Napoleon was recognized as Emperor of the French and King of Italy by Russia and Austria after he beat those countries and made peace with them, in 1805 and 1807 respectively). Moreover and even more importantly, historians take the view that Napoleon was Emperor in 1815. I quote the example of specialists such as Jean Tulard or Britisher Richard Homes who naturally speak of the 'Emperor'/'emperor' in 1815, when talking about Napoleon. Also, D. Smith repeatedly speaks about 'Napoleon' rather than of 'Bonaparte' or 'Napoleon Bonaparte' (including in the chapter about the battle of Waterloo). I believe that these arguments are encyclopedically-sensible and the mainstream on the matter and thus I have re-inserted Napoleon's Imperial title in the lead of the article about the battle of Waterloo. Best,--Alexandru.demian (talk) 15:21, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Definition of terrorism

The list of definitions under "Scholars and other Individuals" is even worst. I´m tempted to delete it.-- Bonifacius 08:47, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better to split the article, having one for the international definition and one for the domestic ones?-- Bonifacius 08:55, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

I see what you`ve done. The problem is that the whole controversy - the difficulties to define terrorism are at the international level. At the national level, each state defines terrorism as it pleases. Right now, the lead and the 2 first sections also refer to the international level.-- Bonifacius 09:00, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to the discussion. Obviously, describing a particular act or group as terrorist might be contentious, and so the ban, but that is not the point of this article. As I see it, and I might be wrong, it is about the legal definition of terrorism in legal treaties and municipal laws, which is rather objective.

Indeed, municipal laws could make evident the diferent interpretations to terrorism. But the list would have to be far more comprehensive than what we have now. And problably, it would require some "original research", at least to highlight the differences. Those laws are easily found - and in English- in the national reports to the Security Council CTC. But just reading them is an enormous amount of work.

My point with the scholarly definitions is about notability. Are any of these important? I don't know. They clearly are not at the level of importance of Kofi Annan. Perhaps it would be necessary to give some qualification of who are these people and why they are being quoted.

Thanks !!-- Bonifacius 09:28, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

I do like your solution for spliting Genocide. You are right, eventually we should adopt a simmilar solution for this page.

Here is a case in point with the scholars' definition: Look at the first one, by Raffoul Saadeh . There is no citation. Acording to the history, he added it himself:

(cur) (prev) 21:09, 20 January 2010 Rls68 (talk | contribs) m (38,070 bytes) (Moved up my definition to coincide with the chronological order) (undo)

(cur) (prev) 16:24, 8 December 2009 Rls68 (talk | contribs) m (39,400 bytes) (undo)

(cur) (prev) 13:56, 8 December 2009 Rls68 (talk | contribs) (39,400 bytes) (undo)

And the only Raffoul Saadeh that I can find is an undergraduate at Georgetown. [See] I don´t now if he is the same one that is being quoted. Notability? -- Bonifacius 11:54, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

the definition subjective?

PBS, the definition of terrorism in political or journalistic discourse might be subjective, the definition used a criminal legal context cannot be. Due process requires legal precision. The different legal interpretations of the geneva protocols cannot be brushed aside just as a political question. Terrorism and the laws of war (International humanitarian law) desperatedly needs some work.-- Bonifacius 13:15, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Khaldei's photo

I see you fixed the RfC title. I appreciate it. I also realise that, since this is a first time when I initiate RfC, I did that in not an optimal way. Feel free to further modify my post if it needs in additional improvements.
Regards,
--Paul Siebert (talk) 14:54, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

terrorism and laws of war

PBS: I`ll be happy deleting it. I did not want to do it beacuse, as far as I see, its content had been hanging to the page on International conventions on terrorism for about four years without you taking issue. I would also delete the couple of paragraph from this text that seem to have contaminated the definition of terrorism one.-- Bonifacius 05:32, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Don't you dare...

...patronise me. How about you actually do something productive? J Milburn (talk) 01:03, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

I ask you not to patronise me, and then you remind me that "Removing warnings from ones user page is taken as proof that you have read the warning"? It's nice that you're doing something useful, but that doesn't mean it's ok to then go and do something not useful, otherwise I would have, by now, built up enough credit to block you and call you all sorts of nasty things. Leave me alone, please. If you want to discuss issues reasonably on an article talk page, I'm happy to join in. J Milburn (talk) 01:18, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, those comments really were over-aggressive. Now I've slept on them, I feel quite ashamed. Thank you for your advice, and I'm sorry if this whole affair has made me appear a lot more angry and aggressive than I am. J Milburn (talk) 12:18, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Edit warring

Dear PBS,
Unfortunately, you formally cannot re-insert a contested image into the Battle of Berlin infobox: the burden of evidence rests with those who adds/restores non-free material, not with those who remove it, and 3RR is hardly applicable here. The best solution would be to wait until RfC is closed. It is quite possible that your premature attempts to restore the image may be used as a pretext to question the results of RfC.
Sincerely,
--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:13, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
PS. Feel free to remove this post if you disagreed.--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:15, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Blair Worden

An article having been created, it needs work. Thought you might be able to help. Charles Matthews (talk) 19:25, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Irish Manual of Style link

• • WP:IMOS ww2censor (talk) 03:55, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

FYI, I have requested that ArbCom confirm that Ireland-naming discussion process is complete. -- RA (talk) 08:53, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

RfC on template:referenced

Thanks for closing this RfC contrary to your personal opinion. It's good to see editors with the necessary detachment between what they prefer and what the current consensus turns out to be. Fram (talk) 08:03, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Welcome to WP:WORCS

Welcome aboard no.15 - I look forward to your edits! GyroMagician (talk) 23:41, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Orphan tags in general

I left you a specific reply on my talk page which I hope you'll read. It's not long. You have a reasonable idea, but I haven't formed an opinion yet. My instinct is to be conservative until there is wider discussion. The upside is less clutter. The downside is that most problematic pages are orphans and most orphans are less likely to be wanted pages. It's undeniable that orphan status is a positive correlate with other article issues. Because orphan status is so easily [automatically] determined, it serves as a useful proxy. Removing it from casual browsers would remove that signaling. Of course automated tools would still have it, but my hunch is individual edits, rather than automated ones are the real fixers of the orphan problem. Similarly, I wonder if the page view stats would support the notion that visible orphan templates are that damaging. Orphans by definition are only reachable by either off-wiki links, or direct searches.

I look forward to further discussion, and like I said, I think this needs a wider audience than the policy talk page. Again, thank you for being so open with me and directing it to my attention. I really do appreciate that. Shadowjams (talk) 08:38, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Hello, PBS. You have new messages at Template talk:Citation-attribution.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Sequestration

It is always gratifying when someone creates an article for something which I have mentioned when creating an earler article without knowing much about. Noble work Regards Motmit (talk) 20:27, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Stub Sorting: You can help!

Hello PBS. Thank you for tagging Sir Thomas Gower, 1st Baronet as a stub. I noticed that you used the {{stub}} template. In the future, it would be greatly appreciated if you could sort the article to a subcategory by using one of these templates instead. For example, you can use {{US-novelist-1960s-stub}} for an American novelist born in the 1960s. Of course, if you can't find a proper category, you can always use the {{stub}} tag and someone else will sort it for you, or you can propose a new stub template or category here. Thanks!

Gosox⁽⁵⁵⁾₍₅₅₎ 22:22, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Robert Holborne

You might be interested in looking at Talk:Robert Holborne -- PBS (talk) 04:17, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Why would I be especially interested in that? Thue | talk 10:37, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Explusion of Germans

I understand why you removed the Algerian War and the slave trade from the list of genocides, but why did you remove the expulsions of Germans after World War II? There was a lot of references for that part. It seems obviously genocide to me, although I know it's not a well-known event outside Germany. Epa101 (talk) 23:24, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I just noticed that the table looked very different, clicked on the history and saw three edits by you for Algeria, Germans and slavery. I didn't read closely enough. Epa101 (talk) 23:52, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Hamburg/Dresden

That was a very interesting article and I'm glad you sent it to me. I was unaware that the USA has never ratified the Genocide Convention. I was not proposing to add the bombing of Hamburg to the list; I was using Nolte's description of it as "genocide" to show that there are opinions held by just the odd scholar and it's not clear what threshold the article requires for an alleged genocide to be included. I noticed Telford Taylor's article was written back in 1982. The concept "genocide" expanded hugely when the Srebenica massacre was described as "genocide". I hope I don't sound insensitive to the victims, but I don't see how Srebenica was different from what has happened in most wars in history. Now that one massacre is defined as genocide, virtually every war could be said to have had at least one act of genocide in it. We are obliged to include Srebenica since that is officially "genocide", but we need to decide what to do about other cases. There is also a difficulty with alleged genocides that have not been studied widely, such as the Zanzibar case. Epa101 (talk) 09:30, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

I've read the articles you've sent me. This is purely my opinion and not something I'm proposing about the content of Wikipedia. If Srebenica was "genocide" because it aimed to eliminate part of the Bosnian Muslim population, then I can't see how the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be anything other than "genocide". Taylor said that these bombings were part of a war, but so was Srebenica. I'd say that the My Lai massacre has to be seen as "genocide" since women and children were killed in it whereas they were mostly spared at Srebenica.

One case in which the term "genocide" is used very extensively is Ward Churchill's book A Small Matter of Genocide: he includes the imperial wars fought by Britain, France, etc., the Crusades and the Vietnam War as "genocide". It seems to include too much but his concepts were consistent as far as I noticed. Epa101 (talk) 21:12, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

talk pages

Actually, in hindsight, I was a bit cheeky there. I think you erred in cross-posting as you did, but neither thinking that, nor even being right about it, gives me carte blanche to roll you back like that. We are none of us perfectly consistent all of the time, and I now recognise that I behaved somewhat more impulsively and aggressively that day than I normally would. Please accept my apology for needlessly stirring you up. Hesperian 05:36, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

new wikiproject

Hi. I noted your new wikiproject had been inadvertently set up in main namespace (ie. as an article). I have moved it to wp namespace, the usual haunt of project pages. (Now Wikipedia:WikiProject Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Interregnum. There's a redirect in place at the original location. I've changed some of your links to the new page. When you are ready, you should probably put the original (now redirect) page up for speedy delete. Gwinva (talk) 21:29, 21 March 2010 (UTC)