Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/American Civil War task force/Archive 5

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This page is an Archive of the discussions from WikiProject Military history/American Civil War task force talk page (Discussion page). (January 2009 - December 2009) - Please Do not edit!

One of the task force coordinators has decided to edit war on Template:American Civil War

I have some real problems with how User:Bedford has decided to continue inserting links to his new pet article Christmas in the American Civil War on the template. When establishing this essential tool, User:Hlj and I took the suggestion of another user and created page guidelines in order to prevent link creep causing the tool to be too large and therefore far less useful. The page guides state that changes must be discussed BEFORE insertion, and with exceptions Hal, myself, and other users have helped to establish that courteous practice in order to prevent glut and cloggage on the tool. In this case, I have made the user an alternative suggestion so as to include the page in a newly established and linked category "Camp life in the American Civil War", originally suggested by User:Berean Hunter. This would be normal daily mischief for an ordinary user, but I'm pretty unhappy that someone trusted with responsibility has decided to act outside page consensus and against established practice on this vital and gateway tool to our chosen subject matter, a subject matter for which the user was chosen to lead process. I expect more from a project coordinator. Am I acting too sensitively? BusterD (talk) 14:05, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes. It is a topic of general interest. Also, the question should actually be why you are edit warring.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 16:14, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm open to that discussion as well. BusterD (talk) 16:19, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't think that's too sensitive; there should always be discussion prior to any major change in any area of wikipedia, even if it is just adding an article to a template. Skinny87 (talk) 19:55, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

No, it is not sensitive. Per the Bold, revert, discuss cycle, it is perfectly acceptable to feel aggrieved in this situation. A template like that is prone to ballooning into a collection of links, and changes should be discussed, especially if they are reverted. Woody (talk) 20:02, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

If I may, I think we should all avoid pointing fingers from this point forward, and just focus on discussing the topic on hand (whatever the problem is with the ACW template). I agree that edit warring should be avoided at all costs, so let's use this venue as a forum to reach consensus/compromise. JonCatalán^(Talk) 20:04, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Redirect battle

I have some children insisting on having the redirect for War of Northern Aggression going to Naming the American Civil War instead of the sensible redirecting to the main ACW article. I need some helping dealing with these kids.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 18:39, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Although I am not a child and was unaware of this battle, I agree that the Naming article is the appropriate target for the link. It will minimize confusion that may result when the reader is redirected to an article that does not mention this term in its lead section. (And I do not think that the dozen or so fringe alternative names should be mentioned in the main article. The prominent link to the Naming article in the first line of text is sufficient.) Hal Jespersen (talk) 19:15, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Agree with Hal, makes sense. Skinny87 (talk) 19:19, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Per WP:RCAT, synonyms should go to the article that is the synonym. The Naming article isn't a synonym.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 19:28, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

I think we are faced with a situation here that was not anticipated by the authors of WP:RCAT--a lengthy article that was written to explain the history and significance of the various nicknames for the war. Their guideline assumes that there are synonyms in wide usage and people would legitimately type those names into a search box. No casual reader would type War of Northern Aggression and be disappointed to find an explanation of where the term came from rather than being dumped into the ACW article without any explanation. Hal Jespersen (talk) 21:30, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

If this is anything similar, "Great Patriotic War" redirects to Eastern Front (World War II). To some degree, I guess it would be better to direct it to some article where it describes the naming conventions, or at least that these conventions be discussed in the article it redirects too (in this case, the American Civil War). It would make sense, and it would get rid of any supposed POV. JonCatalán^(Talk) 20:05, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Mr. Bedford has gone ahead and retargeted the redirect to ACW [1]. I am taking all of the redirects to RfD for broader community discussion. I invite all others to also participate at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion#War of Northern Aggression → American Civil War. Rgrds. --Tombstone (talk) 13:49, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

What is the expectation of this RdD process? I have little more to say beyond what I said above. Should I repeat it on the RfD page? Hal Jespersen (talk) 15:46, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

The decision on this has shifted from this talk page to there so that would be the best place for discussion. A few other similar articles have also been brought in. --ROGER DAVIES ^talk 13:09, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Troop engagements of the ACW

I see on the ACW battles list talk page that Dhartung proposed a few years ago the troop engagments of the ACW lists should be merged into the list of ACW battles page. There are now engagement lists by year (1861, 1862, 1863, and 1864) and was wondering if these should be merged into the list of ACW battles article as well. Wild Wolf (talk) 12:33, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Although a merger would make theoretical sense, in my opinion this is too much information for a single article. One possible solution is to have five list articles, divided by years. However, to match the current contents of the main article, that would prompt the creation of more list articles sorted by state as well, all of which would be rather difficult to keep in sync with each other. I wonder how many people actually look at these list articles. It's too bad that they cannot be created automatically by some tool that extracts current information from article infoboxes. Hal Jespersen (talk) 19:14, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Expert advice requested

We are discussing changing the name of categories suce as Category:United States elections in North Carolina to either Category:Federal elections in North Carolina, or Category:United States federal elections in North Carolina at this CFD page. At first glance, the "United States" in the proposed new name seems unnecessary, as there is no other North Carolina except the one in the US. However, from reading the article on the CSA and the articles on the congress/president of the CSA, it looks like elections were held in those states. The question is whether they were referred to as "federal elections" or not. I'd like to ask anyone with insight into this to please come to the discussion and add your voice. Thanks! Neier (talk) 00:30, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Battle of Marion

Eyes wanted on this article please. It has a rather checkered history with several unsuccessful attempts at Good Article and A-class. Perhaps you could leave comments on its talk page about anything that needs improving for A-Class. It would be good for the editor concerned if this passed next time as it's been a long hard struggle.  :) --ROGER DAVIES ^talk 07:21, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I've been seeing this insertion link pop up in the last few months

This diff is representative of the sort of insertion I've been seeing lately. Always links to Thomas Legion.net; always seems to be a single edit by an ip; always has some marginal helpfulness to the page; almost always is accompanied by a well-written edit summary justifying the insertion (not merely "adding link" or some such). I'm not quite sure what to do, or how much to be concerned. So I'm asking: Should I escalate this linkspam possibly by vanished User:Thomas legion (based on a cursory reading)? BusterD (talk) 13:24, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

At least at first glance I do not see a particular problem. I have read a few of the articles at the Thomas Legion site, and they seem to be serious, sometimes presenting a point of view that would get them banned on Wikipedia, but still historically defensible. In other words, they represent some of our competition, and if one or more of our editors choose to give them some publicity, there is no harm done. If a lot of such sites were to appear, so that our links would be choked with them, perhaps I would rethink my position, but for the moment I think we should encourage this sort of activity. (One possible issue is that Thomas Legion seems to push Amazon for books. Some may object to that, but I see it as no worse than commercials on television.) PKKloeppel (talk) 14:57, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

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Forbes

For those looking for article images, I happened upon a giant collection of Edwin Forbes paintings and engravings at the Library of Congress. Go to http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html and search for "Edwin Forbes Civil War". Since he died in 1895, they're all public domain. Virtually all need Photoshop touchups, unfortunately. You also need to evaluate his captions carefully because there are a fair number of bloopers. For those of you who have the 40-volume Time-Life series, they make use of Forbes quite a bit and you can rely on their interpretations of exactly what you're seeing. Hal Jespersen (talk) 00:44, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Kevin Musker

An article with this title just came up at Articles for deletion. A very quick review established that it was a hoax created in February 2006 by cloning Charles Ferguson Smith. Despite this being pointed out in an edit summary about five weeks later, this article about a bogus Union division commander was tagged as a start-class American Civil War article and survived for three years. Just thought this group would want to know. Rklear (talk) 02:26, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Plagiarism

I just saw this: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. We have a problem with a nontrivial set of battle articles based on this. In the antediluvial days of Wikipedia, over 400 battle articles were copied directly from the public domain source http://www.nps.gov/history/hps/abpp/battles/bycampgn.htm. I would render a guess that about 20% of these articles are still substantially the same and, although they list the source in References, there is sometimes no direct statement that the public domain text was copied. I recommend that if you find a battle article that is only a paragraph or two, check its source against these links and either rewrite the article or say something like "This article contains public domain text from ..." Hal Jespersen (talk) 01:24, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

If we can come up with a list, I'd be willing to go through them. BusterD (talk) 10:31, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

The easy list is here, but we have plenty of battle articles which don't have the tag. I wonder if we could get someone to look at all the battles on our full list and add the tag if any suspicion of copied text is present. Then we can just work the category and solve on a case by case basis. BusterD (talk) 13:34, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

A random clickthough of Category:American Civil War battle stubs shows many are word-for-word copies, or expansions of such copies. We should start there, then work our way toward start-class pages. BusterD (talk) 15:04, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

New Milhist image

File:Ulysses S. Grant from West Point to Appomattox.jpg - I leave it up to you if you want it (or details from it - it should be trivial to take some details of the battles from the PNG version) in any articles other than the ones it is currently in. It cleaned up very nicely. =) Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 09:37, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Copied from WT:MILHIST  Roger Davies ^talk 09:03, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Corps titles

I've just noticed XIX Corps (ACW) and many more like it - would anyone object to retitling these as, eg, XIX Corps (Union Army)? It seems generally more consistent with the practice for naming by country or service, rather than period, and avoids the use of a somewhat jargonish abbreviation. Shimgray | talk | 18:01, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I was wondering about that designation. I would endorse a wholesale move of all such unit disambiguation terms. I would encourage you to get a larger sample of opinion before the move, however. BusterD (talk) 18:05, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I figure if I flag it up here, and no-one objects, that's as good a sample as I could want :-) Shimgray | talk | 18:20, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

For whateber my opinion is worht I agree with that as well.--Kumioko (talk) 18:18, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Agree, the current name is not in line with conventions at all. – Joe N 20:03, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Like one of the stately witness trees at the Battle of Gettysburg, I was there to see the creation of these articles and the (ACW) was selected by a person long departed to differentiate them from the modern U.S. Army Corps names, very few of which are directly related. I did not object to the (ACW) because the links to these articles are always piped and they are easy to type without taking your finger off the shift key. I would not object to naming the articles (Union Army) as long as the busy beavers using automated tools do not start on a frenzy of updating 500+ articles to avoid the link redirects. It is hard enough to keep track of legitimate article edits and ferret out vandalism without having to wade through yet another blizzard of those inconsequential changes. Hal Jespersen (talk) 00:42, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Moved - as requested, I've left the redirect links in place, & I'm sure they'll eventually be weeded out over time. Shimgray | talk | 14:00, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Confederate ranks

As I watch semi-robotic edits going by, I sometimes see officer rank links for company- and field-grade Confederate officers assigned to the United States versions of those links. Do any of you latter-day Rebels out there have an issue with that? There are Confederate links for generals, like General (CSA). I have typically not piped in country-specific links for CSA guys because they were not in the U.S. Army, after all. Hal Jespersen (talk) 00:56, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

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Mixing alternate history and actual history

I have some issues with how Battle of Gunpowder River and Battle of Frederick (fictional) pagespaces are evolving. These two pages refer to fictional battles which occur only in the written works of Newt Gingrich. There are numerous clear copyediting issues which I'll refrain from discussing, but my biggest concern is how real-world sources seem to be used to cite fictional events. While the lede for each page makes clear the conflict is imaginary, the infobox for each page seems to indicate these battles are part of the ACW. A consistent in-universe tone, the repeated insertion of troop numbers and the use of real world sources to document both troop strength and casualties undermine the initial statement the battles are entirely fictional. I also have an objection to the use of the MilHist project template in this talk space (a while ago I deleted the template on one of them, inserting the alternate history template instead). If the author was less notable, I'd probably have nominated both of these for deletion. Any thoughts? BusterD (talk) 14:54, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

At the very least, the info box should indicate that it is a fictional battle, such as by saying "|partof=a Counterfactual (fictional) American Civil War" or something. It would preferable to rename the Gunpowder River article title to be "(fictional)" as well. But I agree with your underlying concern and that is that the purpose of such articles is to describe literary works, not battles. There does not need to be a list of links to actual people, places, or the numeric details of casualties for a fictitious battle. (I would not like to see someone clicking the "what links to" button in the Robert E. Lee article, for instance, and have these battles appear in a list of legitimate links.) The infobox should be chosen from one that focuses on publication date, authors, number of books sold, other books in the series, etc. Hal Jespersen (talk) 16:36, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Since both "battles" pretty much consist of plot summary extracts, I'm pondering the idea of applying merge tags to the lot, merging both battles with the novels from which they derived. The infobox can come out, and then we don't have the problem. Frankly, neither pagespace can claim sourcing independent of the novels themselves. BusterD (talk) 20:02, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I've stated my intention on both talk pages to merge to the fictional works, and applied relevant tags. BusterD (talk) 22:35, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Francis Amasa Walker

I have completed a major re-write of Francis Amasa Walker and am soliciting other editors' input, edits, and corrections to the article. Madcoverboy (talk) 17:00, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Princeton Court House

I would appreciate comments on a discussion I started in Talk:Valley Campaign#Princeton Court House. Hal Jespersen (talk) 23:48, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Changes to popular pages lists

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William Thompson Lusk

I have been working on User:NuclearWarfare/William Thompson Lusk for the past few days, and frankly, I was getting a bit bored of the man. I have taken notes (and cited inline) on the article itself, but I was wondering if other people were interested in converting the work from bullet notes to prose. The man, an assistant adjuntant general during the Civil War, did some interesting things; he was one of the first people to perform C-sections where both the mother and child lived and also came out in favor of germ theory very early. So, anyone interested? NW (Talk) 00:30, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Vermont Civil war units

Here is an excellent source of material on every Vermont Civil War unit:

• http://vermontcivilwar.org/.

Some interested editor should make use of this website to improve every Vermont Civil War unit history.--DThomsen8 (talk) 17:19, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

List class

I noticed that other WikiProjects include a list-class but that the MILHIST prject doesn't. This could be usefull for all of the lists with this task force (such as lists of regiments by state). Wild Wolf (talk) 19:01, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Sesquicentenial drive?

With the Civil War sesquicentenial coming up, maybe we could organize a drive similar to the WWI task force's centenary drive. Wild Wolf (talk) 19:01, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I was just wondering the same thing. Then I found your post here. I absolutely think something should be organized. 'Course, I'm a new guy, so I haven't the faintest idea what's involved. But I do think that if our WWI friends are organizing something for their 100th, we really ought to be doing something to recognize and promote the 150th of the American Civil War. Now...how do we do that? Historical Perspective (talk) 17:24, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

In the last year I got a couple Civil War FAs, Battle of Corydon and Eli Lilly. There is a couple more I am thinking about working on this year. Maybe we should set a goal of getting American Civil War over the last hurdle and to FA status and get it on the main page page on the 150th anniversary date. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:43, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I think that's a great idea. Taking a cue from the WWI project, what if we developed a list of core topics (or maybe just a list of priority articles) to bring to FA? Perhaps we agree on the 10 most important engagements, get them to FA and run them on their 150th anniversary dates? That would stagger the process over four years or so. We might also do something similar with a list of generals/political leaders? Historical Perspective (talk) 15:09, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

That's something I'd be glad to participate in. I have a wealth of reference material available. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 15:12, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Guys, as promised on the main MilHist talk page, I've created a dedicated subpage for this drive under the ACW Task Force here. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 14:36, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Assistance with expansion

I worked on the article 11th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment for quite some time and would love some assistance in getting it to A or FA status. I would appreciate a thorough editor to take a look and clean up the language. It probably requires some additional content, but with the short service of the regiment, there are very few sources. Any help you can offer is appreciated. Thanks! --Daysleeper47 (talk) 15:57, 23 October 2009 (UTC)