Talk:Battle of Petersburg III

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and regional and topical task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Additional information and associated task forces: This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-Class status: Referencing and citation: criterion not met Coverage and accuracy: criterion met Structure: criterion met Grammar: criterion met Supporting materials: criterion met Associated task forces (nations and regions): United States military history task force Associated task forces (periods and conflicts): American Civil War task force

[edit] Needs references

Needs to cite references other than other websites.

In particular, neither source cited refers to this as the Third Battle of Petersburg, and it looks to me like it's just the assault ending the siege rather than a separate battle - is it really commonly called that? Cyclopaedic (talk) 15:46, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

No, virtually none of the Civil War battles that Wikipedia labels as First This and Second That are actually referred to in that way by historians or by contemporaries. There are a few notable exceptions, such as First/Second Bull Run (First/Second Manassas) and First/Second/Third Winchester. Almost all of the Wikipedia battle articles started from the taxonomy of the NPS ABPP, which uses the Roman numerals just to keep them separated in the battle summary. When these articles were turned into stubs in Wikipedia, the Roman numerals were retained. It would probably have been more logical to use parenthesized dates (year--as was done for Battle of Yorktown (1862)--or full date when two occur in the same year), but that is water under the bridge. About two years ago, someone decided that this was incorrect and started renaming some of them as First and Second. So this is simply a small discrepancy between Wikipedia and the world that needs to be tolerated or corrected. I am not volunteering to do the latter and I hope a real discussion will take place before someone charges off renaming articles because the redirects will be a nightmare. Hal Jespersen (talk) 16:20, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

There is a discussion of this going on at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Name. I think it would be really helpful if you reposted the above there and joined that discussion. Cyclopaedic (talk) 18:05, 24 November 2007 (UTC)