Wikipedia talk:World War II wikireader/articles/archive1

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DO NOT BUILD THE LIST HERE - that's what the article is for. Articles added here do not count. →Raul654 23:31, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Arrangement proposal

[edit] Discussion

As this list stands now, we should take the "must-haves" and the "should-haves" (127 articles) and add a dozen or two of the would-be-nice articles. That would give us about the right number. I do have one request - we have a lot of articles on individual germans tank models. I'd like to include an overall article on german armor during world War II. →Raul654 21:51, Aug 4, 2004 (UTC)

Ok, this list is getting quite long now (there's no way we can include all of the ones currently listed). So,
  1. Are we still missing any really important ones?
  2. We need to start paring this list down to the list cut. Any suggested tweaks? →Raul654 23:51, Aug 5, 2004 (UTC)
So, on to do list has to be a dedicated article about German AFV's of World War II... something like this... [1]. So should we just cover the tanks or all AFV’s? GeneralPatton 08:01, 6 Aug

2004 (UTC)

Cover all AFVs and use it to replace Pather tank on the must haves. →Raul654 02:35, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)
This list seems short on Axis victories, especially short on China and Southeast Asia. Would be nice to grab the World War II sections of conentration camp, not sure how that would work though - could we make a separate article just for the Wikireader? Strategic bombing has good information on an important topic but covers a broader period than WWII -what do we do with something like that where only part of the article is useful? The fall of the Philippines seems to lack an article although it was started under Military history of the Philippines. Rmhermen 17:01, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)
I added Strategic Bombing During World War II. →Raul654 02:35, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Finishing the list

I went through, I made some corrections. I think the best thing would be to take all the must-haves and the should-haves. That would give us 145 articles. What do people think of this? If no one registers objections, we can move into phase 2 - organization. →Raul654 02:44, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)

Lot of battles and stuff... we could possibly use more on the non-combat side of things. Why not Tokyo Rose or Lord Haw-Haw for example? Or, on a lighter note, how about at least an exerpt from Kilroy was here? Isomorphic 02:54, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Simply put - we're aiming for 100-150 articles (200 at absolute max - I'd prefer not to go that high). That means we have to pick and choose our articles carefully. Since it *is* about the war, it's only logical that battles and theatres get top priority. We can omit some of the less important battles, but we can't include everything. →Raul654 03:10, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, I understand. But any war is more than just battles and commanders, and it's valuable to have at least a little bit of lighter "color" reading, and a little bit of cultural flavor. If nothing else, it's a change of pace for the reader, and makes the whole thing less dry. I'd really like to see old Kilroy make it in there. Rosie the Riveter is another possibility, although that's a bit more U.S.-centric. Isomorphic 04:28, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Ok, let's split the difference. There are currently 144 must/should have articles. Why don't we add 16 "color" articles to make it an even 160? (preferably chosen from the 'would be nice' articles). I personally like Toyko Rose. →Raul654 04:38, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)
Sounds fine. Unfortunately I'm off to bed, but I reiterate my nominations above, of Rosie and Kilroy. I know Kilroy was here sounds a little silly compared to the other stuff, but he was a well-known phenomenon at the time, and you still hear references to him today. Lord Haw-haw is really just the German version of the better-known Tokyo Rose, but you might be able to put a blurb about him in with her article.
Also, I'm moving Musashi from "Should-have" to "Would be nice." We already have Yamato in there for sure, and Musashi is mostly known as Yamato's sister ship. She didn't have a huge effect on the war, either; her career was basically "Allied bombing target." There are lots of things I'd include before Musashi, for example the sinking of the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, or an article on one of the famous fighter pilots (Dick Bong anyone?) Isomorphic 05:01, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Actually now that I think about it, I'm not sure there are 16 good "color" articles to find. I just want to make sure we include some. Speaking of which, Ernie Pyle would be another good article not directly related to combat. I see he's on there as a "would be nice." Isomorphic 05:17, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Here are my suggestions: Code talkers, Otto Skorzeny, Iron Cross, Tuskegee Airmen, Kilroy was here, Tokyo Rose, Hiroo Onada, PURPLE (if we include ultra, we should include purple, and vice versa). I'm sure GeneralPatton has some too. →Raul654 05:20, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)
All good suggestions. Onada Hiroo is an excellent "color" article for two reasons. First, it's an interesting piece of trivia (I've heard the story but never knew the soldier's name.) Second, it gives some insight into the Japanese mindset during the war.
In other news, I just noticed that Kamikaze isn't on the list. Adding it to "should have" because it's one of the things people clearly associate with WWII. Isomorphic 06:26, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Ok, let's settle this one and for all. We need 13 articles to have an even 160:

  1. Onada Hiroo
  2. Kilroy was here
  3. Tokyo Rose
  4. PURPLE
  5. Otto Skorzeny
  6. Code talkers
  7. Iron Cross
  8. Tuskegee Airmen
  9. Ernie Pyle
  10. White Rose
  11. ODESSA
  12. Japanese American Internment
  13. Husband E. Kimmel

I've filled out the last few items. If you don't like them, change them to what you want. Speak now or forever hold your peace →Raul654 20:33, Aug 8, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I have a lot of objections: The list can be construed as America vs. Germany with some British and Soviet help for the Americans, and some Japanese help for the Germans. No article on Zhukov? Much more important to the war than Anne Frank (who really has nothing to do with the war). More comments coming. Danny 01:19, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Rape of Nanking? Haile Selassie? When exactly does World War II begin? Why Hitler Youth or the Reichstag fire? Those are about Nazism, not WW2?

  1. We do have an article on Zhukov to be included.
  2. Unlike Mr. Selassie, the Hitler youth did actively fight in the war (during the later stages)
  3. The Rape of Nanking is a good one that should be included. Since the list size is now capped, would you like to suggest what it should replace? →Raul654 01:34, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)
PS - it would have been nice if you had registered these objections before (like when I said "Speak now or forever hold your peace"), rather than waiting until later, after I closed off this list (with the edit summary "No objections have been raised. I am officially posting the final list"). →Raul654 02:05, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)

Before you go off making a book, some things to consider:

  1. Books are printed on the basis of pages, not number of articles. They should be divisible by 16 (32 is better). Why do you set a cap of 160 articles?
  2. When creating a book, it is customary to make a statement of objectives about what will include. "World War II" is not such a statement. What about World War II? From whose perspective? (The Russians look at it very differently from the Americans. So do the French. In fact, so do the Canadians.) Battles, personalities, ideologies, trivia, some combination of the above? Once that is defined, you will find that you will be better informed as to what articles should go in the Reader and which should not.
  3. Set your timelines, first of all. Why do you include the Treaty of Versailles or the Spanish Civil War? Causes of World War II and earlier conflicts? You might as well include the Great Depression and the Japanese invasion of China, certainly the invasion of Ethiopia (Haile Selassie is a major figure in this early history). What about political movements? Isolationism in the US (and France, btw), Nazism, Fascism, Communism. The latter ideologies are especially important to understanding why war broke out.
  4. Some figures are so minor that they should not be included. Other major figures are left out. For instance, Anne Frank and Klaus Barbie are in, but Petain and Tito and the Ustashi are out? Pius is out (well, if fascism v. communism is out, that makes sense, but they should be in.) The Chindits played a major role in Burma. Unfortunately, they were British, so Americans don't know much about them (except, perhaps, that Jackie Coogan was Wingate's wingman). Chamberlain is in but Anschluss and Sudetenland are out? Partition of Poland is out? Ribbentrop is in (most Nazis couldnt stand him), but Molotov is out? Anzio, Maquis, Oradour, European resistance in general (see Werner Ring and his four categories of resistance), Mao, Oppenheimer, Sicily, Guadalcanal (or is that covered in Code Talkers).
  5. If you want an American bias (which is legitimate, btw) what about the homefront, four freedoms, race riots (Detroit and Zoot Suit), Lend-Lease Act (which should be in anyways).
  6. What about WW2 technologies?
  7. Those are just some things off the top of my head. Working on a book is a long, time-consuming effort. I know. I have done it many times. Dont make grandiose statements like "This is done." Wikipedia is still a collaborative effort. Personally, I do not believe we are ready for this, but it can be done. You have some decent historians here who have training in this area. A bad product reflects badly on all of us. Danny 02:34, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps it's better to decide what should be covered, then select or create the appropriate articles? For example, Ultra, Purple and such need to be covered but might best be covered by a single article on codes in WW2, which would both reduce the article count and produce more well-rounded coverage. Jamesday 02:57, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think that I have to agree with Danny and Jamesday here. Other similar sources that tried to do the same thing should be looked at first. Then we would be more informed as to what is important to have in our list. We also need to determine what we want to create; a World War II encyclopedia, a selection thereof, or something else that is more book-like. Limiting this to a specific number of articles seems odd; we need to be more concerned about number of printed pages. Therefore deciding what to cut is more of a per article decision. --mav 03:13, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Raul, you may have nothing to do but work on this, but most of us have jobs or classes or (as in my case) both. If you want input from the rest of us, you need to slow down. A lot. There is still work to be done, finding and correcting oversights as well as rationalizing the current choices. We definitely need to decide who our audience is before we move on. I also agree with Jamesday. We should be thinking "how can we cover all the important topics" more than "which articles should we include." For example, is there a Propaganda in World War II article? Should we be writing one? That way we could cover Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw-haw, and Allied propanda, all in one article. Isomorphic 03:08, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

"No objections have been raised. I am officially posting the final list" according to Raul's post on the article comment box. I think that is an unusual interpretation of the comments on the talk page. Are there really no objections? Rmhermen 04:34, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)
These comments were made after (and largely in response to) his "closing" of the list. Isomorphic 04:47, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
My comments were made on Aug 6th mentioning the lack of Asian articles. Rmhermen 05:33, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)
Ah. OK. I see what you were referring to now. Either way, we agree that this is not a closed subject. Isomorphic 05:55, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The list has Tokyo Rose mentioned twice. I also suggest merging Potsdam Agreement, Potsdam Conference and Potsdam Declaration into one, Anne Frank and Klaus Barbie taken out as they are covered under Holocaust and Lidice also taken out as its covered under Reinhard Heydrich. The extra space being used to put in Vyacheslav Molotov, Sepp Dietrich, Ivan Koniev, Operation Mars, Operation Tempest, Stavka and Aleksandr Vasilievsky. Lets not forget, 80% of German casualties was on the East Front, and Soviets lost about 10 million military and 20 million civilians. All other theaters of war were almost sideshows.GeneralPatton 08:58, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I found that we have an article on the war in China under the title: Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). It should be included. Have we really decided on a set number of articles yet? Rmhermen 12:59, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)

You have both Karl Doenitz and Karl Dönitz on your list, at #91 and #92, respectively. Regards, Rhymeless 10:06, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal

Perhaps we're going the wrong direction entirely. If we try to make a single volume on WWII, it's going to be a mishmash of partially overlapping articles, omissions where we don't have room, etc. Wikipedia articles aren't suited for writing a book; a good book needs more structure than just putting some independent pieces together. On the other hand, to make a reference on the whole war we would need to be much more comprehensive than the current list.

Perhaps instead we should do a series of more focused references on World War II. I could see "Biographical Encyclopedia of World War II" being a very useful reference, and perfectly suited for using Wikipedia content. In fact, this could spur the writing of new articles for Wikipedia, to expand our current coverage. So would "Battle and Campaigns of World War II". I could also see references on ships of WWII, on aircraft of WWII, and on ground combat equipment of WWII. Isomorphic 03:00, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I would like to second Isomorphic's suggestions. Both are excellent ideas, and both can be used to focus our efforts more in the writing of articles. Danny 03:32, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I am willing to do the battles part. However, the suggested length is 100-150 articles. We might be able to get 100 biographies, but probably not 100 battles or theatres. How do you suggest we handle that? →Raul654 06:24, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)
A hundred battles, theaters and operations should not be hard. Rmhermen 14:32, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)
Right now I am more than willing to do a "Military Hardware of WWII", or do the splits "ships of WWII", "aircraft", etc. Already did something minorly like that for WWI a few years ago. Perhaps there should be work on a proposed list of possible volumes that we think should be around. We shouldn't base it on articles we have, but on what should really be done to cover the entire war. Then see if we A- have enough articles to fill up a decent sized volume, or B-need to be writing articles, and C- Identify said articles in a and b. Lyellin 14:05, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)
While it sounds nice this is not a good idea, first we have to make the single-volume World War II wikireader, and then we can expand, but first, lets just focus on these 160 articles, instead of doing 1000+. The single volume can be done, the multi-volume will take years. GeneralPatton 20:24, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
We don't need to do the multi-volume all at once. Each one could stand alone. Isomorphic 04:13, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Echoing Isomorphic, I also would like to point out that if you do a single volume, and then decide to do more volumes later, you wind up wind redundant material, doubled articles, etc. Not sure if this is good or bad myself, just saying. Lyellin 07:02, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
Echoing General Patton, while this would be great, it's simply not feasible. The purpose of this is to leverage our current article base to create a good reference, with a bonus of improving the articles along the way. If we were to do some of the things you suggest we'd either have to write lots and lots of new stuff or essentially create a reference of stubs. Right now, I don't think there are even 100 articles on WWII battles. And could we really create 100 interesting biographies on WWII personalities? Let's move from the general to the specific, rather than the other way around. Gregb 02:57, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I agree about the general to the specific - I just would like to avoid unnessecary doubling. Perhaps a model such as "WikiReader:Important aspects of WWII", and then "WikiReader:WWII Appendix A: Battles", etc, etc. Each "appendix" would be a more detailed look at the specific issues that were covered in the general wikireader, along with additions of others that did not make the cut? We don't need to be AFRAID of adding new content. Heck, maybe Wikipedia does a bad job of covering things (For instance, world war 1 aces are pretty weak), and we discover that. Might take a bit more work, but we don't lose anything by adding in the articles. We don't need to limit ourselves to current content, nessecarily. Lyellin 07:02, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

We should have no trouble finding 100 interesting WWII biographies out of what's already in Wikipedia. Probably well over 100, and I know of others just offhand that I could write. The volumes don't need to be absolutely complete, or especially large, although the biographical volume could easilly get huge. I don't think the original WikiReaders were especially large. Isomorphic 04:13, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

To reinforce that: just looking at the categorized airplanes for instance, you've got 20+articles there, in just the american section. Figure another 20 or so for both the British and German sections, add in a few from all the other airforces.... then you can consider.. Major air battles? Airplane flyers? Commanders? Bases? Sure, you'd include battle of britian in the general reader, but not everything else. Someone when talking about the paper wikipedia (I think), suggusted a hub and spoke model. Same thing could be done here, on a smaller scale. *shrugs* Just my .02, I'll help out whatever winds up happening. Lyellin 09:53, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Article quality

As the discussion on how to order and divide the content seems it may become prolonged, I wonder if anyone, in the meantime, is going through the must-have's and should-have's to get them up to snuff? Some of the battles lack "battleboxes" (I noticed Dieppe Raid, Attack on Pearl Harbor.) An article like Dwight D. Eisenhower or Franklin Delano Roosevelt contains a lot of material irrelevant to WWII (like Supreme Court appointments). Do we prune it? Where do we put the temp article? World War II casualties has a disputed tag -and why are some numbers in bold face? Just some ideas. Rmhermen 13:00, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

I'm slowly going through the battles - I've added battleboxes to almost a dozen battles, and maps, etc. My current effort is to bring Battle of the Bulge up to featured article quality - a week ago, it was barely more than a stub. →Raul654 16:51, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
Should we be editing the list with notations as we copyedit, proofread, etc? Lyellin 14:16, Aug 25, 2004 (UTC)

I began looking at other sources to see what we are missing. Here is of articles in a WW2 book, just covering A. We may have some of these under slightly different names. Danny 16:53, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I suppose that excessive information is not a problem. We can remove irrelevant information in the last phase of composition of the Wikireader. Dr Bug  (Volodymyr V. Medeiko) 21:10, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Axis Powers

I haven't caught this page until now, but it seems that if we're talking about WWII, Axis Powers would seem to be a rather important article - yet it's in the "would be nice" section. Wouldn't it be sensible to not only put this in, but put this as part of an introduction? (or close to the beginning) Ambi 13:37, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)