Talk:History of unmanned aerial vehicles/Archive 1

I've been doing research on the internet about UAV's for some time, and have never found a detailed source like this article by Greg Goebel[1] which he has placed in the public domain. See the Original[2]. I hope to, in time, get the rest of the photos and links to other wikipedia pages. JimBo4212.

Are his images in the public domain as well? --HappyCamper 19:06, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

My intention is to copy only images that he has marked Public Domain, US Government Photos, or other that I find a catagory listed for. I'm new to this, so hopfully I'm doing it right. BTW, How do I add the dates when I edit a page, like you have above? --JimBo4212

Type 4 tildes (~~~~) instead of 3. 3 gives you the name, 4 gives you the name and the timestamp, and 5 tildes just gives you the time. Alternatively, you can click on the icon that is second-to-last on the edit screen. See where it says "B", "I", "Ab"? Experiment with those. I'll leave another message on your talk page in a bit :-) --HappyCamper 19:14, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Template added

I added a template to this article which shows up on the left. Please feel free to edit this, as I think it would benefit as a navigational aid around these articles. --HappyCamper 02:05, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Reorganized Sections

I can see the start of the Reorganization works good for Wikipedia's format. Is the intention something like:

• Target drones
• Reconnaissance drones
• Decoys
• Battlefield UAVs
• Long Endurance UAVs
• NASA
• Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles
• Micro Air Vehicles

As of right now, the armed versions of the Predator A & B are not considered UCAV's, are they? Though they have strike capability, they would still better be with long endurance UAVs.

At some point, a stub may be needed for lighter than air unmanned vehicles, which I know the US & Co. is doing a lot of research on.

Other input on organization would be appreciated. --Jim 14:09, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

A mess.

I'm sorry to say this is a terribly organized article that violates many Wikipedia style guidelines (e.g. section heads that are wikilinks, and article titles). It badly needs a reorganization, probably best along topical lines. Things like "US Battlefield drones (1)" are just very awkward and meaningless to the lay reader. If an article is separated into subarticles each article should have a specific reason for existing and cover a specific topic. Even "US battlefield drones (Cold War)" for example is superior. The use of equal subheads for what should be subsections is very confusing and doesn't help people find the parts of the article they want to read. --Dhartung | Talk 16:09, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

What can I say? Then it means this article is more than inviting you to help fix it! :-) --HappyCamper 20:02, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Editors of this article think carefully! (:-) What does an article called "Miscellaneous topics" mean? It has (on the face of it) nothing to do with UAV's. But the spirit is right: the sections should each have a brief one-two paragraph summary and a "mainarticle" template link. The references and sources should be split as apropriate across the articles. The set of articles should proabably be organised as a set, perhaps with a template to navigate between them. Examples of these things abound. Any help neede please ask. Rich Farmbrough. 15:15, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm stretched a bit thin at the moment. It's been on my to-do list for a few months. --HappyCamper 17:01, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

These articles started off as essentially formatted cut-and-paste of an external site which indicated explicitly that the content was in the public domain. I've done some formatting to bring the subarticles in line with the guidelines, but I haven't had the time to finish it off yet. --HappyCamper 17:03, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with both Dhartung and Rich. The information is perfectly servicable in its original form on the external website, but here is obfuscated by poor editing. Unless some attempt is made to summarize or otherwise edit the content, or even to follow the manual of style, the article should be deleted in favour of a blurb and a link to the external site. --Khaerukama'o 06:46, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

How about this? I think the content from that site should be ported over to Wikipedia. But I can't do that alone. It seems that there isn't enough interest to make a Wikiproject to help out. Perhaps nominating all the pages for deletion would be the thing to do. Then, at a later time in the future, the content can be recreated. --HappyCamper 19:44, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm also going to agree that it is a mess and violates styles etc.. I can recommend that you use the data to update the specifications of each of the UAV individual pages (RQ-1,RQ-2...RQ-7,RQ-8,RQ-9). I think they tend to lack a bit. These can be recommeded to be brought under the style guidelines of WikiProject: Aircraft. Then, because the UAV technology is primarily military in application at this point, and you are treatising the history of said military subject, you request a little assistance from the Aviation Task Force over at WikiProject: Military History. If I didn't have enough to focus on, myself, I'd help you out here. But this comment is all I have time for. (Born2flie 02:00, 23 July 2006 (UTC))

Here is a little story on these pages...one day, I saw a Wikipedian port some pages over to Wikipedia. I decided to do help out a little bit - show examples of Wiki syntax, et cetera. After a while, it became apparent that it was too much for two few Wikipedians to do. As a result, these pages have been largely forgotten. Now, if there is enthusiasm for picking this up again, we can start from scratch. I'd be more than willing to delete these pages (yes, a bunch of speedies) and start over. Last time I checked, only me and another editor contributed to these pages, and we have both agreed that it probably would be better to start over. So, this being the case, if there are others who would like to pick up afterwards, that would be great. --HappyCamper 02:37, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

"International Battlefield UAVs" ?

Does this heading mean non-US battlefield UAVs ? It's a confusing title - either a strictly US meaning is being applied to the word "international", in which case changes to increase clarity need to be made, or else the title has another meaning that I am missing - e.g. UAVs that are designed to cross different borders airspace (with changes in different countries standards, or something ) - I really have no idea. Clarity please !

Duplication of data

I'm concerned that the current format duplicates data found elsewhere in Wikipedia. A number of the vehicles listed have articles of their own (Scaled Composites Proteus, for instance), and having sub-articles of this current one merely duplicates those that exist already. On top of that, the current ones don't link to the others. If you want a history page, great...make it a history page, not a table of contents for duplicated model-specific articles. I would strongly suggest that the content of the model-specific sub-articles from this one be merged into the other articles, and links made from here to there, and slowly rewrite this article to be a true general history of UAVs. From the above comments, it's clear that one of the problems is manpower. I'll volunteer to get this going, though it will take time. What I need to get started is to know that by doing so, I won't be stepping on anybody's toes, and won't wake up to find a Predator targeting my house! Akradecki 19:29, 31 July 2006 (UTC), who just finished watching a QF-4 (albeit manned at the moment) doing flybys at Mojave!

I've had these pages on my watchlist ever since they were created. Nobody is working on these pages at the moment, so you'll be the first Wikipedian to work on them in a long time. In short, feel free to do as you like! If other Wikipedians jump in to help out, I would imagine that they would be looking more to your edits for guidance and inspiration - I'm not familiar with the topic to do much other than simple passive edits...but I'll keep this page on my watchlist since I'm curious to learn more about this stuff. Does this help? --HappyCamper 02:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Does indeed. I'll be detailing my plan of action tomorrow here. Stay tuned! Akradecki 02:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Okay, looking forward to that! By the way, I'd be willing to flex my administrative functions if your plan involves deletion of pages and such :-) --HappyCamper 02:38, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Fantastic, thanks! Akradecki 05:20, 2 August 2006 (UTC)