Talk:Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig

Medal ribbons
I have removed the image of a Serbian medal ribbon which was wrongly being used to illustrate a Montenegrin medal. I don't think we have a ribbon for the Montenegrin Obilić Medal. DuncanHill (talk) 02:55, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

Reputation article split
Splitting sections on reputation to the article Draft:Reputation of Douglas Haig and then moving it to the main space. It looks like the article meets the criteria for splitting, and another article in the draft space seems to have expanded on this section. It already is over the recommended Splitting size limit, and says the splitting is very likely needed at the current article length. aaronneallucas (talk) 20:25, 9 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Long story, appropriately enough for a long article. I was working on Haig back in 2011-12, over a decade ago now. There is a lot to be said about him, and the article had already become extremely long, so I hived off 1918 and his "reputation" into sub-articles and put them up for creation, which in those days had to be approved by a member of God's Elect - only for them to be rejected out of hand for reasons which didn't seem to to amount to much more than "nah, I don't like". It is much more common nowadays than it was then for major figures, eg. US Presidents, to have entire families of articles devoted to them. However, I was very cross about this and walked away - which is why the article, which seems to have changed surprisingly little since I last looked in on it, contains so little on the Somme, Nivelle/Arras and Passchendaele. Since then somebody found and created the 1918 draft and I did some more work on it - it is quite detailed up to the summer of 1918 and relying on non-Haig-iographic sources, but needs more work done on the Hundred Days in the autumn. However, I wasn't planning on doing any more work on Haig any time soon - there are just other articles which I'd rather be writing.


 * To be honest I was going to give the "Reputation" article a quick smarten up and copyedit and then "be bold" and move it to mainspace myself. I've lately read Heathorn's book on the evolving reputations of Kitchener and Haig, and Dan Todman's "Great War in Myth and Memory", both of which have some fresh material which can be incorporated when I can find time. It was more or less presentable eleven years ago and there is certainly enough there for a separate article.


 * The article relies heavily on the 1988 (de) Groot biog as it is a scholarly but critical biog, so I chose it as the initial "skeleton" out of the available biographies. In time all the other biographies will need to be incorporated, and a load of other books as well. There are other sub articles on 1914-15, 1916 and 1917 kicking around in draftspace. The first two are vaguely presentable as far as they go - the 1917 one needs some work before it can be posted live. In time we can have an extra article on his early life - there is a fair bit more material to be had from Badsey on cavalry which I've also read recently, and that "Futile Exercises" book on pre-war BEF training.


 * For those who aren't aware the biogs of Sir John French, Wully Robertson, Henry Wilson, Hubert Gough (and Haking and Hunter-Weston) are almost entirely written by me. So that's what I'm capable of writing, given time.Paulturtle (talk) 23:03, 9 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Might be worth changing the title to Douglas Haig: Reputation so that it comes up when people type "Haig" into the search engine. It's probably the stuff most people want to read about Haig. Paulturtle (talk) 03:32, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
 * No, I think that would go way against naming conventions for article titles. aaronneallucas (talk) 05:12, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Support splitting. The article, Reputation of Douglas Haig, looks really good. Dormskirk (talk) 13:26, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Somebody has made the article live. Will copyedit it and then slim down the relevant bits in this article, being careful not to lose anything.Paulturtle (talk) 04:34, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Too long?
An editor has tagged the page as "too long to read and navigate comfortable". I am removing the tag as I think, in this case, the length is not unreasonable and fragmenting the flow of the article would be unhelpful. I happy to consider proposals from a willing editor as to how they propose to spilt it. Dormskirk (talk) 09:38, 26 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately at over 19k words of readable prose, the length is entirely unreasonable - see WP:SIZE and WP:SUMMARY. The article would benefit from significant summarization to make it more accessible to the general readership. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:49, 26 December 2023 (UTC)


 * As already indicated above, I disagree. Are you prepared to do the work to condense it? If not this seems to be a case of WP:DRIVEBY and the tag should not be readded. Dormskirk (talk) 15:10, 26 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Yes, I am absolutely willing to work on it. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:23, 26 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Great. In which case that's fine. Please go-ahead. Many thanks, Dormskirk (talk) 15:26, 26 December 2023 (UTC)


 * By the way, as explained above, Paulturtle is already working on a proposed split on this one. Dormskirk (talk) 15:34, 26 December 2023 (UTC)