Talk:War crimes in World War I

This article needs a heavy edit
This includes: Some of these things were investigated as war crimes, some were even put on trial as war crimes, but the cases where neither occurred are dubious to include here. Better to lay out the efforts of both sides to investigate war crimes than this list-style approach. FOARP (talk) 19:42, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Remove all content that isn't even alleged to be a crime - there's multiple instances here where the editor who's added these things has made the WP:OR decision that they are a crime, but the source only makes a factual statement of what happened (e.g., a Q ship continuing to fly the US flag).
 * Remove all content that didn't occur during the first world war. Evidently these aren't within the scope of this article.
 * Similarly things that occurred in parallel wars that weren't part of the first world war (e.g., the Russian civil war) don't belong here either.
 * Basic coat-rack issues. This is more a list of things that people think belong here than anything about the topic of war crimes in WW1. Things that aren't war crimes (e.g., the internment of Ukrainians) don't belong here, any more than Japanese-American internment belongs in an article about WW2 war crimes. These things might be criminal, but they are not war crimes unless a reliable source says so.


 * I'm inclined to rename this article as "Atrocities in World War I" or something. The big problem is that WWI predated the Geneva Convention so a lot of what is and isn't a war crime is going to be very poorly defined. I think if we go with "atrocities" we might be able to use sources to get together what has been discussed as atrocities, which will also match better what people expect. For example, strictly speaking, the british blockade isn't a war crime against the German population, but against the business interests of neutral merchants! Fangz (talk) 20:53, 20 May 2024 (UTC)