Template talk:Infobox military unit/Archive 2

Automatic short description
At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Short descriptions this template was raised as a candidate for automatic short descriptions. This would mean that the almost 20000 articles with this infobox but without a short description would get the short description "Military unit". This could be overridden by adding a description manually. The issue I found here was that some of the articles are about paramilitary units rather than military units. These would be dealt with by manually adding a short description to these 325 articles. Are there any other cases where military unit wouldn't be a good description which has to be dealt with or is this good? I've also notified WikiProject Military history. --Trialpears (talk) 09:57, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. Do I understand that you'll be handling the exceptions as well? MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:13, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Of course, I plan on starting work shortly (probably today) since no one has raised any concerns. --Trialpears (talk) 11:33, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * , great! MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:07, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Adding a unit number field
Quite a lot of militaries use unit numbers, permanent fixed identifiers that are far easier for researchers to identify than the unit names which can shift from time to time. For instance, China has the Military Unit Cover Designator (MUCD), the Soviet Union and a large number of its successor states including Russia have the Military Unit Number (MUN), every United States Department of Defense related entity has a Unit Identification Code, and the Imperial Japanese Army had the Tsūshōgō. I believe a field should be added to the infobox for the units service number much in the way Infobox military person has "servicenumber" for a person's military ID number, and another field should be added to allow the field title in the infobox to be subsitituted with a wikilinked article to the number scheme, ie for the PLAAF's 1st Fighter Brigade, which recently transitioned from being called the 1st Fighter Division and is still sometimes called the 1st Air Division: |unitnumber = 93056 |unitnumber_label = MUCD After doing so many military unit pages, I think highlighting a stable reference point for the unit is worthwhile. Abovfold (talk) 01:28, 12 January 2023 (UTC)


 * I've added it to Template:Infobox military unit/sandbox. Give it a try. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  01:51, 12 January 2023 (UTC)