User:A D Monroe III

Monroe's Law
This is an observation I once made about the probability of an edit being reverted, later codified into a brief essay by a couple of interested editors: WP:MONROE.

Me
Hi. I'm an average (few edits per week) Wikipedian.

I unwillingly contribute to the lack of cultural diversity of typical Wikipedians, except that I'm way older than most.

My profession is disk storage and software. My primary hobby is military history, specializing in how militaries change through history. My pet peeve is how little technology has to do with this, despite what many historians say. My secondary hobbies are games, science fiction, anthropology, technical writing and writing in general.

I'm not thin-skinned, and openly accept criticism. I avoid criticizing other editors, except as an unavoidable side-effect of asking an administrator if something should be done about an editor's repeated problematic habits.

In discussions about article contents, I much prefer to discuss edits without mentioning the editors. I see this as basic to WP:AGF.

Did you know...
...that materiel (ending "el") means military supply and equipment, which is different from material (ending "al"), meaning stuff to make things?

...that ordnance (two syllables) means military munitions, which is different from ordinance (three syllables), meaning a law or the like?

I wish editors would stop messing these up; it makes WP look foolish.

Useful Links



 * Category:Wikipedia style guidelines
 * Category:Wikipedia how-to
 * Browse
 * WP:WP
 * Glossary
 * Cleanup
 * Cite sources
 * Tony1's How to improve your writing
 * Category:Wikipedia articles needing context
 * Public domain resources
 * Village pump (policy)
 * WikiProject History
 * WikiProject Military
 * WikiProject Battles
 * New articles (Battles)
 * WikiProject Wars
 * List of themed timelines
 * WikiProject Timelines
 * Special:RecentChangesLinked
 * username/IP UTCtime, day month year

To do

 * Maneuver warfare: disjointed, confusing, uneven
 * Infantry: poor in all respects; needs rewrite
 * Cavalry: poor in all respects; needs rewrite
 * Generations of warfare: self-contradicting
 * Conflicts between Tank and History of the tank
 * Economic warfare is just... sigh
 * Ancient warfare: several highly speculative theories presented as fact
 * Heavy infantry: says nothing about formations; incomplete
 * Mangonel: inconsistent and incomplete definitions; merge with Trebuchet?
 * Frontal assault: unbalanced, incomplete
 * Shock tactics: almost nothing for anything pre-modern
 * Artillery: tactics only covers NATO
 * Trench warfare: still too WWI specific
 * Tanks of the United States: nothing before 1919; should have US armored cars, tractors
 * Merge Programming language generations articles: each gen is defined only relative to others
 * Military tactics: now dominated by just two mediocre sources
 * Military: poor lede, mostly pointless content
 * Modern warfare: poor and unsourced lede that reflects nothing in body
 * Battle: lede small, body meanders without regard to lede
 * Armoured warfare: section Germany needs refactor for chronology and flow
 * Chariot: History and Eurasian Steppes sections overlap, non-chronological, confuses chariot and cart development
 * Battle of Prairie Grove: owner has removed context from start of lede
 * Howitzer: Lede simply incorrect.
 * Military vehicle‎: Stub of fairly significant subject
 * Pitched battle: Solely uses obsolete definition of "mutually agreed battle", ignoring modern definition of "dedicated, intense battle".
 * Talk:Peripheral: something I forgot to put on this list 3 years ago. Sigh.
 * Software engineering: this edit, part of an assignment given to a college student.

Done but monitoring

 * Skirmisher: needs lede, wider coverage Fixed
 * Trebuchet: use/construction poor, ignores traction types Fixed
 * Trench warfare: implies tanks ended all trench warfare Fixed
 * Infiltration tactics: almost ignores German role; British and Russian roles need expansion Fixed
 * Hurricane bombardment: need a home for this redirect Fixed (although could be moved to separate article?
 * Soldier of fortune (all lower-case) should redirect to Mercenary, not the proper noun Soldier of Fortune dab. Fixed
 * Assembly language: intro muddles one-to-one instruction def Fixed
 * Merge Machine: stalled, Merger_proposal Fixed
 * Erwin Rommel: Unencyclopedic (and incorrect) "ironically" statement Fixed
 * Maginot Line: new section needs review Done

Discussions I'm currently tracking
User talk:A D Monroe III/Active discussion list.

Legal Stuff
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