Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Campaignbox discussion

It was pointed out in the debates on Battle of Jutland and Battle of Leyte Gulf on WP:FAC that "battle before" and "battle after" are misleading when battles took place simultaneously. Taking Battle of Leyte Gulf as an example, this page explores some possible ways to improve the battlebox. Gdr 17:47, 2004 Nov 5 (UTC)

Current format

 * Pro: simple; easily understand; you can navigate through a war by clicking on the "Battle after"
 * Con: misleading if battles are simultaneous; simple chronological sequence may lead to unrelated battles from other parts of the war appearing here; some work to maintain (you have to edit three articles each time you add a battle)

Related battles

 * Pro: avoids misleading claims about "before" and "after"
 * Con: "related battles" is weak; dates don't fit in column unless you prefer ISO 8601; may be hard to templatize; repeats information about this battle; a lot of work to keep up to date when you add new battles or change dates for existing battles

War
Move the "War" section of the battlebox down to the bottom and list all the battles in the war.


 * Pro: works well for a small war like the First Anglo-Dutch War; can be templatized so you only have to change one template when you add a battle.


 * Pro: good for navigation; can be templatized so you only have to edit one file when you add or rename a battle
 * Con: too big for the Pacific War

Campaign
Too many battles in a big war to list them all here. So what about dividing the war into campaigns and listing only the battles in the same campaign?


 * Pro: short, clear, easy to navigate to other battles; can be templatized so you only have one thing to edit when you add or change a battle
 * Con: only shows the campaign (how do you navigate to other campaigns?)

War/Theater/Campaign
We could make it possible to navigate to other campaigns and theaters by a more complex structure:


 * Pro: a lot of navigational possibilities; templatizable
 * Con: complex; big; requires a lot of articles to be written; trying to do the work of Template:WWIITheatre so might lead to conflict with the people who developed that template; will inevitably lead to spelling wars over "theatre" versus "theater"