Wikipedia talk:Military Collaboration of the week

Questions

 * Why won't the first winner be selected on February 20? It looks like getting three votes isn't a problem. --Dhartung | Talk 21:48, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Being that this is a new Collaboration, I figured I would give it a bit of additional time to gather momentum. If we do get enough turn-out before the 20th (say ~5 votes for an article), then I'm in full agreement of reducing the time before we start. Oberiko 21:58, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Removed COTW Nominees

 * I added in the COTW nominees removed during the first half of February, to juice the list of nominees. Some of these did reasonably well in the voting over there, so there should still be interest. Others may well die on the vine here, too; that's life. I propose to add in the nominees from one COTW/Removed archive back beginning next week, then two archives back the week after that, etc., giving some worthy candidates a second look by a more topically oriented group. --Dhartung | Talk 21:48, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * That sounds like a good proposal. If they did fairly well in the general Collaboration, they definitley have viability here. Oberiko 21:58, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Pruning
I'm thinking that we should keep the runner-up from the previous week as a contender for the week afterwards. Asides from helping to keep the pace up, it would also prevent us from not doing a deserving article only because it ran up against a very deserving article. We'd still reset it's votes, of course. Oberiko 22:15, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Standards and Templates
I think one of the problems suffered by most collaborations is the lack of planning before hand, everyone just dashes into it.

I propose that we have a "standards" page where we keep a general template and set of standards for specific categories (people, battles etc.) and once we start the Collaboration, first thing we'd do is decide the structure of the article using our templates and standards as guidelines.

It would definitely organize us better and, potentially, I think it might even speed up the development process. Oberiko 22:22, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Naming conventions
If Wikipedia is to be easily accessible to people interested in military history, I think it is important that, where possible, we name articles after the most common name used in English language military histories.

Some people do not agree with this position and wish to rename battles, unit formations etc after some other criteria. This is usually to do with converting the names to one which they think is more relevant to other criteria in Wikipedia. Normally to do with language.


 * 1) currently the two battles of Zurich use the German influenced Zürich. Which until that is resolved on the Zurich page will probably not be resolved.
 * 2) There was a debate about how to name the Soviet Front 1st Belorussian Front. The dispute was whether the name should use the Belarusian language spelling of the name, see Talk:3rd Belorussian Front. In the end it was agreed to use that commonly used in English language military histories like Beevor's Battle for Berlin.
 * 3) A similar debate took place over the Battle of Hurtgen Forest in which all references to Hurtgen was initially translated into the German spelling.
 * 4) There is a proposal to move Battle of Spion Kop to Battle of Spioenkop on WP:RM. If this happens then most probably all references to "Spion Kop" will be removed from the article and it will not be found using standard search engines looking for the Battle of "Spion Kop". If this topic is of interest to you then please visit Talk:Battle of Spion Kop and make your opinions known --Philip Baird Shearer 10:13, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)