Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2012/Op-ed

While I always get something out of our op-eds here, I can personally vouch for this one in its coverage of the pros and cons of employing news material in a MilHist context. Over-reliance is risky, judicious use can be the difference between a decent article and a highly engaging one. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 02:18, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks Ian, and that was the point I was hoping to make :) Nick-D (talk) 08:46, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

You mention "favouring" (my word) historians' accounts over journalists'. No particular argument, although some historians are known to have supported a perspective rather than researched. My approach would be to record differing accounts and the sources (eg HMS Whelp, note 4). Folks at 137 (talk) 07:47, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, I've made similar judgement calls about historians' work as well (and see Talk:Convoy Faith for a recent example of where a historian I was relying on made a significant factual error which another editor needed to correct using primary sources). However, I think that historians are much more likely to get things right than journalists given the advantages they enjoy in regards to deadlines, perspective and (generally) sources. Nick-D (talk) 10:22, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

I wanted to reinforce Nick-D's comments on obscurity. History tends to focus on those events and participants leading to some change—what is significant to effecting a geopolitical change is, particularly in wartime or in the recovery period directly afterward, completely different from those events and organizations focused on the welfare of the populace. Military history is therefore particularly riddled with obscurities (obscure = anything off the field of battle) worthy of an informative article. History, at least for myself, comes most alive through artifacts of the time--such as newspaper accounts. Whatever the POV of the time or of the reporter, I find that contemporary artifacts and accounts I also thought I'd share such a bit of my own investigation of obscurities, off-Wiki. It's not about simply writing history for others, it's about our individual, personal, voyages of discovery and sharing the reward and satisfaction of knowing something today that we didn't know yesterday. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 16:30, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
 * provide a palpable connection to events which later scholarship generally does not; and
 * as in Nick-D's case cited, mention of something "obscure" often leads to entirely new threads of investigation