Category talk:Infantry Battalions

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I've started on unit type categories but need more research to get size categories right. I have a vague memory that Your Archives had trouble with large categories making it hard to find child categories, but that was a much older version of MediaWiki.--GavinRobinson (talk) 10:24, 11 November 2014 (PST)

Thanks Gavin! I've started using your [[Category:British_Infantry_Battalions]] and also started [[Category:Battalions_with_official_diaries]]. Similarly, I'll start using [[Category:Battalions_with_personal_narratives]] too.
On Wikipedia itself I get the impression that category pages are limited for the sake of the reader rather than the server these days.


Should we keep this as a parent category that only contains child categories, not pages, with the actual pages only in the national child categories?--GavinRobinson (talk) 03:52, 6 December 2014 (PST)

That works for me. It'd be good to have some explanatory text on this category page to gently introduce people to the complexities of untangling what 'infantry battalion' means in different contexts. --Mia (talk) 03:57, 6 December 2014 (PST)
And also because the 'specific type' field might link back to this page by default --Mia (talk) 04:01, 6 December 2014 (PST)
Current categories are listed in FAQ and help, it'd be good to resolve them ASAP so I can edit existing pages to bring them up to date and update the battalion pre-loading page template. --Mia (talk) 04:00, 6 December 2014 (PST)
Looking at the current list of categories in use at Special:Categories and at uncategorised pages there are quite a few that need updating (which isn't hard). So the general principle is to list army (ie country) plus unit role (infantry etc) in order to link to information specific to each country's method for organising their units? If worst comes to worst it'd be easy to retrospectively add generic 'infantry battalion' tags with a bot, as long as the more granular information has been recorded in the first place. --Mia (talk) 06:35, 6 December 2014 (PST)
I think whether the categories containing the actual pages take their names from general role or specific type will depend on how many each country is likely to have. "Australian medical units" can probably accomodate all of them without sub-categories but "British medical units" would probably be better split into "British field ambulances", "British casualty clearing stations" etc. Higher level parent categories can easily be worked out and changed later.--GavinRobinson (talk) 10:23, 6 December 2014 (PST)

Category names

I'm going to go through and update Battalions_without_personal_narratives/Battalions_with_personal_narratives to Units_without_personal_narratives/Units_with_personal_narratives but I noticed that some of yours use 'with no' instead of 'without' - which option should we go with? --Mia (talk) 04:34, 16 December 2014 (PST)

I intended "with no" to mean that it's confirmed that none exist, while "needing" means someone needs to check whether official diaries do or don't exist. It might be better to keep "without" for personal narratives because they're a different sort of thing. No-one can ever be sure that no personal narratives exist for a unit because a shoebox could always turn up, whereas checking a few major archive catalogues is enough to confirm that official diaries don't exist. And even if one personal narrative is added, there could be more, so there isn't a neat distinction between pages that need a narrative and pages that already have one.--GavinRobinson (talk) 04:55, 16 December 2014 (PST)
Fair enough! And 'official war diaries' or just 'official diaries'? --Mia (talk) 07:24, 16 December 2014 (PST)
Let's have 'official war diaries' to make it absolutely unambiguous. If cats are added by templates it's not much extra typing.--GavinRobinson (talk) 08:01, 16 December 2014 (PST)
Ok! I've updated [[1]]. I've also been looking for an easier way to add categories but haven't been able to find a suitable user-friendly extension so far. --Mia (talk) 09:40, 16 December 2014 (PST)
Actually I like 'needing' for personal narratives too, because it suggests an action for someone reading the page, and they are needed whether or not any still exist. --Mia (talk) 04:35, 17 December 2014 (PST)

Case for category names?

Do you prefer sentence case or title case for category names that aren't based on proper nouns? It's an indifferent thing to me but best to be consistent (even though I haven't been so far).--GavinRobinson (talk) 10:25, 6 December 2014 (PST)

Title case is more likely to yield consistent results, as sentence case requires a bit of interpretation. --Mia (talk) 10:21, 8 December 2014 (PST)
Actually Wikipedia uses sentence case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_titles#Article_title_format ) so assuming they've already thought through all the relevant issues, it's probably better to go with that --Mia (talk) 08:58, 9 December 2014 (PST)