How you can help
There are hundreds or thousands of personal accounts of the war online, whether on large sites like Europeana 1914-1918, national libraries and archives, or individual diaries transcribed and posted online through small local projects. The challenge is to link these personal accounts by creating links from the individual who wrote them to their military unit.
In this phase of the project, the aim is find a personal narrative - a diary, letters, memoirs or images - for each military unit in the British Army. It's a daunting task. Can you help?
There are three ways you can help share the experiences of soldiers in specific units.
- Add links for personal and official diaries, letters, memoirs and histories to regiment or battalion pages. There are some links to websites that list personal diaries, letters, memoirs and official unit diaries and histories to get you started, or you may already know about a personal narrative that could be added to a battalion or regiment page. If you're not used to wikis, use this form to suggest a link.
- Help fill in the battalions for each regiment. Some battalions are already listed in the country pages on the left-hand side. A good source for detailed battalion listings is the Long, Long Trail's page for the British infantry of 1914-1918
- Add detail for battalions through 'infoboxes' that describe how different military units were related to each other (this one is a bit more technical, contact Mia for more information).
If you've got a diary you want to add now, search for their regiment or battalion - if the page doesn't already exist you will be prompted to create it. If you're not used to wikis, use this form to suggest a link. You can can also click on any red-linked page name to create that page.
Don't worry about doing it perfectly, any help is better than none and it's easy to gradually improve wiki pages!
