Talk:Infantry battalion

It occurred to me that to answer the question "what sort of thing did my ancestor's unit do?", the specific unit type is much more informative than an abstract Arm. Making the unit type in the infobox into a link to a page like this avoids:

• trying to define Arms separately from actual legal and administrative structures
• having to show an extra piece of information in a unit infobox that partly duplicates info already there
• having to assign every regiment/corps to an Arm

--GavinRobinson (talk) 03:29, 7 November 2014 (PST)

GavinRobinson wrote: '(Can't populate easily yet because some of the battalion list pages are not exclusively infantry. eg Fort Garry Horse is in Canadian battalions in World War I. Templates and categories might help here.)'

Do you mean 'templates' as in 'preloaded text for new pages' or transcluded text (which seems to be the mediawiki definition of 'template'?

And I agree that categories would be useful. While I was focusing on infantry battalions to keep this phase manageable in size, it should allow for future expansions. --Mia (talk) 07:31, 10 November 2014 (PST)

I've created http://collaborativecollections.org/WorldWarOne/index.php?title=Category:Infantry_Battalions --Mia (talk) 09:16, 10 November 2014 (PST)

The Canadian battalions were taken from the Wikipedia page 'List_of_infantry_battalions_in_the_Canadian_Expeditionary_Force' (suggested by Andrew Gray ‏@generalising) and generally many listing of battalions include mounted battalions, cyclists, etc. To allow for the novice researcher I think it'd be most useful to have pages listing every battalion as not everyone will know where to look for their particular battalion type, so could the text simply say 'these pages listing battalions by nationality include infantry battalions as well as other types'. Alternatively, categories would provide a more specific way of listing infantry battalions but there's a lot of work required to get a comprehensive listing. --Mia (talk) 07:31, 10 November 2014 (PST)

The battalion lists you've put up are needed, it's just that this page needs to link to something slightly different. I don't care how it's implemented, but I was thinking that it would be useful if every unit page that has say the type "Infantry Battalion" could be automatically added to a list of all infantry battalions (and perhaps lists subdivided by nationality). This might be done with wiki templates that transclude a wiki category, or with the scripted infoboxes that you're planning (I don't know much about that side of things).

The more I think about it, the more I think that representing a meaningful hierarchy of unit types needs to be separate from both the tactical and administrative hierarchies. If every unit has a very specific type that links to a page like this, then pages like this could be grouped into broader categories based on things like size, or type of activity. I'll put a couple of examples into the page just to illustrate the idea.--GavinRobinson (talk) 07:44, 11 November 2014 (PST)