Talk:Lists of battles
What does everyone think about separating the naval battles from the land battles?
More generally, I think we need to give some thought as to how to organize this page. It's going to get very, very, very long. I own a six hundred page book containing several thousand battles.... -- Paul Drye
- First, I think we ought to separate naval battles. Second, I think you ought to restrain your desire for completeness, Paul! --MichaelTinkler
- No, no, no, I didn't mean "...and I'm going to type them all in"! Blah! :-) But in the long run everyone working collectively is going to get to a significant fraction of them and this page will get way out of hand.
- I have the same issue with the Star listing page, actually. -- Paul Drye
- WHEW! Well, then - I think that geography is inadquate, or even inflammatory (since geography nomenclature turns on battle, after all). Alphabet is cumbersome, and is searchable anyway (if you already know the name, you can search for it). Would relative chronology be better? Ancient - Medieval - Early Modern - 19th Century - 20th Century - 21st Century and then alphabetical or chronological inside each of those?
- Chronology works for me, though I'd also give large wars their own "epoch": WWII and the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars for sure, maybe more. On the other hand, are the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria part of WWII? Urg.
- Chronological or alphabetical within epochs, though, that's a poser. Alphabetical might be easier for skimmers, but would make it harder on someone trying to trace the history of a war in detail. I suspect it's possible to do the latter task by going through the text of the articles themselves and following the links, but that would take careful writing: making sure that the events leading up to and the events following the battle are at outlined. I'd say "alphabetical within epoch", but I could easily be convinced otherwise. -- Paul Drye
Chronological order is ok for me, links to geography and war would be in entry (otoh, so would be links to dates :) ), so i agree for chronological listing. Should we then divide medieval in three periods two? early medieval, medieval, late medieval?
Then again, battles could be listed in few ways by few categories. No everyone searching for battle would be sure what its name was, although that problem is related mostly to non-english speaker. I would have problems with finding battle of the nile. links like chronological listing, alphabetical listing, naval battles? or that does not have sense?
listing by country would be related not to location of battle, but more to fighting sides, so Beresteczko would be in Ukraine and Poland, Poitiers in France and England...
there could be also table with year and wars, but otoh something like this is already in year reviews. (like 9999 * Fictious War ends * Another fictious war starts * War of clones * .... szopen
I find it hard to understand why we are using a different format for the battles of World War 2. Also the word "Battle" isn't always the best one to use - "Attack on Pearl Harbor" sounds more appropriate than "Battle of Pearl Harbor". I am quite satisfied with the alphabetical list, but showing t5he year and war after the battle in the listings could make them more useful; occasionally with a widespread war it might even be helpful to show the theater of operation. --Eclecticology, Monday, June 10, 2002
Do we have any preferences about how to disambiguate battle names? The existing article about the Battle of Cape St. Vincent describes only the one in the Wars of the French Revolution. There was an earlier one in the American Revolution. Perhaps adding the year in brackets to the title would work for most cases. -- Eclecticology, Tuesday, June 11, 2002