Talk:World War II, air war, Allied offensive counter-air campaign

Reason for not using subpages

Chris, you can see that here, as well as Vietnam War, a good deal of my focus was to break an unmanageably long article into sub-articles that both flowed better and lent themselves to more detailed fact-checking. By and large, I regarded the subarticle titles largely as placeholders, given some of the objections to Jensen's comma style. It had been my hope that a naming consensus might emerge and the metadata could go in for a more generally accepted title structure.

Unfortunately, a consensus on structure has not merged. Some of these titles are ugly, ugly, ugly. I still have mixed feelings; it does help to have the Related Articles page, but "definition" is quite difficult when still struggling with the division of huge-content into subarticles.

Thoughts?

Howard C. Berkowitz 18:17, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

FYI, the reason I added the metadata was because the subpages tag on the article was causing the error check template to kick in. How many articles are we talking about? Is there any chance you can write all their titles on one page in a grand hierarchy, as you did for intelligence related articles? It might be easier to come up with a sensible naming scheme is we see how all the articles are related. Chris Day 18:23, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

While it's not finished, look at the start of a grand scheme at Vietnam War. If for no other reason, it was easier to do there due to the much longer length of the conflict, but I still really haven't worked out solid naming for the latter parts of that war. Vietnam, war, and the United States, I think, is fundamentally a good idea to get domestic politics out of the war, but it's only a start. Air assault is now too large, but it does have sections that clean up some outright errors on weapons systems. Some of the Vietnam-specific battles, such as Battle of the Ia Drang and Battle of Bong Son, have much more general operational implications; one reason I put them into subarticles (i.e., both involved major rethinking of air assault doctrine).

Vietnam still has some problems in a grand hierarchy, since it's not a strict chronological or tree structure. In some cases, that's not too bad, because it might refer to a tactic or operation that has multiple links to it. As you'll see, I am semi-stuck on the 1965 or so period, because the existing text has a lot of political assertions that I haven't been able to substantiate. Some are simply unsourced; a few have turned out to have text identical to some on the webpages of previous contributors.

A major theme that I've been trying to correct with Vietnam, which is less of a problem than WWII, is U.S.-centric writing, or strongly opinionated writing about some personalities and techniques. =

WWII has a lot more apples-and-oranges and is harder to organize. I know you aren't a historian, but I wish I could find some collegial collaborators. For parts of Vietnam, I was working with primary materials during the war. As JFK asked Krulak (JCS) and Mendenhall (State), "did you two gentlemen visit the same country?" Howard C. Berkowitz 18:42, 19 October 2008 (UTC)