Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/News/April 2018/Review essay

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Comments

• Thank you for this essay! Very thoughtful. On the whole I think much of our military history coverage (across nations and eras) tends to take an overly "heroic" tone, reflecting many bombastic popular-history sources, but I hadn't previously considered this to be a particular problem for WW2 Germany articles. What can we do about it - except be more sceptical of low-quality sources? The Land (talk) 20:28, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

  @The Land: the challenges seems to be especially pronounced in the German military articles, in part due to the concerted efforts to establish and support the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, which found its way into English-language sources during the Cold war. There's no myth of the clean Red Army, for example. I don't have a ready-made solution apart from, as you say, being critical of dated and / or self-serving sources. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:25, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

  @The Land: I have written about my own experience in an earlier Op-ed in 2011, which you might enjoy. While notability requires reliable third-party sources, it is important to understand that verifiability does not. You don't have to source an article on netball from books on cricket! On Wikipedia, we have a concept of a reliable source; but as historians, we are often confronted with sources of varying reliability. Sources can date, and even recently published ones can contain outdated material; the book review from Lee baker quoted above goes on to say: "This book, unfortunately, does just that"! Sometimes poor or outdated sources are all we have, so that is what he must use; but on Wikipedia, we have the inside running: we can correct the articles as new and better material becomes available. (It is frustrating, though, to see mistakes being replicated that we have already corrected on Wikipedia.) While we demand a neutral point of view in the articles, that doesn't apply to the sources we use! You can still use Fox News to source an article about Hilary Clinton! Hawkeye7 (discuss) 06:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

  @Hawkeye7: I'm a bit surprised at this comment: Sometimes poor or outdated sources are all we have, so that is what he must use. Why must we use "poor" sources? K.e.coffman (talk) 02:23, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

  It's our purpose: to collect knowledge into an encyclopaedia. We use the best sources we have, in the knowledge that some subjects have better quality sources than others. For some of Shakespeare's plays we have editions in quarto and folio; from which we know that the folios are better, but sometimes flawed; but for many plays we have only the folios, so that's what we must use. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:04, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

  @Hawkeye7: I'm not sure I'm following your example. I assume you mean Shakespeare's First Folio above, among others. If so, we would not use the Folio for an article on Shakespeare's work; we'd use a secondary source instead, written by (hopefully) an expert in the field. If we knew that the author were a crank and a fraud, would we still use such a source?

In a similar fashion, quality in military history sources vary greatly when it comes to the German war effort of 1939-45. We know that certain publications, authors and publishers are apologist, denialist, hagiographic, Landser-pulp, extremist, and / or written by former NS-propagandists, etc. Would you still advocate using such sources, especially for our Good, A-Class and Featured Articles? Here's one specific example: Talk:Helmut_Wick#Propaganda_origins. This is an A-class article: Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Helmut Wick. I would appreciate hearing your take. K.e.coffman (talk) 01:11, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

• @Hawkeye7: last attempt. --K.e.coffman (talk) 01:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Comments (2)

• It's funny. The effort to purge slanted accounts about Wermacht heroics looks the same as historical revisionism designed to paint all Germans with the same Nazi brush. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:54, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

• I agree, @Chris troutman:: the effort to purge sources seems remarkably like revisionism at its worst. In an of itself, revisionism is not necessarily a bad thing, and ideas about WWII are undergoing significant revision now. I'm thinking specifically of Chris Browning's analysis in his 1970s dissertation of "finalization" of the Final Solution (it actually happened before the Wannsee Conference.) Some of the "military" focused histories on inept leadership, weather, terrain, and material advantages as reasons for German loss in the East does not mean they belong to the "lost cause". These were indeed reasons the Germans lost in the east. Wars are not necessarily won or lost on ideology alone. It seems to me that an appropriate balance between concrete disadvantages in the east, the massive manpower the Soviets could mobilize, and the ideological challenges of European antisemitism combine to explain some of the German problems in Eastern Europe. I've noticed, also, a very pro-Soviet leaning emerging in these articles: the Soviets were not angels in how they treated the population, the enemy, and even their own troops. The advantage of Wikipedia is that it can be an evolving analysis of the conflict, not one locked in time and space. As such, we need to give room to a variety of analytical tools used by historians to examine the past. auntieruth (talk) 14:39, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

• @Auntieruth55: if there are articles glorifying the Red Army, please raise the issue at MILHIST or let me know directly so that I can have a look. I'm an equal opportunity editor :-). Re: inept leadership, weather, terrain, and material advantages (...) These were indeed reasons the Germans lost in the east - you've just enumerated what historian Jonathan House calls "Three Wehrmacht Alibis". He has a lecture on YouTube on the topic that I recommend highly; very interesting:

• How the Red Army Defeated Germany: The Three Alibis on YouTube, via the official channel of Dole Institute of Politics

K.e.coffman (talk) 01:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Unlike pro-nazi apologists and anti-soviet propagandists, I'm interested in the similarities of the C20th Johnny come latelys with the Western slave empires and their crimes against humanity, which began at least as far back as the 17th Century and haven't stopped. That dog barks louder than both factions, it makes them seem a little Laputan. RegardsKeith-264 (talk) 19:19, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Comments (3)

• A really good article. This problem has troubled me for a while and used to be particularly bad on the pages of minor (usually non-German) Waffen SS divisions. Your contributions, K.e.coffman, have made a real difference.—Brigade Piron (talk) 06:58, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

• @Brigade Piron: thank you; I appreciate it. Much more work remains to be done, however. K.e.coffman (talk) 01:07, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Comments (4)

• While I didn't really get too far into the debate on the content of the article, this is a great example of someone attempting to utilise Wikipedia's own rules to soapbox a position on this platform. I noticed this phrase here:

>"I was surprised that editors did not share my concerns or appreciate the extent of these problems. Faced with what I perceived to be issues of entrenched local consensus, I emailed a number of historians, providing examples from my user page (User:K.e.coffman) and a few Wiki discussions. I initially emailed those experts whose books I read and used in my editing."

Notice that the community didn't see the same sort of paranoid "Clean Wehrmacht" accusations in the articles that she did, so the first thing she does is contact a carefully curated list of historians, referencing her own user page as a source, and apparently, contacting the media. That's the only way she can achieve consensus: By forcing it with a battering ram. Honestly, this sort of behaviour shouldn't even be allowed: She openly states a political objective (which we can't necessarily gauge as noble since it's from her own subjective perspective, which obviously a lot of wikipedia editors disagree with). PeaceThruPramana26 (talk) 23:03, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

PeaceThruPramana26, I have supported K.e.coffman's work for years. Has it ever crossed your mind that Wikipedia, especially a project such as MilHist, might be riddled with revisionists?

'...this sort of behaviour' is exactly what is needed in order to ensure 'A Clean Wikipiedia'. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:12, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

No: I'm not into conspiracy theories really. PeaceThruPramana26 (talk) 22:22, 21 February 2022 (UTC)