Talk:Sinai and Palestine campaign

ce refs Comment

Altered some references as they had red onKeith-264 (talk) 11:27, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Promoting this part of Wikipedia at BABITME conference

I would like to invite all editors in this area to consider attending and/or otehrwise contributing to the upcoming BABITME conference ("Borders and Beyond in the Middle East since 1914"). Some details are below.

We welcome presentations and digital or other exhibits.

Please email jb43@york.ac.uk if you are interested in this area.

Some funding is available, and there will also be follow-up events throughout 2016 and 2017.

==== You are invited to the following event that I am co-organising (York, 17-18 June 2016): Borders and Beyond in the Middle East since 1914 ("BABITME") : WW1, Yorkshire family connections & others, implications for today, migration, nationalisms, religion, etc., etc..: www.tinyURL.com/BABITME www.tinyURL.com/BABITME2 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.114.39 (talk) 11:48, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

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Ottoman strength

57,000 men, and suffered over 189,600 battle casualties? This information doesn't seem very accurate SJCAmerican (talk) 05:47, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

G'day, I don't have access to the sources, but the strength number would be at one particular time/day, while the casualty number would be across the entire campaign. The total number of personnel committed over the entire period of the campaign would have been far greater than 57,000 men. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 05:56, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

WP:NPOV; Heavy British bias in article

The Sinai and Palestine campaign and its related articles reads well, but unfortunately only as an article of the British/Australian perspective of the Sinai Palestinian campaign. While this was a campaign fought between the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire, with Arab nationalists and the Germans also providing significant contributions to the fight, this article is very unbalanced and reads with a strong British bias, therefore violating WP:NPOV.

Almost the entire article is written in the perspective of the British Empire, inflates the role of the German Asia Corps, and dedicates only paragraphs to the Ottomans. The Arab revolt, its effect on legitimacy of Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces which was pivotal in the outcome of the campaign, is reduced to two small paragraphs.

We can also demonstrate this extreme lack of balance using quantitative methods. When it comes how many hits major players of Sinai-Palestine get in this article with control-F:

• British Empire: General Allenby gets *35*, Murray 22, Harry Chauvel 10.
• Ottoman Empire: Ahmet Djemal Pasha gets 2 hits, Enver Pasha 3, Mustafa Kemal Pasha 1. Mersinli Djemal is only mentioned in the infobox.
• Germans: Kress von Kressenstein 11, Limon von Sanders twice.
• Arabs: Sharif Hussein and Prince Faisal are each mentioned twice in passing.

While the Ottomans were on the defending end of British offensives and launched their own offensives during the campaign, their leadership and military units are hardly mentioned in the article; The Germans are somehow mentioned more in this campaign than the Ottomans, which I suspect is due to the reliance of outdated English military history of the campaign written almost a century ago. According to XTools, 75% of this article was written by user:RoslynSKP, who is a son/daughter of an Australian veteran of this campaign. Their bias also be confirmed by looking at their sources used in the article, which are almost exclusively English and Australian military historians and generals' memoirs, not a single Turkish or Arab work is cited.

While much work has been done in eliminating an explicitly pro-British bias in this article (such as replacing the word "enemy" with "Ottoman", retreat vs withdraw debate), when factoring in proportionality of the article's content, search queries, sourcing bias, and authorship bias there is remains an absolutely undeniable unbalanced British perspective in this article, which violates the non-negotiable WP:NPOV.

Since the problem with this article is an unbalanced perspective of British side of the campaign, information on the Ottoman and Arab sides of the campaign must be included to achieve parity. This can not be done by translating the Turkish or Arabic versions of this wikipedia article, they themselves are mostly translations of this page. So, we can start to fix this article by incorporating Turkish and Arab military literature of this campaign. Modern and contemporary secondary sources will suffice.

Until relative parity is reached, Template:POV will be posted in this article so that readers know that this is a British perspective of the Sinai and Palestine campaign. Discussions to downgrade this article's assigned quality scale by most national projects from B to C is definitely warranted (Except Britain and Australia).

Benlittlewiki (talk) 20:26, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Started off well then went straight to bad faith assumptions of editors rather than the more likely case that English language works on the Ottoman side of the campaign are less available. GraemeLeggett (talk) 20:38, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Look, Blw, you are overplaying your case here, especially since when, by your own user page, you at least should be able to present the Ottoman side effectively. This is not something I personally can do, lacking the language and experience with the area; I just happened by. But you cam, so I suggest getting writing and leave off the unnecessary ranting. Mangoe (talk) 01:51, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

I generally agree with Benlittlewiki's conclusions. Many of the articles on the specific battles are more balanced, placing a greater emphasis on the Arab Revolt and the mindset of the Ottoman leadership. Though I would have tagged it with something more specific like {{Globalize|West}} and {{Expert needed|Ottoman Empire}} instead of a general neutrality tag. GraemeLeggett, I don't think they were accusing Roslyn of bad faith editing, I think they pointed out that they have a personal perspective that will inevitably influence their contributions.  — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  06:25, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Well I interpreted "who is a son/daughter of an Australian veteran of this campaign" as an allusion to conflict of interest, but my interpretation may have been coloured by the use of stress formatting which gave the paragraph a bit of a rant-y feel. GraemeLeggett (talk) 09:41, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

• Oh my, it seems some people want to re-fight WWI on WP, with having the Turks equal to the Allies and the Arabs as equal to the British. Has no one ever heard of to the victor go the spoils?! IZAK (talk) 19:01, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

The alleged 'bias' probably just reflects the tenor of the available English-language sources and therefore isn't necessarily editorial bias at all. Khamba Tendal (talk) 16:55, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Hejaz RR: Ended at Medina, not Mecca. 2601:8A:4001:670:9C86:ED21:4641:8CF8 (talk) 21:00, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

'Heavy' bias? I thought that bias was either/or? As someone has suggested, bias is inevitable given that most editors are Anglophone monoglots, unless Ottoman and other sources have been translated. As for the quantitative data of the complainant, I wouldn't take any notice, history is not a quantitative discipline. The late Stan Hanna translated most of the Austro-Hungarian official history [1] and you can look at Der Weltkrieg [2] here but I suppose that this is Eurocentric bias. Perhaps there are equivalents for Turkey and the middle eastern successor states? Regards Keith-264 (talk) 08:36, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh and what is stress editing? Keith-264 (talk) 08:38, 3 October 2024 (UTC)