Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2019/Op-ed
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Infoboxes − Wikipedia's red bus? |
- By Factotem
In the lead-up to the UK referendum on membership of the EU, the Vote Leave campaign wrote on the side of a bus, "We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead". That statement was actually a misleading over-simplifiction of the complexities of the UK's financial arrangements with the EU; a deriliction of the duty to properly inform the British public at a time when they were being asked to decide an issue of enormous consequence.
Obviously, Wikipedia is a record of the past, not a campaign to influence the future, more academically than politically significant. But the infobox which appears in many articles is its red bus, the place where complex issues are distilled down to easily digested soundbites. Sadly, they all too often provide the same opportunity for subtle mis-information, nowhere more so than in the result parameter of the military conflict infobox.
Examples
There is a plethora of MILHIST articles where attempts are made to insert nuance into what is supposed to be a very basic, bare-bones summary. Examples I have come across include:
- Battle of France, in which there was lengthy and often acrimonious debate about whether the result was a "Decisive German victory", which was eventually settled by an RfC in February 2018;
- Battle of Crete, where the discussion centred around the question of whether the German victory was pyrrhic, a disagreement that is currently lying dormant with the compromise of describing it simply as an "Axis victory" but with three references referring to a pyrrhic victory;
- Battle of Trafalgar, currently described as a "British victory", but subject to frequent attempts to change that to "Decisive British victory";
- Battle of Waterloo, currently described as a "Decisive Coalition victory", which is problematic for reasons explained below;
- Battle of Flodden, currently described as "English victory", but subject to frequent attempts to change that to "Decisive English victory";
- Second Battle of El Alamein, where the current description of the result as a "Decisive Allied victory" is being challenged;
- Operation Storm, currently described as both "Decisive Croatian victory" and "Strategic Bosnian victory", along with a bulleted list of seven consequences, which is currently being challenged.
The problems
Between them, these examples exhibit the following basic failures in their attempts to add nuance to an infobox that is not able to accommodate it:
Result, not what resulted from
Operation Storm is an example of the all-too-common desire to expand the result beyond its original purpose by the addition of a bulleted list of consequences. The current RfC about whether "Massacre of Serb civilians" should be included in that list illustrates the WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT minefield that is the decision about what to include in such lists. More importantly, this type of information is simply not what the result parameter was designed to convey. As pointed out most eloquently in this edit by Cinderella157, "The result parameter is for the result of a conflict, not what resulted from the conflict."
Elevating simple use of adjectives
Articles are subject to a neutral point of view, which requires an article "fairly represents all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources". Part of this core content policy requires us to avoid giving undue weight, which can creep into articles via "depth of detail" and "prominence of placement". In Battle of Flodden, a source was offered in support of describing the result as "decisive". That source, however, used the word simply as an adjective, with no detailed discussion as to what made the result decisive. Other sources describe the result at Flodden as accidental, great, memorable, unexpected or extraordinary. Similar undue weight was evident at Battle of France, where one source offered to support the assertion that the battle was a decisive victory for the Germans was an image caption. Why choose "decisive" above any other adjective, or indeed why give any simple use of adjective such prominence in the lead?
Appropriate evaluation of sources
The proper evaluation of reliable sources to determine weight was an issue for the assertion that the Battle of Crete was a pyrrhic German victory. In this case, the assertion was supported by sheer numbers, with at one stage no less than ten refs to support it. Unlike Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, whose author Antony Beevor makes no mention of a "pyrrhic victory", those sources were all general histories that were not focused on the battle itself.[a] They may well be considered reliable under the right circumstances, but context is an important consideration when it comes to evaluating sources. Per WP:CONTEXTMATTERS, "Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is...an appropriate source for that content" and "...editors should cite sources focused on the topic at hand where possible". Should we be ignoring Beevor's silence on the issue and favour sources that are not focused on the central topic?
Unsupported assertions
In all cases above, the disagreement centred solely on the infobox. The attempts to describe the result were not supported by content in the main body, an issue that is also evident with the Second Battle of El Alamein. The infobox is a component of the lead. The guidance given in the Manual of Style for Lead sections states, "...significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article", while the advice for infobox usage states infoboxes should "...contain material that is expanded on and supported by citations to reliable sources elsewhere in the article". If there is no discussion in the main body as to why a conflict was decisive/pyrrhic/<insert preferred adjective>, on what basis can such a description be asserted in the infobox?
Accommodating nuance
In contrast, the Battle of Trafalgar does discuss the aftermath of the battle in its "Consequences" section, and the article illustrates the difficulties the infobox has accommodating nuance. The battle is often described as a decisive British victory (quite understandably by the UK government, though interestingly not by the Royal Navy). The section does a reasonable job of covering the nuances of the battle's significance, covering some aspects that indicate the victory was decisive, and other aspects which indicate that it was not (and there is further discussion of this aspect on the article TP).[b] This makes it well nigh impossible to describe the result as decisive; to do so is to favour one, well-sourced argument over the other and thus violate WP:NPOV.
Poorly supported assertions
The Battle of Waterloo does a much poorer job of explaining the battle's significance in its "Historical importance" section. The discussion in that section is poorly sourced, and reliable sources which refute the assertion that the result was decisive are omitted. The basis of a much better treatment of this aspect of the battle has not yet progressed beyond a discussion on the TP. Until that is done, the argument for removing the word "decisive" from the result can only be based on advice and guidelines.
Infobox documentation and guidance
According to advice provided in the template documentation, supported by MILMOS, the result parameter is constrained to a simple "X victory" or, where there is no concensus in the sources as to which side was the victor, a link to the section in the article where this issue is discussed. This guidance was adopted following discussions on the MILHIST TP and MILHIST Co-ords TP back in 2009. Further discussion in 2017 resulted in "Decisive X victory" being deprecated as an acceptable option. This advice was given the authority of a guideline in 2018 with an amendment to MILMOS. A recent RfC questioning whether infoboxes should comply with the advice provided by the template documentation concluded that the documentation and its supporting MILMOS statement "give appropriate guidance for the result parameter, which should be respected". At the end of the day, though, the template documentation provides only advice, and carries no more authority than an essay. As a guideline, MILMOS carries a little more authority, but it is still "a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply", which gives a lot more room for argument than does a policy.
Why is this important?
The enthusiasm with which editors attempt to insert assertions in the infobox in articles where the main body of content does not support such assertions indicates the significance people attach to the infobox. It is common knowledge that the lead section is often all that people ever read, thus skewing the impact of the infobox contents on their understanding of the subject. Worse still, Googling any of the battle articles mentioned above returns the infobox information, including the result, directly in the search results, but not the more informed, nuanced discussion behind that result. In this age of alternative facts and fake news, it is, I think, more important than ever to be scrupulously accurate with the information that Wikipedia provides, as much with those 'side-of-a-red-bus' soundbites as with the main content.
Footnotes
- ^ Among the ten sources used to support the assertion that the German victory in the Battle of Crete was pyrrhic were Brassey's D-Day Encyclopedia: The Normandy Invasion A-Z, Hitler’s War on Russia, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park and The Hutchinson Atlas of World War Two Battle Plans: Before and After. I have not checked all of them, but I believe they also all suffer from the same WP:WEIGHT issue of simply describing the result as pyrrhic, without providing any meaningful, scholarly analysis of what made the German victory pyrrhic. Certainly, the Hutchinson Atlas was included solely on the basis of a chapter title, whilst The Second World War: Europe and the Mediterranean, a book which devotes only just over four of its 448 pages to the battle and still listed as a reference in the infobox, simply says "...the Germans could claim only a pyrrhic victory. The 7th Airborne Division was squandered for an objective of dubious worth...".
- ^ There is an assertion in the Consequences section that the Battle of Trafalgar was "strategically decisive", but this is not sourced.
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