Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Victoria Cross Reference migration

The Victoria Cross Reference Migration Project was set up to manage the migration of the information stored on the Victoria Cross Reference (www.victoriacross.net - now closed) website to Wikipedia. The Victoria Cross Reference project has for many years collected information on the Victoria Cross award which is the highest award for gallantry that can be awarded to members of the British and Commonwealth armed forces of any rank in any service and civilians under military command.

The initial notice on this migration was posted on June 27, 2004. Archive of dead link at: Web.archive.org

Mike Chapman, the creator of that site, has given his permission and full backing and has initiated this project: "At this time of the 150th Anniversary of the first VC I hope that those active members of the Victoria Cross Reference’s community will embrace this project and its aims. I am very pleased that the information will not only continue to be available but can be greatly expanded and built upon by a much wider group of contributors, both now and into the future."

Articles that were added to during the migration have the following template on their talk pages, {{Wikiproject VC migration}}, which appears as follows

This article was created or added to during the Victoria Cross Reference Migration. It may contain material that was used with permission from victoriacross.net.

Background

Since 1997 many people have provided information and photos for inclusion on the Victoria Cross Reference site but changing circumstances over the last couple of years have meant that the site's creator is not able to either update the site with this information or modify the site so that members can carry this out themselves.

There is now a considerable backlog of information / photos, etc. to add.

His key aims with this site were:

• To provide as much detail on every VC award as possible.
• To allow visitors to easily find the information, hence all the indexes, and be able to easily jump from page to page and explore.
• To act as a focal point for Victoria Cross-related information both added to and linked from the site and to allow visitors to add/update this information.
• To foster a community spirit with interactive elements such as the Message Forum.
• It was also always in his mind to be able to provide information at a much wider level surrounding the awards – background to the campaigns and such.

Migration to Wikipedia

After much thought and investigation into other options over the last few months, he believes the solution is to migrate all the Victoria Cross information to Wikipedia, hence this project.

(there was a Message Forum thread on this project on the Victoria Cross Reference site which used to be at: victoriacross.net)

On the Victoria Cross Reference, Registered members will now see a new block at the top of all recipient pages which shows an auto-generated Wikipedia-styled and formatted version of that page. A link can be clicked on to go to that recipient’s (blank) page on Wikipedia and the text simply copy and pasted into it.

Some extra formatting may be required, especially for pages which have had extra information added to them, and photos may need to be uploaded to Wikipedia. These details are noted on the recipient pages.

The project recommendation is that members who are willing to help migrate this information log in/register on the Wikipedia site so that page changes can easily be attributed. Wikipedia:Why create an account?.

Once a recipient’s page has been created on Wikipedia the member should use the button on the Victoria Cross Reference site's recipient page to mark it as migrated. Thereafter a link to the Wikipedia page is shown on that page rather than the content.

Pages that have been migrated are marked as such in all the recipient indexes throughout this site.

General site information pages such as The Medal, Stats and Unusual VCs can easily be added (and of course edited).

From Mike Chapman: "I have been sent a great deal of electronic information (text and photos) from people for addition to the site. For the reasons already stated at the beginning I won’t be able to add this myself and although I plan to send an email out to those people notifying them that they will now be able to update the pages themselves I expect a lot of emails not to get though as the people may have changed address. I am open to suggestions on how to proceed."

Wikipedia list pages have been created for the recipient indexes for Name, Campaign, Nationality, and Living Recipients indexes. They are linked from the main Wikipedia Victoria Cross page.

Differences

The Wikipedia recipient articles are formatted in a more paragraph-styled fashion which lends itself to an encyclopaedia article rather than the list-like facts as now. They also tend to have a References section rather than text indicating where people have submitted information on the page.

The Message Forum will remain on the Victoria Cross Reference for the time being – although Wikipedia has what it calls Discussion Pages associated with every article (help: Wikipedia:Talk page they prefer this to be for discussions related to the article (improving it for example) rather than questions about the subject. This can certainly be looked into.

What’s New? - one useful feature for logged-in Wikipedia users are watch pages which allows you to easily see when pages you are interested in have been updated (as well as the Discussion pages above): [User Guide: Using the Watchlist]

Search – Wikipedia:Searching

No Migration

No plans to create indexes for Unit, Rank, Location of Deed, VCs Publicly Displayed, and Books. We should try and look into a way of automatically showing a list of Wikipedia pages based on some text which appears on those recipient pages – this would then allow a list to be added to an existing location in the encyclopaedia. Categories may be the route. For the recipient lists that have been created there are no sort options (such as by date or location of deed).

The Relatives Register details could be added to each Wikipedia recipient’s Discussion page – although this may be frowned upon by the Wikipedia community. I think they are for discussion of the article itself but perhaps a section detailing the contact details for relatives willing to provide further information will be fine. An email will go out to them letting them know of the migration project. Many will not have valid email addresses.

The Guestbook and On This Day are probably not necessary.

Participants

• Mike Chapman

Useful Wikipedia information and pages

For those new to Wikipedia, the following information may help you get started:

• Wikipedia:How to edit a page