Difference between revisions of "Talk:British units in World War I"

Revision as of 05:55, 20 November 2014

Nothing is new under the sun, and there is an excellent page of Infantry Battalion War Diary Transcript Links (WW1) containing 'links to transcripts of First World War British Army infantry battalion war diaries from WO 95 which have already been published on other sites'. The edit history shows a number of people contributed to the page on the archived British National Archives Your Archives wiki (try saying that five times quickly!) so I'm wondering about the best way to acknowledge the work of those contributors if the content is copied over to battalion pages here. Thoughts? --Mia (talk) 10:36, 4 November 2014 (PST)

Units to be placed

Is the 1/4th Battalion (Alexandra, Princess of Wales's Own) Yorkshire Regiment part of the Yorkshire Regiment listed under Line Regiments?

Yes. The regiment name appears in several different forms, and they're also nicknamed the Green Howards. We probably need to have a big discussion on naming conventions. I'll try to find some lists of regiment names to point out variations. Whatever the canonical name is, there can also be redirects for alternative names.--GavinRobinson (talk) 01:30, 15 November 2014 (PST)

Scaling Up

According to E.A. James, British Regiments 1914-18, there were 1,761 battalions in British infantry regiments in the First World War. This doesn't include Machine Gun Corps battalions, which might be another hundred or so, and nations from the rest of the British Empire, which could be several hundred more. A search for "battalion" in WO 95 gives 3,501 items, although many of these will be duplicates because a battalion's diary is split between more than one item.

I think it would be possible to grab some data from WO 95 and use it to automatically create pages for British Empire battalions that have war diaries (many won't, and will have to be done some other way). Discovery allows up to 1,000 search results to be exported as CSV or XML (all catalogue data is under OGL, so no copyright problems). I've worked out searches and filters that should split the results into groups of less than 1,000. The data would then need to be extracted from the results files and manipulated into the right form (probably by a mixture of automatic and manual methods). Ultimately, it can be converted to wiki XML that can be imported through Special:Import. This would provide some basic seed data for battalions, including:

• parent regiment
• at least one theatre of war it served in
• at least one parent brigade and grandparent division
• catalogue references, links and dates covered for all official war diaries held at TNA

Nationality can't be extracted automatically, but there would be economies of scale to doing it in batches with the intermediate data instead of manually editing every page.

The intermediate data will also be a useful, but not definitive, source for regiment names.

There's no point going too far with this method until naming conventions, preload templates and infoboxes have been finalised, but I think it has potential.--GavinRobinson (talk) 04:31, 15 November 2014 (PST)

Gavin, this is brilliant! What's the best way to finalise the preload templates and naming conventions? My main concern with naming conventions is that the name of each page conveys enough information to disambiguate it from similarly named units in the same and other armies. I have a slightly odd week of travel ahead of me so I'm not quite sure when I'll be online, but perhaps we could find time to work on the same document together? I suspect I took a shortcut in importing the infoboxes that I need to go back and untangle to get them to work. --Mia (talk) 09:45, 15 November 2014 (PST)

I've put up a spreadsheet of British infantry regiment names. I'm starting to type up some notes and questions on naming of regiments and units.--GavinRobinson (talk) 02:58, 19 November 2014 (PST)

Looks good! When you say 'parent regiment', do you mean administrative or tactical? Is your data from a particular point in time or generalised across the years? Getting at least a marker in for parent/grandparent units at a particular point in time would be a good start. --Mia (talk) 15:06, 19 November 2014 (PST)

I've now put up some notes and queries about naming specific units, regiments and formations.

I've also downloaded search results CSV files from Discovery and am starting to smooth the data out (it's inconsistent but usable). The data I can get will apply to a range of dates covered by the official war diaries. It's derived from the theatres and divisions that the diaries are filed under, which doesn't necessarily reflect every theatre, brigade or division a battalion was in but covers at least some. Parent regiment is administrative, and will be derived from the unit name in the title of the catalogue record.--GavinRobinson (talk) 05:55, 20 November 2014 (PST)