IronBattalion

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Happy editing! Nick-D (talk) 07:34, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

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2020 Military History Newcomer of the Year

		2020 Military History Newcomer of the Year
		As voted by your peers within the Military history WikiProject, I hereby award you the WikiProject Barnstar for being nominated for the 2020 Military History Newcomer of the Year Award. Congratulations, and thank you for your efforts throughout the year. Eddie891 Talk Work 13:41, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

'Aviator' as a RAAF rank

Hi, The RAAF will be renaming its lowest-level positions 'Aviator' as part of the celebrations of its 100th anniversary and reforms to improve gender inclusiveness. It's not clear though when this is coming into effect as the HR manuals on the Defence website were still using the old terminology when I recently checked. Please see the discussion at User talk:Nick-D#RAAF Question for some sources. Regards, Nick-D (talk) 06:19, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

What you're missing

Howdy, WP:JOBTITLES, which calls for the lower-casing of jobs & offices, in the article intro. That's what you're missing :) GoodDay (talk) 22:15, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

@GoodDay:, I would contest that, simply because prime minister of Australia would be like saying the treasurer of Australia, compared to the proper Treasurer of Australia. It is similar as the Prime Minister of Australia is the official title of the head of government. If we extend this principle it would mean the page Chief of the Defence Force would need his title decapitalised. I would say, from my experience in the english language (don't know how to express this idea less smugly), that convention would dictate that titles like Prime Minister of Australia would be capitalised while job titles like pilot would not. in addition, the article 'The' is talking about one job, not multiple, which would indicate that decapitalised letters are not appropriate. This my ranting and personal take on this issue. Thanks for sticking with me. IronBattalion (talk) 22:59, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of WP:JOBTITLES either. I've grown to grudgingly accept it in the intros of articles. But, haven't yet accepted it in the 'section' & 'sub-section' headings of articles. Completely oppose it being imposed on infoboxes, which (so far) it hasn't been. GoodDay (talk) 23:01, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

@GoodDay:: Well, there is an argument to be made that the articles like Prime Minister of Australia are not referencing an office per se, but are a title, which would be within WP:JOBTITLES remit that it allows capitalised job titles. IronBattalion (talk) 23:06, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

If you were successful in changing/overturning WP:JOBTITLES' preference for lower-casing? I'd be quite happy. GoodDay (talk) 23:07, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

@GoodDay:, Right now I have just added to my bucket list of things I want to achieve on wikipedia. This is going to get interestin >:) - IronBattalion (talk) 23:10, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

You might be interested in this RFC, concerning this very topic. GoodDay (talk) 23:17, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

@GoodDay: I am interested, but it would be more effective, IMO, if we struck at the root cause. This is one of my sandbox pages, User:IronBattalion/Reserve, if you want to collate some arguments against this (unorthodox) policy with me. IronBattalion (talk) 23:37, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

My well known frustration with that WP:MOS, would only hurt your aims if it involves me. A newer face (such as yourself) would have more influence. GoodDay (talk) 23:40, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

@GoodDay:No worries, have a good day, though additionally could you link me to some of your arguments so I can try to avoid any pitfalls and create newer arguments.IronBattalion (talk) 01:04, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

You'd have to check my contrib history. There's so many places, I've argued against WP:JOBTITLES. GoodDay (talk) 01:37, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

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NPOV dispute

Hi IronBattalion, I just noticed that you placed an NPOV dispute tag on the article Industrial unionism back in July of this year. Per Wikipedia policy on initiating these disputes, this tag should be added alongside a section in the talk page, in which you can indicate where and how the article includes a non-neutral point of view. This opens a route for neutralising the language in the article through consensus, whereas a tag by itself doesn't. Thanks --Grnrchst (talk) 14:32, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

• Sorry @Grnrchst:, both for taking this long to respond and most definitely misusing the tag. I have been on an unforeseen break from editing on this glorious timesink due to recent events and probably will remain sporadic for unknown amount of time. The reason for the use of the tag was something to do with how everything was quoted? This is from my memory and thus is not reliably, but the gist is that I objected to the phrasing and structure that lent itself to be viewed as biased. Though this may not be the right tag to display this feeling and I did not look at the policy page for the NPOV. So Sorry for any inconvenience.IronBattalion (talk) 23:42, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

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Indigenous placenames debate

Hi there, there is a discussion raging at the moment that will hopefully lead to a formal end to the debate and edit warring around inclusion of Aboriginal placenames in articles. I have greatly appreciated your input before on this issue and if you have the energy it'd be great to have your contribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Australian_Wikipedians%27_notice_board#Indigenous_names Noticeboard Poketama (talk) 11:46, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Royal commissions

Thanks for your interest in royal commissions. Legislative history is an interesting idea. While there is general legislation such as the s Act 1923 (NSW) it is largely procedural. I am not aware of any book dedicated to the subject and the academic articles I have seen are either (1) about a specific royal commission eg Monsters and Horror in the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2) advocates guides to appearing before a royal commission or (3) procedural such as From Fact Finding to Truth-Telling. You might also be interested in the Australian Law Reform report from 2010 Royal Commissions and official inquiries. Find bruce (talk) 22:15, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

G'day @Find bruce:, to be honest I did not expect the 'hostility' (please be right tone, please be right tone) towards the move, I thought it would be a simple administrative thing, but heh I was wrong. And yeah this me looking at the Victorian page and thinking maybe this page could be a little broader since it is just a list of royal commissions with barely anything to tie it together (and aesthetically it looks horrible). And since I am not aware of any competing pages to the specific topic, I just decided to broaden the page and initiate a move discussion for the entire block of articles. Moreover, thoughts of legislative history only cropped up only after I have been going through the Federal Register of Legislation. I do thank you again for at least appraising the move. Have a great day, IronBattalion (talk) 23:58, 29 June 2022 (UTC).

Piped links

Hi IronBattalion, I notice you've been removing piped links across several articles, e.g. changing references to 1922 federal election to 1922 Australian federal election. This isn't really necessary when the geographical location is already clear from the context, it just adds unneeded words. E.g. Ben Chifley#Railwayman now has four references to New South Wales in a single paragraph. You should also take care that you fix the capitalisation when you remove piped links. ITBF (talk) 07:28, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I probably was going too far in the opposite direction of where it was, but I will go to bat for my decision to change the election names, though not the NSW changes. My intention was to do some house cleaning and remove unnecessary bytes by looking at source editing and removing piped links where I felt it was necessary. Obviously, I've gone overboard and thus corrections are in order. Though, to be fair I did remove unneeded words, just in the backlog and maybe too much of it. The only articles I've touched in regard to this process are Andrew Fisher, Billy Hughes and, of course, Ben Chifley. If you would like I could self-impose an exclusion from the articles for a period of time if you would like, but before I fix my NSW error. Thanks and have a good day, IronBattalion (talk) 09:44, 3 July 2022 (UTC).

Hi again, I really don't see the point of these edits. You mentioned "unnecessary bytes", not sure how seriously, but we should be more concerned with unnecessary words - in articles about Australian figures we don't need the word "Australian" in every sentence. You're also changing the targets of links to redirects which serves zero purpose. ITBF (talk) 13:03, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Scullin government moved to draftspace

An article you recently created, Scullin government, is not suitable as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:42, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Yeah sorry @Hey man im josh:, I just did it on a whim on a very late night, wherein I didn't want to look for sources when I wanted to go to bed. This was originally an apology, but then I had some criticisms, and then it grew a wall of text... I'm sorry, this sort of happens to my "Victims" quite a lot :).

On the issue of verifiability, it can be gleamed from the wikipedia pages of Scullin, Lyons, and the Great Depression, that a lot of sources exist on the issues that affected the government of the day along with the responses that came about. Moreover, the introduction does not need any sources according to wikipedian policy and every point should be expressed within the body and sourced appropriately. I know this is my weakest argument, but it just internally sort of feels there is an irony somehow (well maybe not irony, but potatoes patatoes).

Additionally, in my opinion, it is better than a lot of other stubs that exist on the site, I have seen articles with one or two sources and barely a paragraph of text on Wikipedia as official. And dare I say some with a lot of information and no sources (what's the wikipedian term for someone who knows the info but can't source it themselves, hmmm). Now, I understand this is primarily a sourcing issue, and I understand after seeing so many BLOODY unsourced bodies on this DAMNED BLOODY site, but that's the problem and it goes to the core of the problem with drafting.

The drafting process, while good for people passionate about a subject, is terrible at canvasing for editors who know the subject unless the editor in question has good networks within the community, otherwise it will be a solo project. I'll admit, I have not much passion for this project. My hope at the time was to enable people to help begin the wall of text that they were destined to do by doing all of the tedious necessary page creation tasks. Moreover this was all started by me clicking a red link to create a page. The red link reference was originally meant to be a segue to philosophical debate about why it starts with the creation and not the drafting of an article, but I realised it was redundant and probably too argumentative, so I scrapped it... You're welcome! :)

Finally, an optional survey, with all questions blunt because I like making people uncomfortable, apparently... I don't know, that's just what my psychiatrist told me. More seriously, this is me trying to better understand the circumstances around this conversion, and again it is optional:

1. How did you find the article while it was on mainspace?
2. Can you give an ETA between reading and deletion?
3. Did you, at time of deletion, only read the article and not the related wikipedia links? (understandable if you were mass stub deleting)

Thank you for perusing this lengthy response (in other words a rant... call it what you will, but I call it that) and taking time to appreciate another nationality being sorry to you, if only for brief second. If it seemed like the response cut abruptly... well that's because I cut it a little short, the project was getting a little ahead of me :) . And on one final note... Football rules, Gridiron is meh! YEAH :) IronBattalion (talk) 13:05, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Hey @IronBattalion, it sounds like the main issue is you expect references in other articles to be enough when in fact the references should be included in each individual article. Even if it's the same references from other articles, that's okay, but readers shouldn't have to chase references down. An article with no references is, more often than not, going to be moved to the draft space.

1. As part of the new page patrol, I review pages that are new. Pages typically get marked as approved by reviewers.

2. I don't understand the question

3. I did not delete the article, I only moved it.

No worries, your questions aren't bothersome at all. Ohhh, we're doing a sorry joke now! Well I'm not sorry that gridiron football is better! Hey man im josh (talk) 13:18, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

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Brit Army

Greetings. I've replied to your message at Talk:Brit Army. Greenshed (talk) 18:39, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

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Your draft article, Draft:Scullin government

Hello, IronBattalion. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Scullin government".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. ✗plicit 07:10, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Edit Summaries

G'day IronBattalion, just touching base here to make a friendly request for you to include better edit summaries in your edits.
Noting the guidance from What to avoid in edit sumnmaries, in particular:

Avoid vagueness. While edit summaries can be terse, they should still be specific. Providing an edit summary similar to "I made some changes" is functionally equivalent to not providing a summary at all. -What to avoid in edit sumnmaries

I've noted you have made some rather large changes to a number of pages with edit summaries of only: "edited down" and others with "fixed" etc. etc. here: IronBattalion's Contributions

It makes it difficult to know what you've edited and why the edit was made, without checking the [diff]. If you haven't seen this page before, then it may be helpful in writing some summaries that provide some more information WP:ESL

cheers,
KarmaKangaroo (talk) 12:10, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

G'day, @Kanga: just as a heads up, I'm going to be structuring this into a response for this section and the reverted Australian Army edits. You can split your responses up if you so desire. ;)

Editing summaries:

Edited down is my way of saying, "the byte/paragraph/unsourced/summary size is too large and needs cutting" without having to go through the minutia of remembering everything I'd cut, rearranged, and fixed when I'm about 10 seconds away from going to edit the page again in a different direction.

Fixed for me is usually minor technical or textual changes, however that can expand into me fixing entire pages with sfn (i.e. no sfn sourcing) and general sourcing problems and at the end of the process is me wanting to stuff the bloody sourcing down the BLOODY THROATS OF THE EDI-... ahem, excuse me, I got a bit carried away there. For me, in any case, the terseness is because I made a lot of little changes that didn't involve massive amounts of text editing and the minutia would require a paragraph to summarise (and which because of its generality means I'm not using my more specific Fixed sources).

Australian Army edits:

And by the way, it's a bit ironic Australian Army edits that you reverted were fixing my shoddy workmanship from 2020-2021. I singlehandedly turned a reasonable byte-sized page with no history into a byte monster with an excellent and detailed history section. So when I started this edited down process, I was trying to strike a balance between what was necessary and what was covered by links to articles that would cover this in more detail. That meant reassessing the structure, finding easy byte savings where I could (see King of Australia), and summarising text. From my initial analysis I concluded that the WWII section was bit too long, especially the Pacific sub-section, and I could find some savings with WWI in both how I phrased it and the details themselves. Now onto the Indonesian confrontation, which was done with two thoughts behind it, byte-saving and because that's how the Australian War Memorial calls the conflict in its articles on the subject.

The acronyms were removed because they didn't come up again, and the only one that did (Chief of Army (CA)) was to because and because it came up only once in the introduction. ANMEF was removed because, in my editing, its context was reduced to one sentence and wasn't brought up again (too much operational detail, if wanting more info, click the ANMEF link, style of edit thinking). If someone were to remove the AIF (I did think about it for a split second, but then I realised... its the AIF) I would agree with you and personally pursue a judicious course of the naughty hammer.

These were done with no consultation on the talk page because the current response time is currently in the years. The only active regular contributor to this page, that I know of, would be @Nick-D (I say contributor, more like custodian) since @AustralianRupert retired (I do miss the old bloke commenting). Not to mention that I had gentle warnings about the length of my article, to not have too much detail, back in 2020-2021; which, in hindsight, I think I mostly ignored unintentionally and that I'm getting around to fixing. To be honest, thinking critically, the reason I don't use the talk page is that I try to improve the page and be good faith in my edits, and work it all out in hindsight when an edit of mine gets bogged down in a dispute (I think I'll call it the neurodivergent editing style).

So now my task is to moderate my old "expand and show the world all its wonderful detail" style with my current "buurrn it aaalll down mwhahaa" approach. Though, I'd like to think that I've done a pretty good job over the years all things considered.

In my defence, I thought what was lost was my foolhardy notion that I can do things first try, and that what was gained was me saying to myself: Do better next time! OR ELSE!! And thank you for coming to my defence regarding Earnt, I really appreciate it (I'm not going crazy... YEEESSSS), better late than never, IronBattalion (talk) 15:03, 9 February 2024 (UTC).

I thought about splitting up my response, but I thought it would be helpful to actually combine them, although this is probably going to be a hot mess of ideas mashed together, as I have 6 thoughts on the go.

I get what you're saying, but those edit summaries don't help other editors (and I'll add that the edit summaries aren't isolated to the one article), whether you're the only one editing the article at the time or not. If this were... your own talk page, experiments pages etc. then obviously if you know what you mean then no edit summaries is fine. But its pretty consistent. I'll give you an example where I see the issue, and have actively had this issue, you do happen to make a lot of consecutive edits. In the Aus Army article there are periods there of for instance, 12 consecutive edits made in the span of 22 hours, but there isn't a single useful edit summary. No editor knows what those edits are for, what was done etc, and if for instance, someone had to revert something, or was monitoring a particular section. Again there shouldn't be any reason why you aren't providing reasonable edit summaries instead of nothing. One thing I would say is that if you looked up to @AustralianRupert, as an editor here is to be like him, look at his edit summaries, this is what you should aspiring to.Generally speaking the only people who aren't providing edit summaries are people who are spamming. Its part of the etiquette. I don't want to have to go through each of your edits to find the one that needs to be reverted, rather than the entire lot. (p.s. Im not saying I'm doing that I'm saying this as a generality; what you have done gets lost, whereas a spammer its easy enough to revert the whole lot). Please be like the other good editors on here and follow their example. Use the edit summary legend, its all apart of being community member here. The edit summaries exist for good reason, and no edit summary on 12 consecutive edits in a single day is just not ok.

2nd thing I want to bring up (almost equal first) is that you keep mentioning "byte-saving" and I'm not sure why..... that should not be your purpose for editing. Reading the end of your post, I wonder if it's because of those warnings. There is no word limit, and so long as your article isn't rambling, and the level of detail is appropriate. I note that someone has already posted here to you back in Mid 2022 for making edits that you say were about byte saving, that was for changes to piped links, and changing links to redirects, which is something you did here too - changing the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation to the Indonesia Confrontation both in text, and the link to a redirect to the same exact same article, "Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation". If those edits were you attempting to "save bytes" because the redirect is fewer characters, then please don't.

FYI I am actively watching that page and the talk page for posts.

For what its worth I thought what was there was better, so if thats you're work you should be proud of that. My only advice would be when one starts making such wide ranging and extreme changes to the entire article, I feel like one runs into issues of quality.

If you want my opinion I think its a mistake to go back and edit your old articles etc. that you wrote you believe were too long. Just go about editing the pages like normal, don't think of them like your mistake you need to fix. I think that will lead down the right path, and not mention your edits from 2020-21 have already been absorbed and taken into the article, not to mention they've likely been edited by others in that time.

Hope that helps KarmaKangaroo (talk) 16:33, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

edit fix indent KarmaKangaroo (talk) 16:34, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

G'day, and yeah the continual editing is a... let's just say a "habit of mine".

How I tend to edit, is to use the publish button as a way to save my work (after scrambling to fix up any minor mistakes and make it presentable), because my attention span is the size of a mozzie, then I go off on a different line of editing/thought. And also because there is no guaranteed chance that Wikipedia will save the edit after returning to it for the fifteenth time, and then spend the next thirty minutes redoing it because it was a tedious/time-consuming edit. By the by, I'll think about my edit summaries in the morning, as to whether to go completely custom or adjust my current systemic approach. (P.s. could you please restate your P.s., I'm tired and don't know what it means)

What I mean by byte-saving is the fact that Wikipedia has a general recommended byte limit of 80kb and general tolerable limit of 100kb before splitting gets discussed. I use that as a personal rule that all information that can be condensed should be condensed, especially if there is a dedicated article on the topic, in order to abide by the page byte sizes. I've taken it literally as a decree from God, but I can see where others might find it more like guidelines. Not to mention byte-saving is not a bad thing on its own, as in the same reverted edits, I edited King of Australia to King of Australia.

Thanks for your complements! I'm proud of my work on the page and I've unofficially adopted-the-article due to fondness for my work and time editing the article. But I do believe my edits were in the best interest of the article. My two goals were to byte-save, which you disagree with and that's fair, and to further summarise the history section both to remove operational details and make it streamlined. That last one is particularly important, and one that I think I improved on in my edits. But, in any case, they both work in concert as thinking about them both helps to summarise better, as you are looking for better ways to say the same thing.

This process has been continuing on and off since those initial edits, with my almost year long break since the last edited down (sorry, I'm being a bit facetious) being because I lost interest in editing wikipedia, otherwise I would have continued to make it more streamlined. For quality, when comparing my previous work the prose had issues, I do believe both the WWI and Pacific sections improved drastically with their readability (especially for the Pacific, as it is over detailed compared to the rest of the history section); to be fair quality is a nebulous concept conceptually.

In any case I would like feedback on what was specifically wrong with the edits themselves, because I think I cleared up specific reservations you had with my previous response, so I want to know what I did incorrectly. And I would like fix up the uncontroversial bits.

Now I'm off to bed, I'll try to hop on any responses in the morning. And honestly having six thoughts at once is very relatable. IronBattalion (talk) 17:57, 9 February 2024 (UTC).

Look continual editing is one of those things that kind of just is. Would it preferable to not have it? Sure. What I think is an actual bad habit, that you should change is not putting anything in your edit summaries (haha). Because I went through your contributions, and its not as if its only on the Australian Army page that you don't. So as far as bad habits go, I'd prefer to see that, because its NOT as if you are single character edits like that, like some people do in an attempt to boost their post count to get a higher auto-confirm.....

My tip here would be you should be using the preview key as your save key, that way you can reduce the number edits, and so long as someone hasn't edited on top of you, you can just copy the source code in the preview window Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C, then if wiki doesn't retain your changes, after you cut away and do something else for 12 hours, just press re-edit and then paste the source code over the top. (Ctrl+A)(Ctrl+V). I have had an edit (notably almost my entire PEQ-15 article draft, and I copied the source code from the preview window), and even after at least 48 hours sitting on the edit room floor. Alternatively, do the edit in Word, with track changes on. I do that large articles.

I'm not sure where you got that byte limit from, if you have a source that would be great. I am however sceptical of it, because there are plenty of high level articles of rather high significance, eg. a countries Army. The United States Navy page is almost 130,000 bytes. Secondly, and probably of more use, is that Wikipedia itself says that article/page size is determined by the number of words, not bytes, and the word count should be counted from readable prose only. Pages should be considered for splitting at the ≥9,000 word mark, with ≥15,000 word size should almost certainly be divided or trimmed. See Wikipedia:Article size. And FYI the Australian Army word count is sitting at ~5,400 words, at its current state, with your edits in place, closer to 4,500. And FYI these word limits, are just guidelines. So not sure where you found that limit, or who told you, but as others have said above on this very talk page, you should focus on good content, not bytes. You can obviously see how editing for byte size, instead of content, is a bit cart before the horse, and leads to issues e.g.: calling something by a name its not known as (i.e. the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation, as the Indonesia confrontation) which changes the meaning of the sentence, even if it redirects to the right thing.

The other point to note here about focussing on bytes too much (read: at all) is that the byte size doesn't tell you much about the readable prose word count. Why? Because the page's byte size is driven by other things besides readable prose, e.g. very large templates, like infoboxes, images, and god forbid you have a very vey well researched article, because if you focus on bytes, then you will have no room for an actual article.

I understand losing interest totally, I do every now and again too.

I think I would like to see the edits made from a content perspective as opposed to for the purpose of byte saving; as I think the edits would change significantly.

Hopefully I have been able to convince you to use edit summaries, and if you have trouble with editing the whole document, maybe try editing one section, it should only show the section if you click edit next to it.

p.s. sorry for the long time between replies, I actually thought I'd lost my reply, but found it in another tab KarmaKangaroo (talk) 05:58, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

p.p.s Just wanted to add that you if you hit publish and the edit summary box comes up, you can type in there, and then press the X close button, it will retain what you typed. So perhaps you could make changes, and when you would normally publish, or when you've completed one section, just type a short summary of your changes, click the X, then do some more, come back to add some more summary, and so on. I think the limit is 250 characters, so you can type a fair bit. KarmaKangaroo (talk) 08:12, 11 February 2024 (UTC)