Talk:British campaign in the Baltic (1918–1919)

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Hi Sandpiper, I must admit what DagosNavy says makes more sense to me. the one here is not a WWI campaign. At the same time even though Baltic Sea 1914-1918 includes WWI events, it's grouped together based on the regional criteria that includes WWI + post WWI events. I don't know, it's not a big deal and if you really feel that WWI should be included here somehow, perhaps there should be a more clear infobox made to avoid confusing the reader.--Termer (talk) 00:38, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

If the concern is that one might be interested in other campaigns a particular vessel might have participated in prior, then instead of providing links to other campaigns of WWI not directly impacting Baltic events in 1918-1919, there should be links to the particular participating ships (if there are articles). One can then segue into WWI if they so desire. —PētersV (talk) 02:50, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

There are quite likely to be articles on individual ships or important officers. I am however more interested in the campaign as a whole. My recent interest in these articles has been a tortuous line starting from the point of whether Winston Churchill was right or wrong in promoting the Dardanelles campaign. At present, I think he was right. My information has not largely come from wiki, but rather has gone into wiki where I have been reading about topics and adding it as I go. My conclusion from this is there is a lack of connectedness about the whole of WWI on wiki. Not surprising, since we write articles bit by bit as we fancy. But it is necessary to organise, catalog and draw together information for it to become a greater whole than the sum of its parts.

It is quite clear to me that there is a very sensible temporal progression from battle to battle as the war progressed where one engagement has consequences affecting the next. On the other hand, arranging information by location of battles is like organising biography articles accordng to the height of the people written about. Perhaps that is a complicated comparison, because nationality (equating with geographical location) might be a somewhat better cataloging criteria for people than it is for WW1 battles. People tend to have national influences upon them and act within one country. However, in discussing naval battles this is not the case. The seas then were a good deal less national than they are now and open to all comers. The Germans and British (and associates) took the war to wherever they could see advantage, and the nationality of the particular stretch of water had little to do with it. So I tend to regard the current division of battles into certain geographical regions as very arbitrary.

I noted to Dagosnavy the example from the polish wiki pl:Bitwa na Dogger Bank (1915) where they have a campaign box for all WW1 battles combined and arranged by year. I have no objection to the alternate here where battles are split into several pop-open boxes. It seems a god way of presenting the data. But all the battles need to be mentioned. not just a few, and particularly not a few chosen because they happened near each other. I have the benefit of a couple of good books on this subject which follow events as they unfold. The coverage on wikipedia just does not do this properly. Wiki has a brilliant advantage over any book in the ability to cross link pages and open many at once (my books are stuffed with postit placemarkers). But this is nullified if you cannot navigate from one page to another. Yes, this is done with inline links, but the reason for navigation boxes is to give readers a summary of major related links. Leaving out most of them on any page about WW1 is doing worse than we can. Sandpiper (talk) 18:37, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Category:Soviet Union–United Kingdom relations?

In case this makes sense to anybody by User:Andy Dingley Important campaign in Soviet relations, as the Soviets rememebered it only too well! Also "USSR" might not have been in period, but the "Red Army" was, please explain! The Soviet Union was founded in 1922, this article is about the British Campaign in the Baltic 1918–1919. So why exactly is this getting getting categorized as Soviet Union–United Kingdom relations? There is a difference between British Empire vs. UK like there is a difference between RSFSR and USSR. And how was it possible to the UK have relations with a country that didn't exist at the time?--Termer (talk) 03:15, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The British Campaign was "to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle". Despite the obvious issue of potential anachronism, this is relevant to the category for two reasons:

• The opposing forces during the campaign were the direct political ancestor of the Soviet Union.
• The foreign relations of the Soviet Union, when it was formed, were heavily influenced by the past campaign.

So even though the campaign wasn't fought directly against the USSR (I admit I'm not knowledgeable enough to say whether these forces could even be described accurately as the RSFSR at that point), the campaign is deeply relevant to that category and should be placed within it.

There's also a misunderstanding here about Wikipedia categorization. Categorization is annotational and descriptive, not ordinal. Categorization makes "the overall wiki" and set of pages work, rather than changing the meaning of the individual pages as individuals. Placing this article into the category doesn't mean that the article is suddenly limited in scope to only 1922-1991! Rather the function of categorization is to assist user navigation between these articles: users looking for information UK/USSR relations will have an interest in this campaign, and so it deserves inclusion. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:31, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Finns and British in the Baltic in 1919

Should there be mention of the co-operation between Finns and British Navy. After all portion of the Royal Navy anchored at Björkö and was covered by small (by contemporary standards) squadron of newly formed Finnish Navy's ships (torpedoboats and coastal minesweepers) though Finns did not participate to combat. And Finns lost 3 of their torpedoboats as delayed British departure forced the weakhulled ex-Russian torpedoboats to sail home in far too thick ice. Again not a big loss by its era's standard but for Finnish Navy it was a major disaster - after all those 3 boats made 1/3 of its torpedoboats. All very closely related to the British operations in the Baltic in 1918-19. - Wanderer602 (talk) 18:09, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Jaan's revert of infobox picture

I thought that picture from actual conflict period taking preference over picture from later time is quite a no brainer. But whatever, lets keep it as you want then.--Staberinde (talk) 13:38, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

In my opinion the Inglise laevastik Koporje lahes.jpg which was used by Staberinde is far better than picture of Marat. Also I'm not sure if Jaan actually prefers the old pic over new one but rather that major changes to the infobox should in general first be discussed or at very least declared on the talk page. - Wanderer602 (talk) 14:18, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

The latter. Thanks for your comment. --Jaan Pärn (talk) 19:08, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

So how about we open the discussion. What kind of picture do we ideally want? Why is one of the pictures better than the other? Does it have a more famous ship or a more important situation on it? --Jaan Pärn (talk) 10:09, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

British campaign in the Baltic in 1918-1919 was primarily a naval campaign so picture related to that would be ideal. Both of the current candidates fulfilled this criteria. Another thing is that Inglise laevastik Koporje lahes.jpg shows ships that were active for most of the campaign, as it happened the heavier elements of the Baltic Red Fleet (like Petropavlovsk/Marat, which was the only operational battleship) mostly just stood idle at Kronstadt. Furthermore picture of Marat is dated to 1925 while the image of the British ships is actually contemporary to the naval campaign. - Wanderer602 (talk) 10:35, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Changing "Ships sunk" to "Casualties"

I'd like to suggest that we change the "Ships sunk" heading in the article to "Casualties". Would this be alright? Utahwriter14 (talk) 16:15, 2 February 2016 (UTC)