Talk:Civilian casualty ratio

This article was nominated for deletion on 24 November 2010. The result of the discussion was keep.

A fact from Civilian casualty ratio appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 14 December 2010 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that according to a study by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the civilian casualty ratio in wars fought since the mid-20th century has been 10 civilian deaths for every soldier death?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2010/December.

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2008–09 Gaza War - Palestinian casualties - B'Tselem

The numbers in the chart don't make any sense: 759 + 350 != 1391 and with the current numbers the civilian casuality ratio should be 55% not 26%.

I'm not familiar with the source, one seems to be a dead link, and the other to a stats page which has the 1391 number.

This part of the chart needs to be redone. Ytr1m (talk) 23:07, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Link elsewhere for I-P casualty discussions

There are much more in-depth discussions of casualties and how many were civilians, including criticism of various sources (such as the IDF). We should link to one of the sections in Casualties of the Israel-Hamas war for the criticism and note this briefly in the article.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 01:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@NadVolum, feel free to give feedback on how this should be covered.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 06:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OR

Rosguill can you please expand on the addition of the OR tag? How can the article be improved? How would you like to see it structured differently? VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 02:38, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As I noted in that edit, right now the article is based on a grab bag of news sources that mention civilian casualty ratios in passing as part of their coverage of ongoing news related to conflicts. The article should be based on articles that centrally take up the question of civilian casualty ratios, their calculations, etc., preferably in peer-reviewed literature, and the inclusion of examples from individual conflicts should only be included if this core literature makes reference to it. A quick Google Scholar search would suggest that there's lots of good sources, including meta-analyses like [1] which are precisely the sort of source that should be used to shape an article like this (another good source I came across in that quick search: [2]) _signed,Rosguill ^talk 18:14, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, as some of the sections do cite quality sources, my sense is that several of the conflict-specific sections are likely WP:UNDUE, or at least undue-as-written. A few, like the Chechen Wars section, lack any citation that links the conflict to the broader literature on civilian casualty ratios; others, like the Arab-Israeli conflict, likely warrant some mention but appear to include far more detail based on news reports than seems likely to be appropriate. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 19:52, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that we should use "articles that centrally take up the question of civilian casualty ratios, their calculations etc" etc as opposed to "news sources that mention civilian casualty ratios in passing". However, while sometimes such articles try to cover multiple conflicts (eg this one you pointed above, and note it's already used in the article), other sources (such as this in-depth coverage written by a subject matter expert) tend to focus on a single war.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 04:11, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the example of the AOAV source is a bit different from what I was cautioning against, as that is an article that centrally takes up the question of the proportion of civilian casualties in the conflict and coverage of practices of its calculation, rather than seeking to simply cover the war and assert that there has been a given number of casualties. Some of the other material concerning the competing narratives and counts, however, seems to get too in the weeds. Especially insofar as they just assert different numbers without providing analysis and coverage of the methodology, I think the dueling reports between the UN and the IDF, for instance, don't really seem DUE--if we want to include coverage of this difference and dispute, we should just look to comprehensive academic sources and follow their claims.

More generally, for anyone willing to put a lot more work into restructuring this article, I suspect this could be a better-written and more informative article if it was restructured to focus on what RS say about the calculation of civilian casualty records as a practice and general trends over time, rather than providing statistics for a wide (but by no means comprehensive) range of individual conflicts. I think that Civilian casualty's organization is a more appropriate approach to a similar topic. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 14:58, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Can you propose a structure for this article? Like what should the sections be and what should they be called? And do you think it would be helpful if you tagged specific sections and sentences so I can then go and fix those specific issues? VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 02:47, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think reframing the "Global estimates" section as a History section may be more appropriate. Much of the content in this section already fits that model. I don't think splitting the article up by conflict is necessarily helpful or warranted, and the arbitrary sub-division of some conflicts into specific campaigns (e.g. Drone strikes in Pakistan) is disconcerting. By contrast, the core literature spends a fair amount of time talking about how changes in the rate of civilian casualties are the consequence of changes in military tactics and technologies used, and in the international legal/political paradigms that facilitate the calculation of these statistics to greater or lesser degrees, but this is more or less absent from the article. It's hinted at in the aforementioned awkward subsection titles, and briefly discussed in the Arab-Israeli conflict section, but for the most part the article reads like a list of arbitrary statistics about seemingly random conflicts, without context. A fair amount of the claims in the by-conflict sections could potentially be woven into the historical narrative rather than as a standalone conflict section. Depending on the depth of additional coverage, it may be worthwhile to have separate sections devoting greater detail to the methods and complications of civilian casualty ratio calculation, and/or to media studies analyses of how CCR analyses are used in the media/politics/etc. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 03:27, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]