Talk:List of female United States military generals and flag officers

Additonal info

@Thewolfchild: - RE: your justification for reversing information, "Remove info that is arbitrary, soon-to-be-outdated and/or superfluous for a list article - details that belong on individual bio pages".

A list about military officers is useless without referencing relative seniority. Such information is not arbitrarary, nor superfluous as every other list of general and flag officers includes rank, date of promotion, and command which allows for quickly parsing seniority at at glance.

See : List of senior female officers of the British Armed Forces, List of United States Coast Guard four-star admirals, List of United States Navy four-star admirals, List of United States Coast Guard vice admirals, List of United States Navy three-star admirals since 2010, List of Royal Navy rear admirals

If your motivation for creating this list is to shine a light on the acheivements of these officers or to help make it easier to learn about them, then recognizing significant milestones as well as those who have continued to break barriers by progressing to higher commands does that. Without identifying the trailblazers, this list is useless for parsing any information beyond an arbitrary listing of a bunch of people the average reader has no knowledge about or has the time to go through and find out.

You can see just from the time it took to go through the sections that it took at least 4 hours from the first post about the Coast Guard women to the time I went through every page in every section to look up rank, google the couple dozen broken links, and add the information, so it's not superfluous as a list's purpose is provide a quick and easy access to multiple pages, and their promotions and dates all required congressional approval so isn't arbitrary. Also, the vast majority of these officers are retired, so their rank will not be changing, so your reasoning that the information will soon-to-be outdated is unlikely. - Matsujima (talk) 21:22, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

"A list about military officers is useless without referencing relative seniority."

From United States military seniority:

"

The modern-day seniority system of the United States commissioned officer corps operates on two different levels. For officers of different ranks, seniority is simply determined by who holds the highest rank.

...

For officers in the same rank or paygrade, seniority is determined by the dates on which they assumed their ranks. If officers of the same grade have the same date of rank, then seniority is determined in order by the officer's previous rank's date and so forth. If all promotion dates of ranks are the same, seniority is then determined on order of: previous active duty grade relative seniority (if applicable), total active commissioned service, and finally, total federal commissioned service or date of appointment as a commissioned officer. The secretaries of each service may establish further seniority rules if applicable.

"

- There's only four levels of rank on this list, so that alone is not particular helpful, nor will it be accurate in all instances. As you pointed out, some of the officers are retired, while others are not. Additonally, this is a dynamic list, officers will continue to added, and we can expect more active ones to be added. The list is not separated between active and retired, nor should it be. As for those other lists you noted, (WP:OSE arguments aside), with the exception of the first list, the others are specific to either 3 or 4 star officers, essentially a sub-level of this list, and contain more info (in a table format at that).

"If your motivation for creating this list is to shine a light on the acheivements of these officers or to help make it easier to learn about them, then recognizing significant milestones as well as those who have continued to break barriers by progressing to higher commands does that. Without identifying the trailblazers, this list is useless for parsing any information beyond an arbitrary listing of a bunch of people the average reader has no knowledge about or has the time to go through and find out."

The point is, all of these women are "trailblazers", they all have some kind of milestone, a first at something, whether it's first of their race or first to hold a certain command. As you pointed out, these women are being further listed on articles sub-divided by rank, and those lists contain much, if not all, the info you seek to add here. And this list is not "useless" without your edits.

"You can see just from the time it took to go through the sections that it took at least 4 hours from the first post about the Coast Guard women to the time I went through every page in every section to look up rank, google the couple dozen broken links, and add the information, so it's not superfluous as a list's purpose is provide a quick and easy access to multiple pages, and their promotions and dates all required congressional approval so isn't arbitrary."

Often editors will be upset that they feel the "hours of work" they put into an edit was subsequently changed or removed. But that effort alone does automatically make the content added not superfluous. And the arbitrariness was explained above. Sometimes, when an editor seeks to make significant changes to a page, they will first post about it on the talk page. Sometimes it's helpful to seek input from the community, and possibly even consensus, then to boldly make such changes. But that's just a suggestion. - wolf 00:43, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

@thewolfchild - Looking through the page history, when the page was first created on 22:29, 14 November 2008‎ by @Marc Kupper, it included rank and reasoning for their notability. Those additional attributes were lost when the list became a template, and subsequently left out when it became a list again.

Being a general or flag officer, while admirable, doesn't necessarily convey a sense of notability, especially when the list has become so long, and it's a huge disservice to not distingush those who have acheived command of troops in the field from the officers who have only be granted general of flag rank due to being staff to a general or flag of higher rank.

These officers all have rightfully earned the distictions they have been granted from each other, and at the very least, we should follow proper military etiquette and refer to them by the titles they have earned rather than a generic grab bag of general officers & admirals. - Matsujima (talk) 20:05, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Your comments here are a "huge disservice" to these women. Every woman here is notable, and you can best believe they damn well earned their rank. None of them were just handed their stars because they kept a more senior, and male, flag officer's desk tidy. More than 3/4s of the officers on this list have their own biographical articles, and the remamining ones are notable per their supporting refs, with articles pending. There is a difference between military etiquette and Wikipedia standards. You'll notice on all military bio pages, the rank is not part of the article title, and on most (should be all) of those pages, the lead starts with the name, not the rank. The majority of content on WP is supported by consensus, and you shouldn't have to dig back through almost 15 years of a page's history to support an edit. This page has been stable for some time as is which tells us through implied consensus that these major, unsupported changes aren't needed. They don't provide any great benefit, more of an imbalance than anything, and as I've seen with numerous list articles over many years here, these excess details can become outdated if not constantly maintained. This list works well as it is, it would be more beneficial to focus on pages that actually need improvement, or perhaps articles that still need creating. - wolf 00:14, 23 May 2022 (UTC)