Talk:South African honours system

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Orders, decorations, and medals

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Orders, decorations, and medals, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of orders, decorations, and medals on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Orders, decorations, and medalsWikipedia:WikiProject Orders, decorations, and medalsTemplate:WikiProject Orders, decorations, and medalsOrders, decorations, and medals articles
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Structure

There are 2 pages covering this subject - Orders, decorations, and medals of South Africa and this page. My suggestion of deleting ODM of SA was turned down. (There was a 3rd page - Evolution of the SA Honours system which I merged into this page and has since been deleted}

ODM was meant to be a list of all the decorations and medals - but these lists are better maintained on individual pages such as South African military decorations. Since we can't seem to delete the page, I suggest that we add a list of all orders and medals to ODM

Do any regular visitors of these pages have any suggestions on how to structure these 2 pages? Gbawden (talk) 06:49, 19 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the 'Orders, decorations and medals of South Africa' article should go. It's incomplete, and it seems pointless to discuss a few orders and decorations on it, when there are around 400 in total and they're already covered elsewhere and more informatively.

The most useful thing, in my view, is a master page for SA which contains an overview of the history/evolution of the honours system, with links to the various category pages, e.g. military. civil, police etc. This is a vast subject that could, potentially, run to 400 or more articles if it were ever to be fully written up for Wikipedia. A coherent master page is essential for navigation.

So I suggest :

~ delete 'Orders, decorations and medals of South Africa' : it's not much use as it stands and not worth trying to improve when it simply duplicates a few items already listed (and illustrated) elsewhere

~ rewrite 'South African honours system' to consist of

1 - History (the existing 'evolution' content, which needs some correcting - I can do that)

2 - Military (a brief para with a link to 'main article' which, in turn, has links to articles on individual medals)

3 - Civil (a brief para with a link to 'main article' which, in turn, has links ...)

4 - Police (a brief para with a link to 'main article' which, in turn, has links ...)

5 - Correctional services (a brief para with a link to 'main article' which, in turn, has links ...)

6 - Intelligence services (a brief para with a link to 'main article' which, in turn, has links ...)

I can write the brief paras. I don't think that a list of all ODMs should be put on one page : it will be far too long, and the lists are already on the category pages. It would create unnecessary duplication and more info to be managed.

These pages are essentially about the mainstream SA honours system. Each homeland also had its own honours system which merits an article or two in its own right. As and when those pages are created, the 'South African honours system' page can get an additional link to them under the appropriate category heading. Arthur R (talk) 21:52, 19 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A further thought : the title 'Orders, decorations and medals of South Africa' might be better than 'South African honours system', as it fits in with the titles of articles on the ODMs of other countries. So perhaps we can keep the title of that page but replace its content. Arthur R (talk) 11:38, 20 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]