Talk:Battle of Britain

This article perpetuates the common myth that Dowding was sacked as AOC-in-C, Fighter Command after the Battle. In fact, Dowding had been notified in writing in July 1940 by his boss, ACM Sir Cyril Newall, Chief of the Air Staff, that his final date in RAF service would be in November of the same year. At the time, this was the third extension Dowding had been granted as he was already over normal retirement age. That Dowding was unhappy with that state of affairs is not in dispute and he engaged in some acerbic correspondence over the matter with both Newall and Secretary of State for Air, Archibald Sinclair. Inevitably, this did not endear him to his superiors and did him no favours during the campaign, orchestrated by Sholto Douglas and others, to discredit and criticise him over the RAF's inability to successfully counter German night bombing. This was no more than a tactic to dissuade the Air Ministry from granting Dowding a further extension, however. It cannot really be construed as sacking him. He had merely reached the end of the term which he'd previously been offered and accepted. 2001:4454:76D:0:8061:C4AC:EEC3:9E2F (talk) 05:37, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

The German barges were flat-bottomed and unsuitable for crossing the English Channel. To say the battle "forced" Hitler to cancel Sea Lion is misleading as it was probably not a serious plan, and in any case the OKW had been preparing for Barbarossa since early July. Rumstitlsten (talk) 18:51, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

The kead seems to summarize the content of the article on these subjects, and that content is well sourced. (Hohum ^@) 19:21, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Source your argument to a reliable source and then you can add it. Otherwise this is original research and so can't be added. Shimbo (talk) 10:59, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Both Galland and von Rundstedt said Hitler never seriously intended to invade the UK. Goring and Raeder also doubted Sea Lion was a real plan. Preparations for Operation Otto began in early July 1940. (Rumstitlsten (talk) 10:49, 16 May 2025 (UTC))

Maybe so, but you have to source your argument to a reliable source before you can add it. See WP:Verifiability, not truth. As it says there: "Even if you're sure something is true, it must be verifiable before you can add it". Shimbo (talk) 12:35, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

The article makes use of shortened references (Battle of Britain#References), but when clicked upon, they don't actually lead anywhere. Wikipedia:Citing sources says, "These are used together with full citations, which are listed in a separate 'References' section or provided in an earlier footnote." Yet, that isn't done here? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 17:11, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

An editor removed the bibliography that the references linked to. I have restored them. (Hohum ^@) 23:14, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

I didn't remove it: I moved it to bibliography of the Battle of Britain, because it was far too long and unwieldy. Now that I know what the problem is, I'll fix it by inlining references that are only used once. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 00:50, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

An article should have a consistent citations style per WP:CITESTYLE, so "inlining" those that are only used once wouldn't comply with that. It also doesn't save significant space. If there are a significant number of entries that aren't used at all, a case could probably be made to remove those. (Hohum ^@) 01:00, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

The article is already inconsistent. About 10% of sources already use inline citations, which doesn't look too far off the number of citations where the source is only used once. Of the short references, there is a huge disparity in how often they are referred to (the majority of footnotes are covered by about 20% of the provided works), and even then several sources which are used more than once are probably cited overly-specifically (such as three consecutive sentences in an article referring to individual pages in the same source, which is overly precise). This is a somewhat pathological article, and I'm beginning to wonder whether it warrants creating a new version of {{sfn}} which can link to a separate page rather than a footnotes section. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 06:43, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

Even so, you should have checked if the sources were still working after your move of the bibliography. Please be more careful. The Banner talk 10:30, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

Ordinarily this would raise an error on preview and also on saving the article. I'm not sure why {{sfn}} doesn't support that when most other citation templates do. It's much easier to detect, let alone fix, errors when they result in visible breakage. But I'll keep it in mind. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 17:02, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

"The article is already inconsistent". It overwhelming already uses short style with links, as you note, only 10% use inline links - they should be standardised to the norm, not increased. I'm not convinced there is a need to have special templates linking off page, which would be pointless and cumbersome to use for a reader. Why does it matter to you so much that the article uses a lot of sources?

As an aside, I use User:Ucucha/HarvErrors, which is why I saw the broken citations so easily. It is very handy. (Hohum ^@) 10:15, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

It matters because, as per the numerous discussions in the talk archives, this article is almost uniquely heavy in them - about two pages' worth, so much as to require subheaders. And most of those are referenced once. Every additional abstraction or complexity in a page reduces readability and makes it harder to edit articles, two things which are highly important to every article. Because those 10% of inline references are only used once, it would add another ~30 lines, which is another 20%.

In almost every other article with this level of referencing, a sensible middle ground is found where references used once are inlined and references used repeatedly are consolidated. The whole point of {{sfn}} is supposed to be making multiple citations of the same source take up less space. In this case, the opposite has happened.

Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 18:09, 23 May 2025 (UTC)