Review of Wikipedia: World War II

This is a review of the World War II article on Wikipedia, a top 20 article.

This entire post is Licensed under CC-by-SA 4.0, including CC-by SA for #WikiCritic use. WikiCritic is a project started by Larry Sanger to review Wikipedia articles.

Review of Wikipedia: World War II

Grades (A-F scale)

Overall: C - There is significant room for improvement.

Competency: F - Important terms are omitted because of the writing style.

Scholarship: C - Extensive references are present, but quality historians are not easily identified. Relevant topics are neglected.

Neutrality: D - Lacks deep understanding. Problems with moral equivalency.

Currency: B - Does not appear out of date.

Simplicity: F - Sprawling, wordy article. Difficult to read.

Intro section: C - Not great. Similar issues to the rest of the article. No easy way to learn the five major Allies and three major Axis powers.

This section is copied from https://encyc.org/wiki/Talk:World_War_II#Why_we_wiki and from a reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/encyclopedias/comments/1vd71sv/review_of_wikipedia_world_war_ii/

Licensed under CC-by-SA 4.0

Why we wiki

World War II was a unique war in history, with huge moral implications. Countless books and many firsthand accounts have been published describing the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Ever since the war, dishonest historians, known as revisionists, have attempted to reframe it as a simple conflict among European nation states, or business as usual for the Great Powers seeking to expand their empires. They have achieved their goal on Wikipedia, where the World War II article focuses on diplomacy and battles to the detriment of everything else. Nazi ideology is very briefly described as a “radical, racially motivated revision of the world order”. That’s it.

On Encyc, a wiki alternative to Wikipedia, we copied and then improved the World War II article. This process, called a “fork”, is in accordance with the Creative Commons license and supported by Wikipedia. We added information, changed which topics were prioritized, and made readability improvements. We deemphasized battles and tried to focus more on the human aspects of the war.

The most substantial change is that we used proper terminology for ideas. Wikipedia, on the other hand, uses vague, general terms with links to more specific articles.

Wikipedia’s article is 255,000 bytes. Encyc’s is 93,000. Google prefers Wikipedia’s version. Encyc’s is ranked very low in comparison, so a random searcher is much less likely to find our article. Neither article is perfect. There is still a lot of work to be done.

Here are some facts or terms present in the Encyc World War II article that are missing from Wikipedia’s version:

• Allies, led by Great Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China

• Axis, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan

• Goose-stepping

• Racism

• Napoleonic Wars

• Concert of Europe

• Franco-Prussian War

• Alsace-Lorraine

• Pacifism

• “Stab in the Back” myth

• Russian Revolution

• Beer Hall Putsch

• Mein Kampf

• Aryan race

• Great Depression

• Nazi Stormtroopers / Brown Shirts / SA

• Swastika

• Guernica

• Jesse Owens

• Anschluss

• Dunkirk Evacuation / Operation Dynamo

• Henri Philippe Petain

• Operation Sealion

• Hermann Goering

• Wolf pack tactics

• Graf Spee

• HMS Hood

• Arctic convoys / Archangel / Murmansk

• Kriegsmarine

• Liberty ships

• Admiral Cunningham

• Suez Canal

• Oran / Mers-al-Kebir

• Algeria

• Toulon

• Sudan

• Kenya

• General Archibald Wavell

• Operation Compass

• Operation Battleaxe

• Claude Auchinleck

• Desert fox

• Harold Alexander

• Bernard Montgomery

• Morocco

• Kasserine Pass

• Victor Emmanuel III

• Pietro Badoglio

• Gustav Line

• Sword, Juno, Gold, Utah

• Caen

• Bradley

• Avranches

• Mortain

• Falaise

• Seine river

• French resistance

• V-1 rocket

• Narrow front strategy

• Island hopping strategy

• Canada/Canadian mentioned once, in context of Pacific War

• Spitfire

• Hurricane

• B-29

• Feminism

• Civil rights

• Rotterdam

• Arthur “Bomber” Harris

• Zyklon B

• Josef Mengele

• Reinhard Heydrich

• Chaim Rumkowski

• Gestapo

• Fat Man

• Little Boy

• Uranium

• Plutonium

• Ledo Road

• Himalaya Mountains

• Flying the Hump

• Operation Ichigo

• Claire Chennault

• Mao Zedung

• Alfred Jodl

• V-E Day

• Panzerfaust

• Eva Braun

• T-34 tank

• Panzer IV

• Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen

• Walther Model

• Omar Bradley

• Parachute

• St. Vith

• Bastogne

• Antisemitism

• Vladimir Lenin

• Kamikaze

• Orde Wingate

• Chindits

• Nazi war criminals escaping to South America. Nazi hunters.

• Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Simon Wiesenthal

• Japanese internment camps, Executive Order 9066

• Master race

• Olympics

[[User:Enki|Enki]] ([[User talk:Enki|talk]]) 12:04, 30 October 2024 (EDT) and

[[User:Enki|Enki]] ([[User talk:Enki|talk]]) 00:18, 17 February 2026 (UTC)